I'll Be There For Me Pot O' Gold
March equals St. Patrick's Day and St. Patrick's Day equals Ireland and Ireland equals Leprechauns. Ireland also equals getting drunk and eating potatoes, which I will be doing this month while I review the "Leprechaun" series, starting, naturally, with the first one.
This cinematic stroke of genius starts with an old Irish dude named Dan O'Grady coming home from Ireland to his waiting wife...Mrs. O'Grady. He is rather tipsy and arrives home in a limo, much to the confusing of Mrs. O'Grady and her cow. No wait, that's Miss O'Leary. Anyway, Mr. O'Grady tells his wife that while in Ireland he found a leprechaun and it gave him gold, so yay their rich.
But apparently leprechauns don't like to give up their gold without a fight because this Leprechaun, played by Warwick Davis, came after O'Leary and killed his wife. But luckily, O'Leary knows all the leprechaun tricks and knows they are deathly afraid of four leaf clovers, which is what O'Leary uses to subdue the Leprechaun. O'Leary locks him in a crate in his basement and is about to torch the house when he has a stroke.
Ten years later and he is still trapped in the box. He reveals that he is about 600 years old, so ten years to him is probably like a couple of minutes to you and me. The house now belongs to Jennifer Aniston and her dad. Yes, THE Jennifer Aniston, back in the day when she was praying this Leprechaun gig would lead her to a TV show where she would ask a ridiculous amount of money to play a haircut. She plays in this movie, however, Lori, a very whiny, bitchy, snobby chick from L.A. Lori doesn't like the look, feel, smell, touch, taste, and hearing of the place and is about to leave until she runs into hunky housepainter Nathan.
Nathan is the owner of, I'm not making this title up, "Three Guys Who Paint". The other two guys is his younger brother Alex and a slow dude named Ozzy, who is played by the dude who played Francis in "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure". They're all painting the house when Ozzy is covered with paint and he screams out "SHARON!!!!!!!!!! THE (Bleep)IN' KIDS (Mumble mumble mumble)". No wait, wrong Ozzy. This Ozzy spills paint on himself and while he is washing it off, he hears the Leprechaun calling from the basement. Stupidly, he releases it.
Ozzy runs back upstairs to tell everyone, but they don't believe him because he is prone to making up stories about UFO's and creatures. Then they spot a rainbow and Ozzy and Alex run to see what's on the other end. There, they find something they couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams!! A broken down truck. Oh, but a bag of gold appears in the truck and Alex and Ozzy vow to keep the gold a secret.
Back at the house, the Leprechaun feels Tori up but everyone thought it was a cat, so when good ol' Dad tries to find the "cat" in a tree, he ends up getting his hand clawed it. It was really the Leprechaun pretending to be cat. Everyone leaves to take Dad to the hospital, where he shall stay and rest, lucky him.
Ozzy and Alex take one piece of gold to Collectable Joe, a very "knowledgeable" fellow who offers to analyize it overnight with his high tech machinery and probably a bottle of scotch. But here comes the little Leprechaun, after his gold coin, on a tri-cycle no less. He goes after Joe and stomps on him on a pogo stick.
What? No, I wasn't smoking anything, it really was a pogo stick. If you don't believe me either get the movie or get the compulation video/DVD "Boogymen", where this very scene is shown. Now if you're done doubting me...
After killing about 25 minutes in a diner where nothing really was going on, we find the Leprechaun in the house, looking around for his gold coin and stumbling on shoes. Another Leprechaun folk lore is they are shoe craftsmen and they just can't help but clean up shoes, no matter what they are doing. This is rather important and I'll get back to that in a few moments here.
Lori and the "Three Guys Who Paint" crew come home to find a ransacked house and clean shoes. Ozzy still claims it's the Leprechaun but of course no one believes him. After the editor cleans up the house (meaning the end of one scene was "Lets start cleaning this up" and the beginning of the next is "Well, we're doing cleaning") the Leprechaun makes his appearance to everyone else when he tricks Nathan into going outside and make him fall into a bear trap. Of course actually seeing the guy with their own eyes doesn't make them believe he's a leprechaun. Sheesh.
Then one of the oddest scenes in movie history takes place. The Leprechaun somehow made a tiny car for himself in the barn and he drives off. A cop nearby sees the tiny car driving down the highway and must investigate this, which turns out to be a mistake because he ends up getting clawed to death.
After that, there's about 20-25 minutes of Lori and company running from the Leprechaun and shooting him, which doesn't work but they must shoot him anyway. It is around this point when they start believing he is in fact a Leprechaun and say "Ok fine, we'll give your gold back. Sheesh, Mr. Bossy Boots". Alex and Ozzy reveal where they hid the bag and Lori gives it back. Now everything should be ok...
Oh yeah. Earlier when Ozzy found the gold, he wanted to test to see if it was actual gold so he bit down on and and somehow swallowed it. D'oh!! So now the Leprechaun wants this piece back. Ozzy tells them that O'Grady knows how to stop the Leprechaun but he wound up in an nursing home after his stroke so Lori must go to him. But they need to distract the Leprechaun.
Oh yeah. They throw shoes at him and he must, DAMMIT!! he must!!!, clean them. But that doesn't last long, he follows Lori anyway and attacks O'Grady so he doesn't give the secret to stopping the Leprechaun. But that didn't work because his dying words to Lori was the instructions to stopping the Leprechaun. She must pick a freash four leaf clover from a patch in the backyard.
So she rushes back and they all stumble to find one and luckily (no pun intendend, really) they find one. The kid Alex stuffs it in a ball and shoots it down the Leprechaun's throat using a sling shot. Thank you Dennis The Menace. It falls down a well and he melts, much like the witch at the end of "Wizard of Oz", but for good measure, Nathan blows the well up. But there are 4 more movies after this one, so apparently that wasn't enough.
This is a hard movie to rate and judge. The storyline isn't really that good and it's extremely goofy as all hell so there's no way this movie was taken seriously, but it's entertaining to watch. You can't help but laugh when The Leprechaun sings children rhymes while killing a person or is driving the little car down the hallway or when he appears on roller skates for no reason or is rushing back to the house in a wheelchair. If you don't like horror movies and your significant other says "Let's get a horror movie", you can, by a techincality, get this movie, even though there is nothing remotely scaring about it. Plus if he/she is Irish, they'll definately go for it. Just don't forget to bring the booze and potatoes.
3 stars (On entertainment value only)
"Leprechaun" on IMDb.com:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107387/