Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood

That Leprechaun hood movie must have done well enough because three years later they did another one.  It’s still completely its own thing though not associated with anything else.  This time we begin with the Leprechaun being defeated by a priest who throws holy water on him at a construction site for an upcoming youth center in LA.  A year later a group of friends have a bbq on the still unfinished site (funding ran out) and one of them falls through a hole.  She discovers a small chest of gold and divides it up between her and her friends.  They use it to splurge on clothing, cars and (I’m not kidding) large black trash bags full of weed.  The theft brings the Leprechaun back to life and he hunts down the gang.

Unfortunately there are lots of problems here.  The story and characters are your run of the mill late teens/early twenty somethings for this type of picture looking to break free from their downtrodden lives.  One works for a shitty boss at a hair salon, one slings drugs, one does nothing but goof around and get high and one goes to school.  Nothing interesting is done with this setup.  The discovery of the gold is a game changer that could provide a better future but they don’t have it long enough to where we see a true impact on their lives.  They only get as far as buying frivolous stuff for themselves.

The pacing is off.  There’s a long stretch in the beginning where the Leprechaun isn’t in the film for like thirty mins.  The opening with the priest battling the Leprechaun must have been tacked on later to address this.  And then once he starts to show up he’s kind of inserted randomly into scenes.  Finally in about the second half we do get the typical Leprechaun chasing after his targets routine from the other installments.  This ramp up is sluggish and the dull characters and story aren’t sufficient in holding your attention.

Continuity and editing are some of the biggest issues.  Clothing and hairstyles will match in scenes that are supposed to take place on different days, one character gets arrested for possessing pounds of marijuana (something that carries a sentence of years or even decades of prison) but a short time later he’s among his friends and the situation is never brought up again, several different scene transition swipes are used arbitrarily (sometimes within the same scene) and a psychic with Leprechaun knowledge sardonically dismisses someone’s suggestion that a cross could harm him yet the very first scene depicts a priest conquering the Leprechaun with holy water meaning at least some Christian trappings have an effect (further evidence the opener was an afterthought to hastily stick more Leprechaun in the film).

Out of all this shit though maybe the aspect that annoys me the most is the Leprechaun’s teleporting ability.  We’ve seen this power in other entries and he uses it quite a bit in this one.  But of course he doesn’t use it all the time which I don’t get.  There are moments when he gets temporarily stopped by a door when he could teleport in or out.  I mean the sonuvabitch could easily escape any circumstance and kill whoever at the drop of a hat but just doesn’t.  It could be that it’s too much of a strain on his energy but that’s never established.

To end on a positive note I do like the updated look they give the Leprechaun’s outfit.  He sports a darker, dirtier green velvet suit.  Gone are the striped stockings, buckles on the shoes and hat.  It’s a more menacing look that matches his other grotesque features almost like he’s a rotting corpse that rose up from a grave.  Although I guess that sorta accurately describes what happens to him.

And the filmmakers deliver a few good hood related gags that mostly one up the previous film.  Like the Leprechaun rips a bunch of bong hits and gets giggly high and he gets blasted by a whole gang of thugs with machine guns.  The most original hood-related idea is placing the Leprechaun underneath a lowrider so as the protagonists are trying to race away from him they hop the car up and down while zooming along the road to try to smash him.

Leprechaun in the Hood

Boy I remember when this came out and it piqued everyone’s interest, everyone.  I think since hood movies were passé by 2000 that only made the prospect more intriguing.  Similar to Leprechaun 4: In Space the title says it all and certainly sounds like a joke.  More fish out of water shit.  So does it work?  Not really.

Of all the movies so far this one has the most story.  Three friends form a hip hop outfit and approach record mogul Ice-T (Surviving the Game) to show off their demo.  He’s willing to work with them but after the group shows hesitation over proposed changes to their image he withdraws his services.  The rappers decide to get revenge by breaking into Ice-T’s office to steal his shit.  One of the pieces they swipe is a medallion that’s hung around a statue of a Leprechaun.  As in part 3 once removed the Leprechaun comes to life and chases after the guys who stole his gold.

