Horror Movie Review: Leprechaun Origins (2014)

The Leprechaun franchise has seen 6 films before this reboot came along each sillier than the last. The thing is the series as a whole has a certain charm about it & Warwick Davis has always excelled in the role.

Well no more as Dylan Postl (better known as the wrestler, Hornswoggle in WWE) has taken on the role for the franchise reboot. How does he & the movie fare?

Not so well, sadly…

2 teenage couple’s back-packing through the Irish countryside come across some unhelpful cliché Irish people. The teens are your standard lot for this kind of movie & one of them happens to be a bit of an Irish history buff…whew.

Rebuffed by the locals the teens are ready to move on when one villager comes forward & offers to show them some rocks & offers them a place to stay for the night. If that doesn’t get your spider senses tingling than his free lift & super-unfriendly son will.

Holed up in the cabin for the night the teens do what teens do while their host behaves super-suspiciously outside. Not a lot happens until the history expert gets up & sees something go past the window in a terrible attempt at a jump scare. She is freaked out & in a long list of clichés, the men don’t believe her. She imagined it…it was a wild boar. Yeah, alright…

Anyway they discover they are locked in which was a nice touch & than come under attack from some mysterious beast. Turns out they are fodder for the Leprechaun, a tribute to it so that it won’t attack the village in revenge for them stealing its gold many years before.

This entire plot is filled in at convenient moments by characters & it isn’t until 54 minutes into a 90 minute movie that we get even a passing glimpse at the Leprechaun. Considering it’s supposed to be the star of the film & all we’ve seen up to this point implies a cross between a boar & the Predator (yes, that Predator).

In the end I wished I hadn’t seen what it looked like at all as it is was so incredibly disappointing. It’s like a wild animal with overly large teeth, growling away & running on all fours. It had nothing that says Leprechaun about it & is so far removed from the original film it’s crazy.

The excuse is given that they wanted a darker edge to the movie but this could have been managed in other ways. This attempt to not give us a clear image of the Leprechaun results in one of the darkest movies I’ve watched in a while. I couldn’t see shit & it was infuriating.

The acting is so-so & made up of teenagers screaming & saying “what’s going on?” except for the father/son who are just awful & stink up the screen in a horrible showdown over the Leprechaun. That scene should mean something if the film had spent anytime building up characters but instead is incredibly awkward & laughable.

There are some nice gore moments such as a spine ripped out of a back & an amazing axe-head kill that had me reacting like this:

A movie with this many clichés wouldn’t have a straight-forward ending either as our lone survivor (guess who?) kills the Leprecahun with a poorly placed pun & than finds out there is more than one. Ok…

It has moments (such as the axe to the head scene) that show promise but it’s mostly made up of rehashed ideas, bad clichés & poor acting. I also can’t forgive the awful looking Leprechaun even if it is a convincing performance by Hornswoggle.