Summer of Blood: Ya fecking gobshite
Sometimes, the peculiar alchemy of what makes a film click with an audience can never be fully understood, but merely accepted as what is, part of the ineffable magic of the movies. This is not the case with the six Leprechaun films that were released between 1993 and 2003. Every person who's ever seen even one of those movies knows exactly why they're worth watching, if indeed they are worth watching: Warwick Davis is having a great time hamming it up as the murderous gold-hungry leprechaun who has been given a whole lot of bad jokes (often written in rhyming couplets), and his love of the goofiness all around him is joyful and infectious, even when the films are otherwise pure misery. As they generally are.
It's for this reason that the idea of restarting the Leprechaun franchise without Davis never made sense to me in all the years it was kicked around as an option, and why it came as absolutely no surprise when the proposed reboot became a reality in 2014, that it would be resoundingly rejected by series fans and horror buffs more generally. Leprechaun: Origins - for that is the reboot's name - is something of an outright miracle: it's managed to be the worst and most painfully unwatchable entry in a franchise that had already produced Leprechaun 4: In Space in 1997. And not, I am sorry to say, because it is more bewilderingly stupid than that film, which for all its considerable flaws is at least one of the nuttiest misfires in all of '90s horror. Leprechaun: Origins is in fact quite the opposite of nutty: what makes it so gruesomely unenjoyable is precisely that is so brutally small-minded and narratively conservative. It is a film whose entire plot, including every little swerve, is wholly contained within the sentence "four tourists arrive in a small, impoverished town and become the victims of the monster to which the shady locals have been feeding nosy tourists for many years now". That's about as standard-issue as standard-issue plots get.
And to be sure, there's no reason a film built upon such an ancient formula can't still be fun, even if the formula doesn't present a solitary new idea. Which Leprechaun: Origins very much doesn't, unless you count using the word "leprechaun" to describe a monster that is not in any meaningful sense a leprechaun as a "new idea". So I guess the reason it's not fun is that it's just such a tired, airless, inexcusably ugly version of that formula, with director Zach Lipovsky and writer Harris Wilkinson treating a series that had, to that point, absolutely never once taken itself at all series with the most morbid, unsmiling "no, fuck you" amount of tetchy attitude that could be summoned, and obliging the cast of blank-faced model-looking white people to dully recite dialogue without expressing even a trace amount of personality. This is then all swaddled in a blanket of stormy gloom by cinematographer Mahlon Todd Williams, whose work here is truly some of the most oppressive digital cinematography of all time. It is grossly underlit. It is extremely soft, in part because the underlighting makes it impossible for anything to have a hard edge. It has been color corrected too hard towards steel greys and blues, exaggerating the low light. Everything seems unnaturally smooth and airbrushed. I don't have a list of my least-favorite examples of cinematography, but if I did, I surely do think that Leprechaun: Origins would have a spot on it, for even without ever doing anything "wrong" - it's technically proficient, nobody fucked up - it is just utterly nasty to deal with it as it wallops your eyeballs.
But back to our generic plot befalling our generic characters. It may well bill itself as the "origin" of something, but I don't know what that might be, nor why anyone bothered hooking this onto the six older films, since there is not a single aspect of them that is replicated here, and any of the things that would make one a fan of those movies is in evidence. So we have our four Americans, traipsing through Ireland, played by an especially British Columbiaey-looking British Columbia. Well, first, we have two people getting attacked by an unseen creature in the night, because this is checking absolutely all of the boxes of the slasher formula. Then we get our Americans, four newly-minted college grads: first up is Sophie (Stephanie Bennett), who is weighing whether or not to go to grad school in the fall, and has arranged this trip because it ties in with the historical research she's interested in doing, and this is literally 100% of the character-building work that will be given to any of the four leads. We learn nothing about the other three. They're not even given crummy archetypal personalities. They just exist. Hell, even Sophie doesn't get a personality. "Wants to get a post-grad degree studying history" isn't a personality, it's barely even a motivation. It's still enough to mark her out as the obvious Final Girl in the absence of anyone else could at all plausibly fit the role. But the other three, for form's sake, are Jeni (Melissa Roxburgh), Ben (Andrew Dunbar), and David (Brendan Fletcher). The two boys are dating the two girls; I think it's Ben with Sophie, but to be honest, keeping Ben and David straight, in all that murky cinematography, was outside the limit of the mental labor I was prepared to devote to Leprechaun: Origins.
They arrive in a small village not so far from an ancient monolith with interesting carvings that capture Sophie's attention; the locals don't know much about it - it's older than the village - but they're otherwise welcoming enough. The tourists are even offered a cabin by one friendly man named Hamish (Gary Chalk), because the filmmakers literally could not do the most absolute literal least amount of research imaginable into getting Ireland right. Anyway. Hamish and his gloomy son Sean (Teach Grant) offer them a cabin where they can stay before hiking out to the old abandoned gold mine that was formerly the source of the village's modest wealth. Actually, it's so he and Sean can lock them in so they're captive prey for the vicious something from the first scene. As we'll later learn in an exposition dump, when those Irish guys were minin' they accidentally broke the seal on a different monolith that was keeping a leprechaun trapped. In order to safely acquire the gold, they've had to offer it annual human sacrifices, primarily in the form of tourists.
