Welcome to another holiday edition of YNTE Horror Night! Today, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll be watching and reviewing the classic 1993 film Leprechaun. I was tempted to jump ahead and watch Leprechaun 4: In Space or Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood, but ultimately decided it would be best to watch the original first.
As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!
To be honest, I was having a bit of trouble finding motivation to watch this one. Of course I knew it was going to be bad; I just wasn’t sure if it was going to be hilarious bad or just bad bad. So, in the spirit of St. Patricks Day, I decided a bit of drinking would help make the experience enjoyable, even if the film was not. I googled “Leprechaun Drinking Game”, and the internet did not disappoint.
Here are the rules to the Leprechaun Drinking Game.
So I started up the movie, and pretty much right away I learned two things:
- This movie was going to be awesome
- I was going to wind up incredibly drunk if I followed all the rules.
The very first scene involves the titular Leprechaun rhyming about how he’ll kill anyone who steals his gold. Then we immediately cut to a drunk Irishman who tricked him and stole his gold. He busts out the gold right there on the porch for his wife to see.
Apparently the leprechaun is already inside the house, inside a suitcase. He tricks the wife into letting him out (by pretending to be a trapped little girl) and kills her. The he gets into a big fight with the man. Throughout the fight, the leprechaun keeps asking where the gold is hidden. It was at this point I found myself shouting at the TV, “IT’S NOT HIDDEN, IT’S ON THE PORCH, YOU MOOK!” If he had just walked through the front door instead of sneaking in through a suitcase he could not have missed it.
Then the man pulls out a four leaf clover, which apparently repels the Leprechaun. I thought leprechauns loved four leaf clovers! I’ll admit though, that most of my knowledge of Irish folklore comes from cereal.
Anyway, the man uses magical clover power to trap the leprechaun in a box and puts a four leaf clover on top of the box so the leprechaun won’t be able to escape. Unfortunately though, in his moment of triumph, the leprechaun shouts some mean things at him and he dies of a stroke.
(Editor’s note: By having an unnamed leprechaun fight an unnamed man, those few sentences were incredibly difficult to write without having pronoun-antecedent confusion. Hopefully that all made sense, if not, blame the filmmakers, not me!)
At this point the film jumps forward in time, and we are introduced to Jennifer Aniston’s character. Despite the fact that she is playing, I’m assuming, a high school kid, she looks like she’s at least 35 years old. In fact, she looks pretty much exactly the same age she does now. I think maybe she has a Portrait of Dorian Gray thing going, only she was already old when it got painted.
While she does not convincingly play a teenager, she DOES convincingly play a spoiled twat. Her character’s supposed to be spending the summer with her dad in a new house he bought (which happens to be the same house from the intro, with a leprechaun in the basement). But the house is DIRTY and GROSS and it looks like POOR PEOPLE might live there. I’m not sure if she’s acting at this point, or if the producers told Jennifer that her trailer was gone and she’d have to live in this house for the rest of the shoot, and then just rolled cameras on her reaction.
She’s convinced to go stay at a hotel instead, but she runs into a painter who looks like Jim Carrey. He calls her a pansy baby for being afraid of a house. Then, to prove a point and impress the guy, she decides not to leave after all. Why is she trying to impress this guy? He looks like Jim Carrey!
There’s also a fat guy who is also a painter I guess. You can tell he’s a painter because he’s wearing a shirt with paintbrushes on it.
Well, Jennifer Aniston goes into the creepy basement to try and get the Jim Carrey painter drunk on the job, but instead he starts hitting on her. Literally, by dropping things on her head. Then he dares her to start going through the creepy boxes. Instead of saying “Hey, poor loser. I’m rich and pretty and you’re an ugly douche who throws things at me. This place is creepy as shit and I’m outtie” she instead says “I’m uh, NOT afraid! Let me open that box up, because nothing bad can come of this!”
But, since we have to drink when somebody gets tricked, they postpone the opening of the leprechaun’s crate for a bit longer. Instead, Aniston and Painter Jim hear a loud noise upstairs and go to investigate. It turns out Painter Tubbs spilled blue paint all over himself! Oh, Painter Tubbs! You and your wacky antics!
