Oh hey, it's St. Gertrude's Day, the patron saint of cats and those who love them (and also travellers, gardeners, widows and the mentally ill, among others. I don't think there's a Catholic saint more suited to be my patron if I were still Catholic). Since I've already reviewed Uninvited, though, I guess I'd better look at a movie themed very loosely after the culture of that other saint who gets celebrated on March 17 - so here's Leprechaun.
Daniel O'Grady returns from visiting Ireland with a pot of gold he managed to steal from a leprechaun, as he knew the old stories and how to capture them and render them powerless. Unfortunately for him, the leprechaun isn't ready to part with his gold so easily and follows O'Grady to the US, and in their ensuing fight O'Grady suffers a stroke... but not before he manages to trap the leprechaun in a crate with a four-leaf-clover. Ten years later, Tory arrives to stay with her father for the summer in his new house, which of course is O'Grady's old home, complete with the leprechaun still trapped in the crate in the basement. When one of the handymen hired to help paint the house accidentally knocks the withered four-leaf clover from the crate, the leprechaun escapes and starts searching for his gold once more - and he's more than willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. Tory, along with house painters Nathan, Ozzie and Alex, find themselves trapped in the house and fighting off the homicidal leprechaun. Will they be able to fend off the leprechaun long enough to escape, or will he go through them in his quest to recover his gold?
Wow. This movie is a nostalgia trip for me. I remember first seeing it in 1994, shortly after it came out on video in the UK, back when I was going through all the available horror movies at the local video store whenever I was babysitting. It certainly wasn't scary to me back then, but I know I did find it entertaining in a quaint way... Although I also suspect that at least some of my fond memories of it are down to Jennifer Aniston in those shorts (this was a couple of years before Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn made me realise that I liked women as well as men, but I'm sure my subconscious still appreciated it). Of course, I also grew up with a lot of the old Irish fairy tales and so the idea that leprechauns weren't jolly little elves dressed in green was already clear in my mind (one of my favourite fairy tales, for example, was about a girl who picked flowers from a fairy ring and so was cursed to have every bed she tried to sleep in turn to thorns. Irish fairy tales don't mess around).
One thing that doesn't surprise me today is that Leprechaun was originally meant to be a kids' horror movie, even though I didn't figure that out when I first saw it. Despite the violence that the leprechaun uses against people, he also does a lot of things that are far more comedic, and the violence and gore feel as though they were added in later (which it turns out they were). There's also no adults involved in the fight with the leprechaun, just two teenagers/young adults, a kid and a mentally challenged adult who effectively counts as a child. The absence of parental or authority figures is a key component of kids' horror movies, perhaps even more so than in the teen slasher movie because there's no "safe" adult for the child protagonists to run to for help (see also The Monster Squad for both a prime example of this and a subversion).
So clearly Leprechaun is a horror comedy as well, with things like death by pogo stick and the leprechaun's OCD that makes him need to shine any shoes he comes across (all part of the folklore!). And it is an amusing enough b-movie - one that you shouldn't go into expecting too much of, but hey, it's better than the gritty WWE-produced reboot with Irish Gollem. And one final anecdote - originally the movie made a deal with the makers of the breakfast cereal Lucky Charms to feature in the movie; however, when they saw the movie the company decided they didn't like it and pulled their permission. This led to an expensive reshoot of scenes featuring the cereal, and a script change at the end of the film, where a character delivers the pithy one-liner, "F* you, Lucky Charms," before dispatching the leprechaun. So that's the origin of that line...
Comments