- Written and Directed by Mark Jones
- January 8, 1993
A vengeful leprechaun hunts a group of people he believes stole his magical pot of gold.
Some movies, intentionally or not, are so bad they’re good. They are garbage yet transcend being garbage to become quite enjoyable. Possibly because from the get-go those behind their creation understand exactly what they are making. Such is the case with the original Leprechaun. I doubt writer/directed Mark Jones thought this was potentially an Academy Award nominee. Leprechaun is equal parts goofy and gory. It uses that formula perfected in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series-horror mixed with dumb comedy.
I realize I may at points sound as if I dislike this movie but the bad things I am highlighting are the very things that have endeared it to me as well as others. Separately anything I mention may not sound good (and they are not) yet in the most ephemeral of ways when brought together in this film by these very people it created something inexplicably good for me.
Amongst the gore it uses sped up footage and just cheesy visuals which include visual humor. The horror jokes border on Dad Jokes with the whole production often feeling like it was written by a variety show writer trying to be edgy. It is not hard to imagine Steve and Eydie coming out and doing a number.
Warwick Davis plays the title leprechaun. As a character he runs around shouting about wanting his gold and so forth. He’s like an evil version of the Lucky Charms cereal mascot. And maybe that’s in part what they were going for. He’s just a hairsbreadth away from saying “They’re magically delicious!”
There were not many actors at the time who could’ve taken the part because clearly they hired foremost on physical stature. Yet Warwick Davis has some real talent and he infused his performance with something here. He got the joke and gave the part a little something more. Just something a little more that made his portion of the absurdity enjoyable.
Davis courtesy of prosthetics gets a rather sinister face but is generally dressed like a St. Patrick’s Day decoration. He is gnarled teeth with some of the cutest clothing you ever saw. It is a weird clash of adorable and scary.
Jennifer Aniston in a star making performance (not really) plays a woman named Tory that comes out to the country with her dad (John Sanderford) that rented a dilapidated farm whose owner had a stroke at the beginning of the film. I thought it was a heart attack, but they seem to refer to it as a stroke. Anyway, she’s a very stereotypical LA girl for the time period-into sparkling water and water crest salads and so forth. As if straight out of a Hallmark romcom, she meets handyman Nathan Murphy (Ken Olandt) who’s fixing the place up and decides it’s not so bad. We are also introduced to Nathan’s brother Alex (Robert Hy Gorman) and Alex’s friend Ozzie.
Every horror movie of the time needed one character to make things worse and that honor fell in the lap of Ozzie. He is known as a liar and because of his vaguely defined mental limitations is not that smart. Not only do his initial warnings go ignored but the idiot manages to swallow a rather large gold coin belonging to the villain neglecting to understand what he will need to do to get it back. Or maybe he likes rummaging around in that stuff.
Davis, Aniston, Olandt, Holton, and Robert Hy Gorman all take different approaches to their performances. Davis goes for campy. Aniston is, well, Rachel Green. Olandt is the bland guy in a serious romance movie. Holton is a simplified version of Francis Buxton. Robert Hy Gorman is straight out of a heartfelt movie of the week. Mark Jones was not a first-time anything here, so I do not know what was going on with this. Or maybe since he knew what he had that is EXACTLY what he was going for.
But despite all these disparate and uneven elements Leprechaun comes together to make a genuinely entertaining movie. It’s just dumb entertainment. Aging well, I seriously find it as entertaining now as I did when I first saw it. There are no scares but there’s plenty of shock and general entertainment.
With all the weird and kind of stupid elements it certainly is a worthy Cult Classic. It’s one of those things that will only appeal to a select group of horror fans and not the broader film community or even the broader horror community. You have to enjoy the 80s style of horror which this was going as heavy as possible on the gore but almost nonexistent with scares. Entertaining but not frightening.
Leprechaun is a movie that shouldn’t be good but is. It’s quite possibly the personification of a guilty pleasure. It’s fun and dumb and silly and a very good time. I highly recommend this one!
Warren Watched A Movie 