When Tubbs goes inside to clean up, he hears a “little girl” singing in the basement. Apparently the Leprechaun’s tricks only extend to pretending to be little girls. Anyway, of course the painter accidentally lets out the Leprechaun, and not only do we have to drink here for “Someone is tricked”, but also for “The Leprechaun bites someone” and “He polishes shoes”. I had sort of assumed those rules would come up infrequently, but apparently they are character traits.
Painter McFatty gets away but when he tries to warn the others, they treat him like a big dumb idiot. “Everyone else” in this scene represents “Hollywood”, because I can’t think of a single fat character in movies who’s portrayed as smart. They’re always clumsy idiots like Paul Blart Mall Cop, or crazy serial killers.
They finally calm the guy down and convince him to get back to work painting, when he gets distracted by a pretty rainbow and runs off. A kid who is inexplicably hanging about the site agrees to go get him and bring him back, and chases after the guy as he Paul Blarts down the hill.
They make it to the end of the rainbow, and the Leprechaun’s gold magically appears. At this point the movie takes a right turn for me from being lighthearted, silly fun, and steers off into actively enraging me. I could write a whole article about the reasons, and I probably will, eventually, but these columns are generally funny, and I’ll try to keep that tone here. But the short version, which bears mentioning, is that they took the stupid fat guy cliche WAY too far. A character tells the fat guy that he can use his share of the gold to get surgery on his brain so he won’t be so stupid and people will stop making fun of him behind his back. The line is delivered without any malice or irony, just matter of factly, as though this is a real thing that fat people should be doing.
But, even though I now hate this movie and everyone involved in it, I’m going to finish watching it and keep making jokes, because I am a professional. Honestly, hating everyone in this movie is not really a loss for me, since the only person I’ve ever heard of from it is Jennifer Aniston, and I already hated her!
So the leprechaun pretends to be a cat so he can bite Jennifer Aniston’s dad; then the whole gang goes to town to take him to the hospital. At this point I’m not sure the Leprechaun actually wants to kill people, just munch on them.
While in town, the two painters who found the gold take a coin to be appraised. They agree to leave it with the shopkeeper overnight so he can study it more. But that night, when he tries to lock it up in his safe, the Leprechaun springs out of the safe at him! How did he get in there? Magic? Did he teleport in there? If he can teleport, why did he have to ride a tricycle to get into town?
He bites the shopkeeper, then pogo sticks up and down on his body, stabbing him to death. Then he shines the corpse’s shoes, for good measure.
It turns out that those two weren’t the only ones to sneak away from the hospital. Apparently Jennifer Aniston isn’t at the hospital either. She decided to go have dinner with Painter Jim Carrey! Her own father is in the hospital, but she’d rather whore it up with some dude she met hours earlier. She’s too prissy and elitist to eat anything there.
I honestly have no idea how she had a career after this movie.
The leprechaun steals a toy car and drives down the freeway. Where is he going? I don’t know. All his potential victims are in the same town as the guy he just killed. A cop sees him drive by and pulls him over, even though he’s clearly only going 15 miles an hour. So the leprechaun claws the cop in the face and continues on his merry way.
He’s headed back to the house to look for his gold. But rather than actually looking for it when he gets there, he eats knockoff brand lucky charms, and shines every shoe in the house.
When the gang gets home they find the place wrecked, food strewn about, but every shoe in the house is neatly placed on the table next to shoeshine equipment. The “fat idiot” character deduces that it must have been the leprechaun. Everyone else assumes it was a bear. Apparently, not only are bears driving, they are also shining shoes. Even the character who literally saw a bag of gold appear out of thin air at the end of a rainbow refuses to believe that a leprechaun could exist. Newsflash, Hollywood bigots! Joke’s on you! The “fat idiot” character you created as a scapegoat is actually the SMARTEST GUY HERE. Also, FUCK YOU, you sizeist ASSHOLES who made this movie. Whoops! Slipped back into rage mode for a second there! Back to silly!
Jennifer Aniston decides to leave. Then she decides to stay. Then she decides to leave again. Then she doesn’t leave. Which is just as well, because the Leprechaun has placed a single bear trap outside which Painter Jim is stupid enough to fall into.
