Summer of Blood: Seems like gold times
I don't know what was going on in 2018, but the odds of this happening twice seems too high for it to be pure coincidence: a long-running slasher film franchise that had gotten snarled on insoluble convoluted and self-contradicting inter-film continuity rebooted itself by tossing out everything that had created that snarl, making a new film that was a sequel to the first film and only the first film. Halloween is the obvious example, dumping ten films and three entirely different lines of narrative continuity into the memory hole, but it was followed, a couple of months later, by the direct-to-streaming release of Leprechaun Returns, which had comparatively less work to do: it was only the eighth film in its series. And to speak of "narrative continuity" in regards to the Leprechaun pictures is nonsense anyway: out of the seven preceding films, only 2000's Leprechaun in the Hood and 2003's Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood aren't in obvious mutual contradiction with each other. So the fact that this is an explicit, direct sequel to the original 1993 Leprechaun basically just means putting the first effort that anybody actually ever had put into these.
The question of why the Leprechaun franchise particularly deserved this treatment is one I cannot answer: I don't think anybody ever really had affection or nostalgia for the films, they had affection for Warwick Davis's performance as the wisecracking, murderous leprechaun. And to the credit of everyone involved, the people who made Leprechaun Returns did reach out to Davis, who declined, suggesting that he no longer had an interest in starring in horror films. They soldiered on anyways, and it's kind of a treat that they did, because even without Davis, this is assuredly one of the best Leprechauns; not a high bar, and the film benefits from clearing an even lower bar still: all it really had to do was to improve upon the four-year-old standalone Leprechaun: Origins, one of the very worst horror movies of the 2010s.
But I should hate to speak of Leprechaun Returns like the only thing in its favor is that it's not an abject failure. It is, to my considerable surprise, a rather decent throwback slasher film - not an extraordinary neo-classical triumph of the genre, but if your thing is watching a bunch of random teenagers get stuck in a cabin and killed one at a time, there are far, far worse examples than this. If nothing else, the film has some exceptionally imaginative gore effects - one hesitates to describe them since there's a certain joy in the moment of realising "ewww, they just went there!", and I think it would be a shame to spoil that. Suffice it to say that it director Steven Kostanski knows where the sweet spot lies in letting us see a pretty substantial amount of stage blood (or computer-generated blood; both show up here, I think), but leavening it with enough of both a "wow" factor and an unmistakable dash of slapstick humor, so it never feels like we're being attacked by the savagery that can befall the human body. It's the kind of gore that provokes laughter more than revulsion, not even particularly nervous laughter, thanks to having just enough surrealism woven into its physical plausibility. I gather that this particular sweet spot is something of a specialty of Astron-6, a Canadian film production company with which Kostanski is associated, and which formally has nothing to do with the creation of Leprechaun Returns, but there's a mixture of the disgusting and the playful here that comes from a very honest and loving place (Kostanski was also involved in the prosthetics design for the film, securing the likelihood that this is all a love letter to gory horror).
As for the meat and potatoes of the plot, it's a little more convoluted than it strictly "needs" to be, largely as a function of getting us back to where Leprechaun ended. Lila Jenkins (Taylor Spreitler) has just arrived in rural North Dakota, a newly-minted sister in the Alpha Upsilon sorority at Laramore Universtiy. The AUs (the symbol for gold - a nicely understated joke) have recently acquired an old farm to be the source of the combination sorority house and green renewal project, and in a coincidence that the film owns early on and pushes past as fast as it can, this just so happens to be the same farm where Lila's late mother Tory had some kind of terrible experience 25 years earlier. Tory always claimed to have seen some kind of leprechaun at the farm, and was roundly understood to be hopping mad as a result; Lila has spent all of her young life caring for her dotty mother, and one gets the impression that this new adventure is her present to herself, now that she's an orphan in control of her own destiny.
Lila being our obvious Final Girl, the rest of the cast assembles itself quite neatly: Katie (Pepi Sonuga) is the only person here Lila really knows, a passionate eco-warrior who thinks this farm will mean great things for the sisters; Rose (Sai Bennett) is the dark side of passionate, a mildly raving bossy mean girl; Meredith (Emily Reid) is a stoner who doesn't seem to care about the environment at all, and seems to be happy that the farm is so isolated that she can just smoke and drink and fuck her way into oblivion without any oversight. To that end, she's brought over two boys to help around the farm, if you know what she means: Matthew (Oliver Llewyn Jenkins), who seems nice until he starts talking about being a film student and becomes just way too unbearably name droppy and pretentious for somebody at film school in North Dakota, and Andy (Ben McGregor), a slightly meanspirited idiot who had a thing with Katie a while back, and despite all of her best intentions, Katie isn't over it entirely. And then there's Ozzie Jones (Mark Holton), who was here 25 years ago, and while he's nice in a creepy, dimwitted way, he also gets extremely close-mouthed when he learns whose daughter Lila was. Ozzie permits himself a trip to the decaying old well on the property where You Know Who was drowned way back when, and is immediately doused with a blast of bright green water. This is horrible new for him, since it means that the Leprechaun is now inside his body, and as he's driving back to town, it wastes no time in exploding out of his stomach, immediately launching into terrible rhyming quips as it does so.