The leprechaun itself is played by WWE wrestler Dylan "Hornswoggle" Postl, and this was intended to be his breakout into movies to such a degree that WWE Studios produced the film. This is unfathomably bizarre. The leprechaun is kept almost entirely off-camera, and when we see little bits and flashes of it, Postl is covered in full-body latex. Unlike Davis, who had lines of English dialogue, this leprechaun just roars and snarls; other than a couple of scenes where it is shown to be specifically interested in gold, it could have been a jungle cat or a wolf or a very large and angry badger, all without requiring the slightest change to any of the scenes. If this was designed to appeal to the wrestler's fans - I must assume they call themselves "Hornswogglers", and if they don't, then they really had ought to - it's hard to imagine how deeply upset and ill-used they must have felt. The leprechaun is barely a presence, certainly not an actual role; it's just a handful of quickly-cut shots of many sharp teeth and reptilian skin. I literally cannot think of a slasher-type killer who makes less of an impression - maybe some who make equally as little of an impression, but making less would almost be a mathematical impossibility.
The whole film is thus swirling around a vacuum: the killer barely exists, the victims are effectively indistinguishable, the plot proceeds in an unwavering straight line from point A to point B. The British-Canadian Chalk adopts a sufficiently plummy Irish accent that he's at least "colorful", but he offers none of the ominous menace the film seems to think should hang around him. Basically, Leprechaun: Origins is a pure exercise in joylessly going through the motions: put tourists in jeopardy, kill some of them, have the final girl outwit the killer but oops! did she really. I cannot imagine a film that is less inspired by its own existence. This is functional execution of a formula that almost seems worse for being functional, since if they screwed it up, there'd at least be some kind of humanity to be seen. Nope, this is just ice-cold, by-the-books horror filmmaking, one of the most bitterly anti-fun slasher movies I have ever seen. There is just nothing here but sullen make-work calculation.
Body Count: 8, with a ninth sort of but not really implied. This is the lowest for any Leprechaun film since Leprechaun 2, speaking to the overall don't-give-a-fuckness of the whole project.
Reviews in this series
Leprechaun (Jones, 1993)
Leprechaun 2 (Flender, 1994)
Leprechaun 3 (Trenchard-Smith, 1995)
Leprechaun 4: In Space (Trenchard-Smith, 1997)
Leprechaun in the Hood (Spera, 2000)
Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (Ayromlooi, 2003)
Leprechaun: Origins (Lipovsky, 2014)
Leprechaun Returns (Kostanski, 2018)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
It's for this reason that the idea of restarting the Leprechaun franchise without Davis never made sense to me in all the years it was kicked around as an option, and why it came as absolutely no surprise when the proposed reboot became a reality in 2014, that it would be resoundingly rejected by series fans and horror buffs more generally. Leprechaun: Origins - for that is the reboot's name - is something of an outright miracle: it's managed to be the worst and most painfully unwatchable entry in a franchise that had already produced Leprechaun 4: In Space in 1997. And not, I am sorry to say, because it is more bewilderingly stupid than that film, which for all its considerable flaws is at least one of the nuttiest misfires in all of '90s horror. Leprechaun: Origins is in fact quite the opposite of nutty: what makes it so gruesomely unenjoyable is precisely that is so brutally small-minded and narratively conservative. It is a film whose entire plot, including every little swerve, is wholly contained within the sentence "four tourists arrive in a small, impoverished town and become the victims of the monster to which the shady locals have been feeding nosy tourists for many years now". That's about as standard-issue as standard-issue plots get.
And to be sure, there's no reason a film built upon such an ancient formula can't still be fun, even if the formula doesn't present a solitary new idea. Which Leprechaun: Origins very much doesn't, unless you count using the word "leprechaun" to describe a monster that is not in any meaningful sense a leprechaun as a "new idea". So I guess the reason it's not fun is that it's just such a tired, airless, inexcusably ugly version of that formula, with director Zach Lipovsky and writer Harris Wilkinson treating a series that had, to that point, absolutely never once taken itself at all series with the most morbid, unsmiling "no, fuck you" amount of tetchy attitude that could be summoned, and obliging the cast of blank-faced model-looking white people to dully recite dialogue without expressing even a trace amount of personality. This is then all swaddled in a blanket of stormy gloom by cinematographer Mahlon Todd Williams, whose work here is truly some of the most oppressive digital cinematography of all time. It is grossly underlit. It is extremely soft, in part because the underlighting makes it impossible for anything to have a hard edge. It has been color corrected too hard towards steel greys and blues, exaggerating the low light. Everything seems unnaturally smooth and airbrushed. I don't have a list of my least-favorite examples of cinematography, but if I did, I surely do think that Leprechaun: Origins would have a spot on it, for even without ever doing anything "wrong" - it's technically proficient, nobody fucked up - it is just utterly nasty to deal with it as it wallops your eyeballs.
