Thanks to WWE studios and director Zach Lipovsky, the shambling corpse of another dead horror franchise is brought back to life! Just like all of the other reboots that nobody wanted, this one fails in every way.
The Leprechaun series has never been a particularly interesting collection of films, but it’s always had some charm. Warwick Davis played the titular character in each of the six previous installments; he was charming, funny, and he made terrible movies entertaining with his performances. This movie lacks any of the redeeming qualities of its ancestors.
The film starts off stellar enough: a group of boring, generic college kids are travelling around Ireland, (although they obviously filmed in Canada) only to end up as sacrifices to the local “leprechaun”, which really looked more like Pumpkinhead, or a chupacabra maybe. The monster is supremely generic, doesn’t speak at all, and can hardly kill a bunch of dumb college kids. There’s not much gore in this slasher either, not that blood is necessary, but since Leprechaun:Origins does nothing else right the hope is for redeemable action.
Nothing about any of the characters stands out in my mind as unique or interesting at all; they weren’t even annoying murder fodder, which would have worked great for such a terrible movie. An hour through the
movie and hardly anything happens outside of suspicious locals being suspicious. There is also this horrible gimmick where every so often, we see things through the eyes of the monster; everything is gold and closer to the ground with lots of heavy breathing. When I say every so often, I actually mean every few minutes. For some reason, that bothered me more than almost anything else in the film. Each time the camera shifted to garbage predator vision, I shed an angry tear.
Thinking on the deaths in the movie, only two are notable: The first being a scene where the leprechaun rips somebody’s spine out of their body and the second comes at the end when the remaining survivor of the bland college travelers chops the monster’s head off. Normally, I would be sad about the monster dying in a slasher movie, but again, I had absolutely no connection or investment at all.
This brings up another problem: if the leprechauns can be killed, why don’t the villagers just wipe them all out? Why not bring the Irish military in to abolish Leprechaunkind? Maybe these generic spooks are really a means to rid the beautiful country of Ireland (really Canada) of pesky American college kids who are travelling abroad to “find themselves”? Just like spiders to flies!
I went in to this movie expecting very little. I had hoped for something at least somewhat entertaining as a slasher film, but they couldn’t even do that right. It was a chore to watch, but the good thing is that I don’t expect the memories of this awful task to stay in my head for very long. Forgettable, cliché, and no fun whatsoever: don’t watch this movie unless some very rude person locks you in their basement and forces you to. Even then, it would be debatable.