The leprechaun this time around is played by Linden Porco, whose performance exemplifies all that is best and some of what is most misguided about Leprechaun Returns. He has so much gusto, for starters: there's no one-liner too corny and no merry little jig and pose too ridiculous for Porco to avoid giving 100% of the energy has on-hand to it. And this especially applies to his accent, which isn't even just a terrible Lucky Charms travesty of an Irish accent; he's very clearly trying replicate Davis's own terrible travesty from the original six films. Which speaks to the strange thing where this movie seems weirdly consumed by its love and respect for a series of movies that were frankly not all that good, even at their best. The notion that the Leprechauns represent some kind of sacred text that most be treated honorably and with dignity is a very odd one, and even if it has the happy side effect that Leprechaun Returns therefore takes itself infinitely more seriously than Leprechaun: Origins, for starters, it can't help but feel like the film is over-invested in the very uncomplicated story it's telling. Better that than the opposite.
Anyway, for what amounts to a by-the-books "spam in a cabin" picture, Leprechaun Returns handles the formula well. It actually bothers to give its characters some measure of personality; Meredith the horny stoner is the only one who feels entirely like a cliché, and Katie in particular has an exceptionally idiosyncratic collection of quirks for a slasher movie character. Whether this actually manifests in the acting is a different question: more or less yes, but Jenkins completely mangles Matthew's enthusiasm for filmmaking, turning what's written to be a sign of earnest eagerness into tiresome egocentrism, and Bennett lets Rose get much too caustic much too often. Spreitler is both good and bad by turns, depending on the scene; mostly, she's fine or even interesting in her pragmatic low-key reactions, but she can't really handle the quips the screenplay hands her, generally playing every single one-liner in the same tone of flat ironic disaffect. It gets extremely tedious by the end.
Still, all in all a pretty above-average slate of soon-to-be dead bodies, and Kostanski and screenwriter Suzanne Keilly do good work in keeping the pacing snappy and purposeful. This doesn't do much at all for the film as horror, and indeed it tends to fall flat on that front, gore or no: Porco's deliveries are too joyous to feel threatening, and the victims are too savvy to feel endangered, even when they're seconds away from death. It's also not a very atmospheric film at all, oscillating between bright sunlight and amateurish digital night lighting that doesn't so much sculpt the darkness as slather it on like a hungry child making a peanut butter sandwich. Still, "good at horror" was never part of this series' skill set, and in facing a choice between something like Leprchaun: Origins, which seems to think that these films must only be greatly unpleasant, or Leprechaun Returns, which seems to think that they must only be sarcastic comedies... I mean, neither one is my first choice, but I have absolutely no hesitation at all in going with Leprechaun Returns.
Body Count: 6, tied with Leprechaun 2 for the second-lowest of the series, but they are also quite possibly the six best kills in all eight films, so it more than balances out.
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!
The question of why the Leprechaun franchise particularly deserved this treatment is one I cannot answer: I don't think anybody ever really had affection or nostalgia for the films, they had affection for Warwick Davis's performance as the wisecracking, murderous leprechaun. And to the credit of everyone involved, the people who made Leprechaun Returns did reach out to Davis, who declined, suggesting that he no longer had an interest in starring in horror films. They soldiered on anyways, and it's kind of a treat that they did, because even without Davis, this is assuredly one of the best Leprechauns; not a high bar, and the film benefits from clearing an even lower bar still: all it really had to do was to improve upon the four-year-old standalone Leprechaun: Origins, one of the very worst horror movies of the 2010s.
But I should hate to speak of Leprechaun Returns like the only thing in its favor is that it's not an abject failure. It is, to my considerable surprise, a rather decent throwback slasher film - not an extraordinary neo-classical triumph of the genre, but if your thing is watching a bunch of random teenagers get stuck in a cabin and killed one at a time, there are far, far worse examples than this. If nothing else, the film has some exceptionally imaginative gore effects - one hesitates to describe them since there's a certain joy in the moment of realising "ewww, they just went there!", and I think it would be a shame to spoil that. Suffice it to say that it director Steven Kostanski knows where the sweet spot lies in letting us see a pretty substantial amount of stage blood (or computer-generated blood; both show up here, I think), but leavening it with enough of both a "wow" factor and an unmistakable dash of slapstick humor, so it never feels like we're being attacked by the savagery that can befall the human body. It's the kind of gore that provokes laughter more than revulsion, not even particularly nervous laughter, thanks to having just enough surrealism woven into its physical plausibility. I gather that this particular sweet spot is something of a specialty of Astron-6, a Canadian film production company with which Kostanski is associated, and which formally has nothing to do with the creation of Leprechaun Returns, but there's a mixture of the disgusting and the playful here that comes from a very honest and loving place (Kostanski was also involved in the prosthetics design for the film, securing the likelihood that this is all a love letter to gory horror).