But back to our generic plot befalling our generic characters. It may well bill itself as the "origin" of something, but I don't know what that might be, nor why anyone bothered hooking this onto the six older films, since there is not a single aspect of them that is replicated here, and any of the things that would make one a fan of those movies is in evidence. So we have our four Americans, traipsing through Ireland, played by an especially British Columbiaey-looking British Columbia. Well, first, we have two people getting attacked by an unseen creature in the night, because this is checking absolutely all of the boxes of the slasher formula. Then we get our Americans, four newly-minted college grads: first up is Sophie (Stephanie Bennett), who is weighing whether or not to go to grad school in the fall, and has arranged this trip because it ties in with the historical research she's interested in doing, and this is literally 100% of the character-building work that will be given to any of the four leads. We learn nothing about the other three. They're not even given crummy archetypal personalities. They just exist. Hell, even Sophie doesn't get a personality. "Wants to get a post-grad degree studying history" isn't a personality, it's barely even a motivation. It's still enough to mark her out as the obvious Final Girl in the absence of anyone else could at all plausibly fit the role. But the other three, for form's sake, are Jeni (Melissa Roxburgh), Ben (Andrew Dunbar), and David (Brendan Fletcher). The two boys are dating the two girls; I think it's Ben with Sophie, but to be honest, keeping Ben and David straight, in all that murky cinematography, was outside the limit of the mental labor I was prepared to devote to Leprechaun: Origins.
They arrive in a small village not so far from an ancient monolith with interesting carvings that capture Sophie's attention; the locals don't know much about it - it's older than the village - but they're otherwise welcoming enough. The tourists are even offered a cabin by one friendly man named Hamish (Gary Chalk), because the filmmakers literally could not do the most absolute literal least amount of research imaginable into getting Ireland right. Anyway. Hamish and his gloomy son Sean (Teach Grant) offer them a cabin where they can stay before hiking out to the old abandoned gold mine that was formerly the source of the village's modest wealth. Actually, it's so he and Sean can lock them in so they're captive prey for the vicious something from the first scene. As we'll later learn in an exposition dump, when those Irish guys were minin' they accidentally broke the seal on a different monolith that was keeping a leprechaun trapped. In order to safely acquire the gold, they've had to offer it annual human sacrifices, primarily in the form of tourists.
The leprechaun itself is played by WWE wrestler Dylan "Hornswoggle" Postl, and this was intended to be his breakout into movies to such a degree that WWE Studios produced the film. This is unfathomably bizarre. The leprechaun is kept almost entirely off-camera, and when we see little bits and flashes of it, Postl is covered in full-body latex. Unlike Davis, who had lines of English dialogue, this leprechaun just roars and snarls; other than a couple of scenes where it is shown to be specifically interested in gold, it could have been a jungle cat or a wolf or a very large and angry badger, all without requiring the slightest change to any of the scenes. If this was designed to appeal to the wrestler's fans - I must assume they call themselves "Hornswogglers", and if they don't, then they really had ought to - it's hard to imagine how deeply upset and ill-used they must have felt. The leprechaun is barely a presence, certainly not an actual role; it's just a handful of quickly-cut shots of many sharp teeth and reptilian skin. I literally cannot think of a slasher-type killer who makes less of an impression - maybe some who make equally as little of an impression, but making less would almost be a mathematical impossibility.
The whole film is thus swirling around a vacuum: the killer barely exists, the victims are effectively indistinguishable, the plot proceeds in an unwavering straight line from point A to point B. The British-Canadian Chalk adopts a sufficiently plummy Irish accent that he's at least "colorful", but he offers none of the ominous menace the film seems to think should hang around him. Basically, Leprechaun: Origins is a pure exercise in joylessly going through the motions: put tourists in jeopardy, kill some of them, have the final girl outwit the killer but oops! did she really. I cannot imagine a film that is less inspired by its own existence. This is functional execution of a formula that almost seems worse for being functional, since if they screwed it up, there'd at least be some kind of humanity to be seen. Nope, this is just ice-cold, by-the-books horror filmmaking, one of the most bitterly anti-fun slasher movies I have ever seen. There is just nothing here but sullen make-work calculation.
Body Count: 8, with a ninth sort of but not really implied. This is the lowest for any Leprechaun film since Leprechaun 2, speaking to the overall don't-give-a-fuckness of the whole project.
Reviews in this series
Leprechaun (Jones, 1993)
Leprechaun 2 (Flender, 1994)
Leprechaun 3 (Trenchard-Smith, 1995)
Leprechaun 4: In Space (Trenchard-Smith, 1997)
Leprechaun in the Hood (Spera, 2000)
Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (Ayromlooi, 2003)
Leprechaun: Origins (Lipovsky, 2014)
Leprechaun Returns (Kostanski, 2018)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
