Lionsgate
St. Patrick’s Day is one of the few holidays everyone celebrates, and yet, lacks an official movie. We’ve argued in the past that Leprechaun: In The Hood is perhaps the ultimate St. Patrick’s Day movie, but I notice there’s no definitive ranking. So, in the interest of informing your film watching decisions, here are the Leprechaun movies, from best to worst.
1) Leprechaun (1993)
If you only know this movie by reputation, or by Jennifer Aniston being the final girl in it, you really need to see it. It was originally written as a straight horror movie, but Warwick Davis brought some comedic elements to it, which only makes the obvious drama even weirder. For example, about twenty minutes into the movie, it dawns on you the fat guy who follows a little kid around is not, in fact, a pedophile but is supposed to be mentally handicapped. This comes up when the little kid explains to him if they can find a pot of gold, they can afford an operation to make him smarter, which makes this kid either cruelest or the stupidest kid in horror movie history.
It is a masterpiece of unintentional horror comedy, only accentuated by the terrible attempts to make an intentional horror comedy. Truly, proof that inspiration and sometimes talent are unnecessary to be entertaining.
2) Leprechaun: In The Hood (2000)
You can sum up everything about this movie in just one clip:
By the way, Ice-T there is playing Mack Daddy O’Nassas. At this point, TriMark, the longtime distributor of cheesy horror that had actually launched thanks to the original movie, was imploding, the movie was going straight-to-video, and the MPAA was never seeing this. So the movie just kind of… goes insane. You’ve got the above scene. You have an extended drag joke where the Leprechaun demands a beej from a character named “Postmaster P.” You have “Zombie Fly Girls” rescued from the hypnotic power of the Leprechaun’s flute (GEDDIT?) by smoking a four-leaf clover-laced joint. Does it end with a rap number? Oh, does it ever:
That said, I rank Leprechaun: In The Hood below the original only because none of this stupidity is accidental, so there are moments where it feels just a bit forced. Although really, in terms of accidental comedy, they’re nearly interchangeable.
3) Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997)
TriMark decided to mash up two ever-reliable direct-to-video genres: The Aliens knockoff and the slasher movie. If that sounds incredibly stupid, oh, my friend, words cannot capture how stupid it is. This is a movie that starts with Warwick Davis exploding out of an erect penis, and let’s just stop for a moment and contemplate the breathtaking accidental symbolism in that image.
The best part is that why, precisely, the Leprechaun is running around on an alien planet is something they barely waste time trying to justify, let alone explain. The damsel of this movie has a lot of gold, he wants her gold, he’s still a tiny little pixie rapist (see Leprechaun 2, below), boom, plot solved. The problem is that this extends to most of the plot, and when the movie ends with a giant, dismembered fist flipping you off in space, it may accidentally sum up how this movie views its own audience.