Leprechaun 4: In Space

*sigh* they don’t even call him a Leprechaun.  He’s an extraterrestrial creature now hanging out on some planet attempting to woo a space princess of some other alien race.  He wants to be king and bribes the princess to team up to take over her kingdom.  During the nefarious plot discussion space marines invade his cave lair because I forget why.  They blow him to bits, “rescue” the princess and return to the ship.  Actually right before that one of the marines takes a piss on the Leprechaun’s remains and this somehow acts as a conduit for the Leprechaun to invade the marine’s body.  Later the imp bursts out of the poor schmuck’s groin and attacks everyone on the spaceship.

The thing I can’t quite wrap my head around is the setup.  The two ideas presented are incompatible in my opinion.  The Leprechaun still dresses, talks and acts the same as he had before.  Tiny green suit, buckle hat, buckle shoes, striped stockings, grotesque wrinkly skin, sharp razor like fingernails, evil monologuing, quippy attitude, the whole works.  But since he’s supposed to be some other creature (I think?) then why are all of his attributes exactly the same as the other films?  If he had started on Earth and somehow got launched into space then that would be perfectly acceptable.  But bizarrely that’s not what they decided to do.  I don’t think the word Leprechaun is used once.  This is similar to Jason X where an earthy character is plucked out of its natural environment, placed into a radically different scenario unaltered without explanation and it’s just too dumb to be that much fun.

And aside from not thinking about what they were doing story wise the filmmakers were in over their head in terms of the type of movie they were making.  This is a special effects heavy assignment that calls for lots of intense makeup work, large scale creature sculpting, puppeteering and a heaping spoonful of CGI.  That last bit definitely looks the worst.  The crude 90’s spaceship flying around and the morphing of objects to make them appear to shrink or enlarge are atrocious.  On the other hand the half human, half machine Dr. Mittenhand (Guy Siner (Lost Highway)) with his upper body sort of bolted onto a motorized medical cart is decent.  The large scale spider/humanoid monster is also kinda cool if on the rubbery side.  I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the budget went into these couple of bigger practical effects.

One thing that’s sort of a funny idea is towards the end they blow up the Leprechaun to be a giant.  Get it?  He’s usually only three and a half feet tall or something so they went in the opposite direction by making him fifty feet tall.  Obviously the first thing he does is look inside his pants to marvel at his now enormous wang.  But besides that you can’t do a whole lot with him at that size so he mostly lumbers around the cargo bay searching for a space marine to smoosh.

Depending on your preference you may have to take what I’m saying with a grain of salt because while I like sci-fi fine it’s not my most favorite genre.  To be totally honest I have no patience for a low budget space adventure like this with junky sets, plasticky costumes and cheap looking effects.  It’s a very hard type of picture to pull off convincingly because you need to have a strong vision.  I understand this is more or less a spoof movie that simply wants to have a good time with a ridiculous premise and a few gags but space fantasy stuff is a real tough sell for me.

Blatantly knocking off Alien, Aliens, Terminator 2, Star Wars and Gremlins 2 doesn’t help either.  Again, this is more making fun of other films than attempting to do its own thing.  As stupid as part 3 is at least it introduces new ideas into the franchise with the vampire-like transformation of a human into a Leprechaun and modifying how the wishing works.  With part 4 they simultaneously stretched themselves too thin on the technical side and went too far afield with turning the Leprechaun into an alien.

One last thing, the poster is yet another aspect that’s a complete head scratcher.  It depicts the surface of the moon with the old 60’s lander on it and the US flag but that has nothing to do with the movie.  Apparently the genesis of the idea for this one was to parody Apollo 13 which came out the year before.  Maybe the poster was cooked up before they made the film but then they forgot to change it.