Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood

January 27, 2004

The Leprechaun is back, and boy – is he stoned!

In the sixth installment of the Leprechaun series, Warwick Davis returns as our favorite nasty leprechaun after something a bit more valuable than his Lucky Charms. This time, his gold has fallen into the hands of Emily and Lisa, two poor hoodrats struggling to make ends meet. They share it with their stoner friend Jaime and Emily’s ex-boyfriend-turned-drug-dealer, Rory. Of course, they spend the gold on bling-bling, cadillacs and a big houseparty. Only there’s an uninvited guest at the party…

…and then the leprechaun is in the back taking bong hit after bong hit – he’s stoned out of his mind. He’s actually pretty cool and mellow – at least until he spies one of his gold coins. He flies into a rage and impales his smoking buddy with the bong. I’d be a bit more impressed with the bongicide, if I hadn’t already seen it in Terror Firmer. (After watching part of the director’s commentary, I learned that Tommy Chong Bongs are proudly featured in the movie – nice product placement!) Then comes a hilarious scene of the leprechaun with the munchies – he’s digging in the fridge, eating bologna, margarine, anything he can find.

After the bongicide, the leprechaun continues his rampage, with humor interspersed here and there. Seeing the leprechaun giving a Full Shiatsu Massage to a 300 pound lady is pretty funny, but not quite as funny as when he walks on her back. Leprechaun feet look like Hobbit feet. When Rory’s hoochie gets a gold tooth made out the gold, you know it’s going to end badly. The leprechaun also gets to flirt via cell phone. “How tall are you?” “About 3’6,” he replies, “but I make up for it an other ways, if you know what I mean…” Yeah, I puked in my mouth a little.

The one thing that irritates me – but cracks me up at the same time – is the lack of continuity of “leprechaun traits” between movies. In the first one, the leprechaun is easily distracted by shoes – we even started calling my sister “The Leprechaun” because of her love of shoes. The shoe thing has yet to come up again, although the clover allergy was used in the first movie. A prison of “cold iron” was used in the second film, but that never came up again – even when the Leprechaun was shoved into a cast iron furnace in this one! And what about his amulet from the third film? Or his magical flute from the fifth film? And the dirty limericks! I miss them the most of all. Well, at least the changes require a different deus ex machina in each film, which necessitates creativity in finding new ways to kill the leprechaun.

All in all, a pretty entertaining film, as B-movies go. According to the commentary, the film was originally supposed to be a Spring Break Horror movie. (Like there aren’t enough of those already.) The producers forced the director to move it back to the ‘Hood. Maybe they felt that the black audience has been dealt a dearth of horror movies lately? Or maybe they have demographic info to back it up? Those are some studies that I would like to see…