Final Thoughts on the “Leprechaun” Series

The premise of the “Leprechaun” horror movies is one that doesn’t lend itself to standard slasher-style horror.  Horror based around a small, magical creature is at a minimum going to be based more around creative kills than around simple bloody slaughter.  Given the image of leprechauns as more trickster-style supernatural beings, the ideal move is to show the leprechaun tricking its victims into creative deathtraps, whether you want to take the premise seriously or not.  But the premise does seem to work best with a horror/comedy notion, similar to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, because it is always going to be too difficult to take a small, green-clad leprechaun seriously.

The “Leprechaun” series, as a whole, fails to do this properly.

The best movies are the first one and the last one, its direct sequel. They take the premise lightly, but slip in lots of humour to turn it into more of a horror/comedy than a serious horror movie. They also have an interesting female lead where the actress playing the part does a good job with it. The plot also follows more from the situation and so mostly gets out of the way when the horror and killing has to come in, and also supports the humour aspect fairly well. Yes, the plots and notions are often stupid — the first one, for example, is spawned by someone swallowing a gold coin thinking it was chocolate — but we’re okay with stupid in a movie that’s not really trying to be serious anyway.

And the best of the lot are still mediocre at best.

Ultimately, the problem is that most of the movies never managed to find a decent balance of horror and comedy. “In Space” is a prime example of where they dragged down the overall humorous tone with an out-of-place serious tone in places, while “In Tha Hood” and “Back to Tha Hood” mess up the more serious background plot by attaching it to the ridiculous leprechaun premise. “Origins” is so serious that it doesn’t even fit with the other movies at all, while the other two are closest in tone but are ruined by very poor writing and lead characters. For the most part, then, the execution is sorely lacking in them which is what makes them range from “Meh” to “Ugh”.

I can’t imagine watching the entire series again. There’s a chance of watching the first and last again, but that’s pretty unlikely as there are much better horror movies for me to rewatch than those if I want to.

Tags: horror