Three pals trying to make it in the music biz while struggling with life in the hood is deeper than any other plotline explored in the series.  It’s also sorta generic.  You need strong characters, writing and performances to pull off a story like this and they come up short.  There’s an extra angle involving the Leprechaun’s magic flute that the three friends use to hypnotize their audience into thinking they’re the best performers ever (this is how Ice-T got rich (the character in this film, not the real life person, at least that I’m aware)).  In a dramatic picture I could see this being an idea worth exploring.  Do you use the flute to obtain wealth and fame?  If you do then would you feel like a fraud?  None of this is delved into so whatsoever.

The feeling I get is this was not originally a Leprechaun script.  It was some old thing the filmmakers decided to jam the wee lad into.  I swear he has the least amount of screen time compared to the other installments.  There are long stretches where he’s simply forgotten about and extra scenes are added using either POV shots or other actors to give the illusion he’s just out of view.  Bummer.

In that same vein the film isn’t technically up to snuff.  For example it seems that either they forget to get certain shots or some of the shots they did get were unusable because the editing is kinda terrible and baffling at times.  Also, several deaths oddly occur off camera.  And there are two separate scenes of guys in drag which is redundant.  And the same nighttime cityscape establishing shot is used over and over again to help link scenes.  And none of this is good.

While this is undoubtedly a hood film with the Leprechaun smoking weed, banging a horde of chicks, our protagonists battling to break free from their surroundings, etc. the end product doesn’t come together.  The strangest aspect is that the concept came along at least six or seven years too late.  I mean the Leprechaun even does a full rap at the end with fly girls by his side doing a choreographed dance routine.  Yes it’s awful and somewhat embarrassing and shit that people did like a decade prior.  It’s so fucking weird.

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.

Leprechaun 3

Once again we’re starting over.  We open at a pawn shop in Las Vegas and a man missing an arm, a leg and an eye hauls in a statue of the Leprechaun with a medallion around its neck.  He wants to cash it in but warns the shopkeeper to not remove the necklace.  Of course the advice isn’t taken and the Leprechaun comes to life and immediately bites the shopkeeper’s ear and toe off.  Through some shenanigans a gold coin goes missing yet again and the Leprechaun hunts it down while killing anyone who gets in his way.

It's mildly frustrating that each installment scraps the previous films and does its own thing.  If the scenario, vibe and production were totally different from picture to picture that could potentially be a damn fun idea.  However, that’s not the case.  Instead they basically keep hitting the reset button which is incredibly odd.  On one level it’s an interesting experiment but it doesn’t succeed that well for me.  For instance the Leprechaun’s powers are always slightly different, his backstory changes or isn’t explained at all (as is the case here, he’s in Vegas now and frozen into a statue, no explanation needed, deal with it), different methods are employed to kill him despite each film claiming there’s only one true way, the power the gold gives its bearer varies each time and etc.  You have to blank your mind going in otherwise it’s impossible to keep any of this shit straight.

Moving on, there are two main gimmicks they throw at you this time.  One is that whoever possesses a Leprechaun’s schilling can make one wish.  Unlike in part 2 the wish is fulfilled without a nasty loophole.  It’s only when the Leprechaun intervenes later and alters the wish that the situation becomes deadly.  The best death in the series to date is executed through a wish.  A scummy casino worker (Caroline Williams (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2)) wants to be young and beautiful again and is granted her desire.  When the Leprechaun shows up though he puffs out her ass, boobs and lips larger and larger until she explodes.  Probably the most gruesome death so far is when the Leprechaun chainsaws a magician in half in front of an audience revealing stringy bits of gore between the two halves.  Yuck.

