Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone and hopefully the throngs of green-attired tourists in your town have gone back home & to work in the morning.
What was Horror Movie Twitter doing on this glorious day of misappropriated myths and legends? Watching the Leprechaun series, of course!
Surely we were all doing so ironically as it’s no secret that the Leprechaun horror series isn’t the greatest. It’s all over the place and could have easily skipped a few movies between my beloved In Da Hood and In Space and not lost anything. Even in terms of late night B-movie binges and the greatest horror movie aisle (well, I suppose horror movie queue now) rentals you could be doing… something else. Every time this franchise passes across someone’s desk, I can only imagine someone with a furrowed brow perusing the material thinking, “how the hell do you tie all this together?”
Well, someone’s trying. Leprechaun has gone through a couple of career renaissances – the first one being under WWE Studios, which is known for producing films that vary in quality from OK to “eeyikes”, featuring wrestlers. Leprechaun: Origins ended up on the lower end of that scale unfortunately, so the franchise disappeared again for a few years. In 2018, studio Astron-6 decided the series deserved another wack at it and dropped the offering known as Leprechaun Returns at our feet. The good news is, as Leprechaun had already been leaning towards comedic as all slasher franchises will after a while, being under a studio that actually understands the comedy AND horror parts of “comedy horror” is really a win in the franchise’s corner.
The bad news is… what the heck do you do with these movies?
Look, Leprechaun Returns is great. It’s witty, it’s just meta enough, the effects are pretty good, and it makes just enough nods to the original series while letting you know that we’re going to act like the majority of it didn’t happen. And I’m fine with that. We should be find with that. Change is good. It fits in very snugly between the first and second movies, so much so that I wish this were the actual sequel rather than what we got. Multiple times.
But one of the many things that tank this franchise is follow up. Namely, the Leprechaun pretty much always achieves his goals in each movie. Sure, he dies at the end of each one, but the series lore has established that the Leprechaun is extremely hard if not impossible to kill For Reasons. And with rare exception he tends to get his gold back one way or another. So where is the need for a sequel, ever?
Leprechaun Returns, surprisingly, addresses this motif by injecting some rather timely messages and playing them completely straight. The most noticeable recurring ploy from the Leprechaun is playing up toxic masculinity and the misogynistic tendencies of the frat bros in the movie – namely, the ways in which they berate the sorority sisters, who are clearly intelligent and self-sufficient, and in a first for a slasher film NOT doomed to die for Sex. I’m sorry, did I just say a magical, murderous creature addresses social justice issues in a horror flick?
But that’s not all. Leprechaun Returns also brings us cautionary words against greed and corruption (the Leprechaun’s whole motive and the underlying message of the original movie before it got Flanderized) and the effects of mental illness on folks that provide care for family. Wow, this got way deeper than expected. Messages, dated or not, tend to make material more malleable than cramming in material for a sequel hook. Is this what the franchise needed? Is this how we make this… work?
Maybe not. Only time and luck will tell. Leprechaun Returns makes me feel like this franchise deserves another chance at the bat. If only because for this particular holiday, Leprechaun is all we got. It’s a shame, too, because somehow in the midst of messy plotlines and cringey humor, Leprechaun has managed to build up a pretty consistent and solid lore. It’s never going to be Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th, but the potential has always been there. If only, damn it, someone would do something with poor old Lubdan!
(Did you know the Leprechaun had a name? Me neither until right this year.)