Leprechaun

Leprechaun

1993

Dir; Mark Jones

"Your luck just ran out"

Rachel from Friends gets chased around a bit by Willow.

Future big shit, Jennifer Aniston, stars in this surprisingly competent and occasionally spooky little horror movie about a disgruntled Leprechaun who is willing to go to any lengths necessary to find his lost pot of gold. The film opens as big suited, mock oi-rish Dan O'Grady (Shay Duffin) drunkenly returns home to his unimpressed wife with a bag of gold coins which he claims to have taken from a Leprechaun. O'Grady celebrates his new found wealth by getting a lift home in a limo. His celebrations are cut short when the films namesake (Warrick Davis, the busiest dwarf in show business) comes to get his pot of gold back.

A genuinely scary moment introduces Davis' character as an eerie child's voice calls to O'Grady from inside an old suitcase and the tension slowly builds as he walks towards it and starts to unlock its clasps. The tension quickly ends, of course, when a tiny man in ladies shoes pops out of the case and starts wisecracking with the old man. The Leprechaun kills O'Grady's wife and has bad intentions for O'Grady too if he doesn't give him back his pot of gold. Luckily, the old man has a handy four leaf clover and manages to lock the evil little bugger up in a crate.

Fast forward 10 years and the Leprechaun remains imprisoned in the crate. That is, until father and daughter duo JD and Tory (a pre-op Jennifer Aniston) start sticking their noses where they don't belong. Tory is a rich bitch from LA, her father has apparently bought her the O'Grady house so that she can learn about the real world and gain some valuable life lessons (like money isn't everything and Leprechauns are bad). The house is an absolute mess of joke shop cobwebs and creaky floor boards. Tory disagrees with her fathers tough(ish) love and wants to take herself to the nearest hotel and get back to LA as quickly as possible. Her attitude soon changes when she runs into Nathan, a local part red neck, part male model type who sports an attractive Lady Diana haircut and Keep The Fath era Bon Jovi wardrobe and dead eye combination.

Nathan is one third of "3 Guys That Paint", a decorating team who have been hired to help make the old house liveable for Tory (so much for all that tough love). The other two guys that paint are Nathans 12 year old brother Alex and a simpleton by the name of Ozzie (Mark Holton who had long been an expert at playing fat men-children, most notably as Pee Wee Herman's nemesis, Francis, in Pee Wee's Big Adventure). Tory thinks that guys that paint houses are "weird and strange". She reminds them that "this is the 90's" before changing into a pair of high tops and stone washed denim short shorts. Inevitably our gang stumble across the crate that O'Grady left in his basement and let the Leprechaun out. Then the real fun begins.

Ozzie and Alex find the "pot" of gold (which is actually a bag of gold, presumably because a pot was just out of budget). Wacky old Ozzie decides to eat one of the coins. Alex tells him that they can sell the lot and use the money to get Ozzie an operation to fix his brain. Ozzie just wants to use it to buy comic books. Unaware of the discovery, Nathan is busy teaching Tory how to paint the house, he does this by dry humping her bottom whilst she does all the hard work. He claims to be impressed with her "nice even strokes". Tory's father seems less impressed by his daughters burning loins but soon forgets when the Leprechaun appears and bites him on the hand.

The mildly comedic slaughter is ready to begin. The Leprechaun threatens to bite Ozzie's ear off and make a pair of boots out of it. He bites a mans nose and then kills him by jumping on him repeatedly with a pogo stick. He breaks a police officers neck. He is given inumerous wheeled vehicles to ride, (a child's trike, a tiny sports car, a skateboard, roller skates, and, the real money shot, a wheel chair). He rides them all in comedy fast forward.

With all the killing that's going on, Tory and the "three guys that paint" lock themselves away in the house. Nathan gets his denim clad leg caught in a bear trap and has an amazing sit down punch up with the Leprechaun. At a glance it looks as if Jon Bon Jovi is having a fist fight with a toddler. The gang try to get away in a pick up truck but the Leprechaun somehow manages to turn it over by driving a child's toy car into the side of it. The gang get out without a scratch. Tory hands the gold over hoping that it will placate our little evil friend but there is a coin missing (the one that Ozzie ate earlier). Rather than waiting for him to shit it out like any reasonable person, the Leprechaun decides he's going to cut it out. In the process he grabs Nathans balls and performs an impressive skateboard routine along a hallway.

Tory goes to see old man O'Grady, who now lives in the local nursing home, to find out how to kill the Leprechaun. When she arrives, the old man is not in his bedroom and instead she finds the Leprechaun riding around in fast forward in that wheelchair. Tory manages to get away and into an elevator where, without reason, Old Man Grady's bloody face smashes through the ceiling. With his last few breaths he tells Tory to find herself a four leaf clover. She rushes back to the house where Nathan's bear trap inflicted limp is becoming less and less pronounced. The gang find a four leafed clover amazingly quickly. Alex produces a slingshot and fires the clover into the Leprechauns face with the immortal line "fuck you, lucky charms". Our titular hero proceeds to melt, fall in a well and get blown up for good measure.

This is a fun film, plain and simple. There's not a lot of characterization going on, some of the performances are a little wooden and nonsensical plot twists are the rule of thumb here but there are a couple of genuinely creepy moments early on, the Leprechaun is a great character and the mixture of horror and comedy is pitched just at the right level.

We can see flashes of why Jennifer Aniston's career skyrocketed shortly after this film came out. She is likeable, if a little wooden in the role of Tory and, in fairness, she isn't given much to work with. There are suggestions of the rich bitch, big city girl character (she threatens to leave a couple of times, she asks for a water cress salad and bottle of Evian in a redneck bar and describes Nathans Meat loaf as a "cut up dead cow") but shes far too nice and far too capable to fully encompass this type of character (she plays nurse without batting an eyelid and never acts superior to the other characters in the film, even the simpleton). Without doubt, this is Davis' film, he hams up the Leprechaun character with absolute glee and the screen lights up every time his little legs pigeon step into view. The Leprechaun make-up is very effective, his dialogue never gets overly tedious and watching him drive things in fast forward never gets old. Its no wonder that Davis returned for five further sequels (in the years following this movies release the Leprechaun would get to go into space and hang out with Ice T in the 'hood).

Director, Mark Jones, would go on to gain writing credits for a number of the Leprechaun sequels and would also return to the directors chair two years later for "Rumplestiltskin" also starring Davis. The franchise may not be dead yet either, with rumors of an upcoming "Leprechaun Vs Chucky" (god help us all) proving that there might still be life in the little fella yet.