As for the meat and potatoes of the plot, it's a little more convoluted than it strictly "needs" to be, largely as a function of getting us back to where Leprechaun ended. Lila Jenkins (Taylor Spreitler) has just arrived in rural North Dakota, a newly-minted sister in the Alpha Upsilon sorority at Laramore Universtiy. The AUs (the symbol for gold - a nicely understated joke) have recently acquired an old farm to be the source of the combination sorority house and green renewal project, and in a coincidence that the film owns early on and pushes past as fast as it can, this just so happens to be the same farm where Lila's late mother Tory had some kind of terrible experience 25 years earlier. Tory always claimed to have seen some kind of leprechaun at the farm, and was roundly understood to be hopping mad as a result; Lila has spent all of her young life caring for her dotty mother, and one gets the impression that this new adventure is her present to herself, now that she's an orphan in control of her own destiny.
Lila being our obvious Final Girl, the rest of the cast assembles itself quite neatly: Katie (Pepi Sonuga) is the only person here Lila really knows, a passionate eco-warrior who thinks this farm will mean great things for the sisters; Rose (Sai Bennett) is the dark side of passionate, a mildly raving bossy mean girl; Meredith (Emily Reid) is a stoner who doesn't seem to care about the environment at all, and seems to be happy that the farm is so isolated that she can just smoke and drink and fuck her way into oblivion without any oversight. To that end, she's brought over two boys to help around the farm, if you know what she means: Matthew (Oliver Llewyn Jenkins), who seems nice until he starts talking about being a film student and becomes just way too unbearably name droppy and pretentious for somebody at film school in North Dakota, and Andy (Ben McGregor), a slightly meanspirited idiot who had a thing with Katie a while back, and despite all of her best intentions, Katie isn't over it entirely. And then there's Ozzie Jones (Mark Holton), who was here 25 years ago, and while he's nice in a creepy, dimwitted way, he also gets extremely close-mouthed when he learns whose daughter Lila was. Ozzie permits himself a trip to the decaying old well on the property where You Know Who was drowned way back when, and is immediately doused with a blast of bright green water. This is horrible new for him, since it means that the Leprechaun is now inside his body, and as he's driving back to town, it wastes no time in exploding out of his stomach, immediately launching into terrible rhyming quips as it does so.
The leprechaun this time around is played by Linden Porco, whose performance exemplifies all that is best and some of what is most misguided about Leprechaun Returns. He has so much gusto, for starters: there's no one-liner too corny and no merry little jig and pose too ridiculous for Porco to avoid giving 100% of the energy has on-hand to it. And this especially applies to his accent, which isn't even just a terrible Lucky Charms travesty of an Irish accent; he's very clearly trying replicate Davis's own terrible travesty from the original six films. Which speaks to the strange thing where this movie seems weirdly consumed by its love and respect for a series of movies that were frankly not all that good, even at their best. The notion that the Leprechauns represent some kind of sacred text that most be treated honorably and with dignity is a very odd one, and even if it has the happy side effect that Leprechaun Returns therefore takes itself infinitely more seriously than Leprechaun: Origins, for starters, it can't help but feel like the film is over-invested in the very uncomplicated story it's telling. Better that than the opposite.
Anyway, for what amounts to a by-the-books "spam in a cabin" picture, Leprechaun Returns handles the formula well. It actually bothers to give its characters some measure of personality; Meredith the horny stoner is the only one who feels entirely like a cliché, and Katie in particular has an exceptionally idiosyncratic collection of quirks for a slasher movie character. Whether this actually manifests in the acting is a different question: more or less yes, but Jenkins completely mangles Matthew's enthusiasm for filmmaking, turning what's written to be a sign of earnest eagerness into tiresome egocentrism, and Bennett lets Rose get much too caustic much too often. Spreitler is both good and bad by turns, depending on the scene; mostly, she's fine or even interesting in her pragmatic low-key reactions, but she can't really handle the quips the screenplay hands her, generally playing every single one-liner in the same tone of flat ironic disaffect. It gets extremely tedious by the end.
Still, all in all a pretty above-average slate of soon-to-be dead bodies, and Kostanski and screenwriter Suzanne Keilly do good work in keeping the pacing snappy and purposeful. This doesn't do much at all for the film as horror, and indeed it tends to fall flat on that front, gore or no: Porco's deliveries are too joyous to feel threatening, and the victims are too savvy to feel endangered, even when they're seconds away from death. It's also not a very atmospheric film at all, oscillating between bright sunlight and amateurish digital night lighting that doesn't so much sculpt the darkness as slather it on like a hungry child making a peanut butter sandwich. Still, "good at horror" was never part of this series' skill set, and in facing a choice between something like Leprchaun: Origins, which seems to think that these films must only be greatly unpleasant, or Leprechaun Returns, which seems to think that they must only be sarcastic comedies... I mean, neither one is my first choice, but I have absolutely no hesitation at all in going with Leprechaun Returns.
Body Count: 6, tied with Leprechaun 2 for the second-lowest of the series, but they are also quite possibly the six best kills in all eight films, so it more than balances out.
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!
Categories: comedies, fantasy, horror, slashers, summer of blood, violence and gore, worthy sequels