The other gag introduced is that if a Leprechaun’s green frothy blood gets inside your body (via an open wound in this instance) you will then slowly turn into a Leprechaun yourself like a vampire.  Your skin becomes blotchy and decrepit, you speak in rhyme, crave potatoes, develop some special powers and so on.  Aside from a few jokes like when a doctor runs an EKG and the readout says “Fuck U” spelled out in shamrocks nothing much is done with the Leprechaun turning.

They definitely punch up the humor here by having the Leprechaun don several silly costumes and do a rash of fake infomercials such as a televangelist.  There’s also the lame duo of mob adjacent thugs that have miserable seemingly improvised banter as if to say “see, these guys aren’t intimidating at all, they’re a bunch of goofs”.  And because we’re in Vegas they felt obligated for the Leprechaun to have a run in with an Elvis impersonator.  They both swivel their hips and all that crap.  The one thing I can say is John DeMita (tons of anime overdub work including The Animatrix), who plays a terrible magician, is legitimately funny in most of his scenes.

I’d say this is the worst so far.  They lean too far into the comedy instead of finding a better balance like part 2 did.  Nothing makes sense in terms of who the Leprechaun is and what he can do.  And I’m willing to accept that to a certain extent but damn it, I would love a little more consistency.  Everything feels too annoyingly made up as they go.

Leprechaun 2

So I bet you’re wondering how they’re gonna bring back the Leprechaun in part 2 to wreak more havoc on unsuspecting humans.  Will someone cast a spell to conjure him up or will the Leprechaun’s brother step in to avenge his death or some other classic horror trope?  Nope.  We’re simply going to pretend the first picture didn’t exist and start over from scratch.  I guess this could be a totally different Leprechaun despite Warwick Davis reprising his role, the makeup design is the same and he acts the same.

This time though the Leprechaun is on the lookout for a bride which he can only do every thousand years for some reason.  He finds himself in Hollywood, CA due to his tree home being moved from Killarney, Ireland to Harry Houdini’s estate decades ago.  Maybe he was hibernating?  I dunno man.  They needed the character to be in Hollywood because that’s where they were gonna shoot the movie.  I’m just glad they didn’t attempt to set this in the turn of the century or some shit and have Houdini be the protagonist.  That would’ve been painful.

Anyway, this first sequel is a decent improvement over its predecessor.  One thing I dig is they really lean into the theme.  For starters it takes place on St. Patrick’s Day.  An obvious choice that the original strangely didn’t take advantage of.  So there are decorations out and a bar full of little people dressed as leprechauns and people wanting to go out and celebrate.  The Leprechaun even gets into a drinking competition at one point.

The horror elements are amped up too.  Like the Leprechaun uses his magic powers to make a guy think he’s about to smush his face into a bare woman’s chest but in reality it’s a pair of lawnmower blades.  Ouch.  Or during the finale our hero does battle with a cobwebbed skeleton that the Leprechaun conjures to life.  Gross out stuff is here too like the Leprechaun giving a woman a kiss with his forked tongue and thick slime oozes out of his mouth.  Or another part where he has his pot of gold appear inside someone’s stomach and the stretched out belly along with the moaning is a touch uncomfortable.

Instead of making the same film again they chose to go in a slightly different direction which is greatly appreciated.  Sure the Leprechaun is on a mission to recover one of his gold coins like in the previous installment but that’s only half the story.  The other half deals with our protagonist fighting to save his girlfriend from being forced to marry the evil creature.  There’s a noticeable bump up in every single category.  With frequent location hopping, a bunch of extras, a whole Leprechaun tree/cave lair set, good quality effects work, you immediately get a sense of the increased production value.

Part 2 is hands down better.

Leprechaun

This first film is a matter of practicality.  Almost the entire thing takes place in one remote location, there’s a small cast of characters, they use editing to massage the action oriented and gorier scenes, they tailor the premise and gags on a relatively modest scale, etc.  They clearly put the money into the design and makeup effects of the Leprechaun which is what they needed to do.  And he does look very nice.  Gruesome blotchy skin, scraggily hair, rotted teeth, long sharp fingernails, a pervasive grin, it all works.  In fact it fared so well that no serious alterations were made during the entire series.