Jim sends Paul Blart(who is still covered in the blue paint he “fat idiot” dropped on himself) inside to call the cops. He does, but the cops don’t believe him, because he’s the “fat idiot” character. But who needs the cops? They have a magic shotgun with unlimited bullets. They shoot him a bunch but he gets away. They go back inside to tend to Painter Jim’s wounds. Then they all try to get away in a truck, but the leprechaun is back, and he rams a lawnmower with a pitchfork on the front into their truck, causing it to flip over several times. They escape once again, and once again flee inside the house.
Now, Jennifer Aniston tries to call 911 again, this time as a reputable human being. She calls from her cell phone, or “portable”, which, since the film takes place in 1993, is bigger than her head and has a battery life of four seconds. They agree to send a policeman, unfortunately the policeman the try to send is conveniently the one the leprechaun already killed.
Holy shit, how are we still only 2/3 of the way through this film?
So Jennifer Aniston is still at this point not convinced that they’re dealing with a leprechaun, so the two painters finally reveal about the gold coins.
Now, to the filmmakers’ credit, they try to fix/soften the line about surgery to fix Fatty’s dumbness. To their discredit, they do a terrible job, and actually make the situation worse. It goes something like this:
Jennifer Aniston: You know you can’t fix Fatty’s fat dumbness, right? He’s gonna be fat and dumb forever and nothing can make him not fat and dumb!
Other Asshole: Yeah, of course I know that! But he’s too fat and dumb to know that!
And of course I’m exaggerating. But it’s still pretty egregious.
So Jennifer Aniston goes out to the well to get the gold coins, so she can appease what she’s still not convinced is a Leprechaun. So she gives him the gold and goes back inside. But when the Leprechaun counts his gold, he finds that he’s one coin short. This is because earlier the big dumb idiot ATE ONE. ON ACCIDENT. Because fat people are too stupid not to eat everything they touch!
So the leprechaun comes back to get them, and accomplishes this by grabbing a dude in the dick. But Painter Jim gets mad that a dude touched his junk and so he shoots the leprechaun with his magic shotgun. Sure, earlier, outside, he shot the leprechaun six times with the shotgun and he got back up without a scratch, but now that we shot the Leprechaun once he’s dead for real!
Right, guys?
Nope! Because if he were, mercifully, this movie would be over.
So they continue shooting the shotgun with the infinite ammo cheat at the leprechaun, since it has worked so well up to this point. They chase around the house for a bit, pointlessly.
I realize this is pretty late in my review to bring this up, but what the hell kind of shorts is Jennifer Aniston wearing? Were those ever fashionable?
They finally decide to go see Old Man O’Grady who had the stroke in the first 10 minutes of the movie but apparently didn’t die. Even though he couldn’t kill the leprechaun in the begininng and had to settle for locking it up, everyone assumes he will know how to kill the leprechaun now. So, to make sure they can get to Old Man O’Grady without the Leprechaun getting in the way, they bring a box of shoes, so if he tries to stop them, they can throw the shoes and he will get distracted trying to polish them.
This is clearly a terrible plan. This is the kind of terrible plan that they would come up with on an old episode of Doctor Who. And, like old Doctor Who plans, it totally works.
Jennifer Aniston goes alone for some reason? And partway there, the Leprechaun uses his magic teleportation powers to catch up with her. But rather than teleport inside the car, next to her with a knife, he teleports behind the car, with rollerskates. He then manages to accidentally skate through a fence, leaving a perfect outline of his body behind.
Aniston makes it to the home where O’Grady is suppossed to be. She finds him bloodied and hanging upside down in an elevator, where he tells her she needs a 4 leaf clover.
They all fight the leprechaun a few more times. It’s more tiresome than exciting. I thought the climax was a half hour ago.
The group look for a 4 leaf clover in the clover patch, which is conveniently illuminated in green light. Alex, the kid goes off to fight the leprechaun alone. But he’s kind of an asshole, so at this point I’m hoping he dies. I’ve never so actively wished death upon a child in a movie. He lives, sadly.
They stick the 4 leaf clover they find to some bubble gum and slingshot it into the leprechaun’s mouth, and he falls backward into the well. Then they pour gasoline on him and light the well on fire.
But from deep within the well, we can still hear the leprechaun chanting about how he’ll be back for his gold.
Sweet. Merciful. Conclusion.
The moral of the story is don’t try to impress anyone who looks like Jim Carrey. It will lead to bad things!
Catch up on past installments:
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Valentine
Jason X
Jason Goes to Hell – The Final Friday
Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan
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