Horrorble Holidays

# 13 Leprechaun

Irish this had been better.

Father and daughter, JD and Tory Redding, arrive from LA in a beautiful red Jeep Wrangler, to a small town in North Dakota to fix up a house purchased cheap, ten years after the mysterious circumstances of an Irish woman named Mrs. O’Grady (Pamela Mandt), dying from a fall down her basement steps and her husband Dan O’Grady (Shay Duffin) having a stroke and getting sent to the local nursing home. JD and Tory soon discover, along with their house painting crew consisting of Nathan, Alex, and Ozzie called “Three Guys Who Paint”, that some sinister force locked away in a crate, dormant for the past decade as well, has roused to claim its precious riches.

Turns out Dan O’Grady trapped a leprechaun and stole its one hundred gold coins. The ring to its Gollum that it sold its soul for six hundred years ago. The leprechaun escaped, forced Dan’s wife down the stairs, killing her, and causing Dan’s heart attack after he locked the leprechaun in a large wooden box in the basement with a four leaf clover on the lid. The leprechaun’s only weakness, like a crucifix expelling a vampire.

The cast must band together to battle and best the leprechaun even after giving back almost all of its gold. Moving around a few set pieces in the town, the leprechaun in pursuit, an unstoppable slasher force bound to kill by pogo stick, kid size race cars, go karts, and even a manual wheelchair to propel. With each piece of gold it regains its magic, growing more potent and difficult to triumph over.

By 1993 horror fans had over exposure to a sub genre of tiny terrors. Some classics like Gremlins, Critters, and Child’s Play. Some solid fun like Puppet Master and Dolls. And the so bad it’s good types of Troll, Ghoulies, and Munchies to the infamously transcendent trash like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 covered Hobgoblins and Troll 2 (both amazingly and fascinatingly bad. I cherish both of them).

Leprechaun falls into a separate pot altogether. It’s not grand enough to reach the comedic looniness of Gremlins or the little bastard, wisecrack one liners that the Chucky series delivered so deftly. Like the leprechaun trapped in its crate, the film is also confined to a perplexingly droll storyline and not meeting the legitimately frightening look of it’s evident spiritual forbears, movie trolls Torok (Troll) and Trantor (Ernest Scared Stupid). The Leprechaun’s practical makeup, costuming, and Irish accented vernacular is meant to be a mix of the seriously grotesque and comically folkloric, but diminishes into unappealing chinwagging all the while being aesthetically repellent and undaunting.

Warwick Davis is a talented actor who’s played a gamut of beloved characters from heroes in Star Wars and Willow to more villainous turns in this and Harry Potter. But Leprechaun forces its lackluster Irish imp upon us through languid pacing, beggarly jokes, flat one liners, and a repetitively short list of ways the leprechaun can ambush and strike its victims. Leprechaun feels at conflict with itself, unsure if it wants to be a 90’s version of kid friendly Gremlinesque holiday movies or an R rated, raunchy, gorefest bearing set pieces reminiscent of a red headed, murdering doll. Leprechaun seems like it was originally the former and was tampered with by the studio and director to achieve the latter.

Dad JD, means nothing to the plot and disappears before the second act. The director/writer Mark Jones, found a Tremors era poor man’s Kevin Bacon in Nathan (Ken Orlandt) who playing younger with a mullet and blue jean jacket, still looks like the thirty two year old he is compared to the twenty three old Tory. His much younger brother Alex (Robert Hy Gorman), whom Nathan seems to raise and works for him, is a post Home Alone precocious type wanting to act older. Mark Holton plays Ozzie as a cognitively impaired man and best friend to Alex, who nobody believes at first when he claims to have encountered a leprechaun. Holton has more to do here but was better in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Teen Wolf.

The obvious highlight and the reason this entry is still discussed today other than it’s Saint Patrick’s Day appeal for horror fans, is the pre-famous Jennifer Aniston hour and half long audition tape as Rachel Gellar, final girl. Her character here is one note, LA spoiled, vegetarian scold eye rolling her way through being dropped down into this small town horror show. Aniston here, not yet possessing the shoe polished charisma that would set the stage for her iconic casting on mega hit Friends a year later, feels like she’s over it right along with Tory and it further maims the movie with meta frustration from its lead.

A sight to behold though for one of the biggest, most expensive superstars of the last thirty years wrestling with a three foot tall monster and the cheapest of props. A comedic icon working out the movie’s leadened shortcomings on the cusp of a 90’s nuclear reaction that would create a persona of pure gold. Through Hollywood alchemy and television transmutation a fruitful formation of art and commerce was formed, never to be stolen away by typecasting or tabloid fodder.

Leprechaun, making its own pot of gold with audiences at the box office, is much like a scene in the movie in which our greedy, gnomish star sifts through kitchen drawers searching for its stolen treasure, but stumbles across an opened box of Lucky Charms instead. It recognizes the iconography as itself, and amused, digs its claw in and tries a bite. Disgusted it immediately spits out a sugary mix of crunch and marshmallows continuing its wicked quest. An unnaturally killer cereal and this supernatural serial killer are loudly execrable but we still keep coming back for more. In future viewings for this series, I hope the sequels hold more charm. Exploring through a patch of horror mediocrity there’s still a chance our luck will lead us to that four leaf clover protecting us from holiday boredom even if the film’s rainbow may eventually lead us into outer space and tha hood.

Have a Horrorble St. Patrick’s Day!