Of course Warwick Davis’ (Skinned Deep) performance is what really sells the whole piece.  You can tell he’s having a blast shooting scowls everywhere, cackling like a screwball jester, delivering his lines dramatically but always with whimsy, butchering anyone who stands between him and his gold.  It’s a very theatrical presentation and essentially a dark twist on the Lucky Charms Leprechaun.  The humor is key.  That puts him in Freddy Kreuger territory where you can have fun with the scenes.  The audience can laugh along with the villain.  I don’t think this would’ve worked nearly as well if the filmmakers took the character in a completely serious direction.

With all of that said the movie isn’t terribly remarkable overall.  They did what they could to put their twist on a slasher and that aim is somewhat commendable especially considering how tired and out of fashion the genre was in the early 90’s.  Unfortunately all the characters besides the Leprechaun are incredibly bland, the shooting style and production design aren’t that memorable and the horror gags they came up with aren’t unique enough.

I could be wrong but it seems like besides some of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels Evil Dead may have been the next biggest influence.  There’s a house in the middle of nowhere, the amount of humor injected with some of it veering into cartoon land, the Leprechaun’s hand gets cut off at one point and starts to crawl around on its own, the lower camera angles used for the POV of the Leprechaun is reminiscent of the POV of the malevolent force racing through the woods, the protagonists find the Leprechaun in a box in a dusty basement filled with other assorted crap, the enemy is a supernatural entity and etc.

If they never made another Leprechaun film this would probably only be a mild curiosity that left most folks minds long ago.  However, this little guy grossed enough to warrant a sequel.  And then another.  And then another.  And then etc.

Stalked by My Doctor Series Wrap Up

Well that was really fun!  If you’re into thrillers in general, especially the 90’s variety, you’ll dig this series.  The premise is solid and Eric Roberts is a blast to hang out with through the journey.  You can tell he loves playing this character and we love watching him pathetically attempt to connect with his victims, get enraged when they reject him, cheer for him to get his comeuppance, chuckle when he escapes his captors and let the cycle wash over you again and again.

As long as you understand that these are modest made for TV pictures whose job is to keep you entertained for barely ninety mins while mixing legitimate thrills with sporadically gloriously goofy moments you’ll be happy as a clam.

Ok I think we have time for a couple of bullet points.

• All these films feel like they’re based on a script from well over a decade ago.  I find this kinda charming though.  It’s like the series is perpetually trying to keep up with the times but it’s forever somewhat out of reach.
• I gotta hand it to the people behind these movies because Beck does indeed stalk his victims in all of them.  It would’ve been so easy to forget that key part in the sequels.
• Beck always seems to have money or at least a lavish mansion to retire to.  Sure he would have a nice big house in the first film but having ones in the others doesn’t make sense.  If he has bucks outside of his doctor income it’s never mentioned.
• Beck never changes his appearance or makes that much of an attempt to hide.  Fleeing to Mexico for a few months is the most he ever does to evade the authorities.  Hiding out in Georgia isn’t bad either.  Otherwise though he sticks to his home state of California or the southwest.
• It’s funny how they keep finding ways for Beck to return to medicine, whether practicing it or teaching it.  He never simply remains a man on the run lurking in the alleys.  He gets back on that horse time and again.
• Aside from the original each film teams up two women to take on Beck.  This actually makes sense because Beck’s victims are upper/upper middle class teenage girls so it’s natural to pair them with some sort of parent/guardian figure.  And to have that figure be another woman working in partnership to take down a gross male homicidal pedophile is fitting.
• Finally, throughout the series Beck ends up saving as many lives as he takes which is a pretty interesting balancing act.  Don’t get me wrong, the man is a maniac who needs to be behind bars.  I just find it fascinating that despite the fact he performs genuine good deeds without an agenda in three of the five films like heart surgery, CPR and calling an ambulance for a dying person it doesn’t erase his perception as a total monster.  At least not for me.