Leprechaun (1993)

• Written and directed by Mark Jones
• Starring
  • Warwick Davis
  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Ken Olandt
  • Mark Holton
  • Robert Gorman
• Produced by Jeffrey B. Mallian
• Executive produced by Mark Amin

In my fertile imagination, here’s how I see the genesis of Leprechaun: Mark Jones, who’d spent 20 years writing for various TV series, has a get-acquainted meeting with producer Jeffrey Millian, who’s gotten three or four direct-to-video genre flicks made and released. After a few minutes spent in the requisite idle chitchat, Jones blurts out the sentence that seems to fall from every actor’s or screenwriter’s lips in unguarded moments:

“But what I really want to do is direct.”

“Oh, yeah?” says Millian. “Terrific! I’ve got this idea – a killer leprechaun! You know, those little Irish guys? Pot of gold and everything? Someone steals his gold, so he kills people! Whaddaya think?”

Jones says slowly, “A leprechaun. That’s… interesting. Are you thinking forced perspective, or…”

“Nah,” says Millian. “Just the other week, I met Warwick Davis’s people. He starred in that movie a few years ago, Willow. he was two-foot-eleven then, can you believe it? He’s grown a couple of inches since then, but he’s still perfect to play a leprechaun.”

“That’s it — stroke, stroke, stroke… aw, yeah…”

“A killer leprechaun,” Jones repeats.

“You got it.” Millian smiles. “So whaddaya think?”

Jones stares at the front of Millian’s desk a moment. Always wanted to direct, always wanted to direct… “I… think it could work, sure.”

“Terrific!” says Millian. “I’ll send the papers right over. You can start shooting a week from Tuesday.”

“But –” Jones stammers. “But we don’t have a script or anything!”

Millian snorts. “A script – like that’s really hard to write something! No offense, you know, but come on. You’re a writer. So can come up with stuff for the actors to say while you’re directing.”

And thus Leprechaun, plausibly, was born. I mean, sure, maybe this was a labor of love for Jones, maybe he honed the script for years, maybe he wanted to make a movie with a single point of novelty surrounded by the hackneyed trappings of a decades’ worth of horror movies… But isn’t my version kinder? (To Jones, anyway. Not kinder to Millian. But producers? Screw ‘em.)

Lecher-chaun.

Our setup, which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, involves Dan O’Grady (Shay Duffin), an Irishman in America, drunkenly telling his wife (Pamela Mant) that they’re rich now, because he’s got gold from a leprechaun in Ireland. He goes out to hide it, but while he’s gone, out of his traveling trunk springs – a leprechaun! Not the creature of cute temperament of Americanized pop culture (although his costume looks like it came directly from a party supplies store stocked up for St. Patrick’s Day), nor even the “chaotic neutral” folk of more authentic mythology; this is a bad-ass leprechaun who wants his gold, and wants it now, dammit! He scares the wife into falling down the basement stairs and breaking her neck, then waits for O’Grady to return. O’Grady fires a gun at the leprechaun, subduing it long enough to nail it into a crate from which it can’t break free because O’Grady lays a four-leaf clover on top of it. O’Grady then douses the crate in gasoline and is about to drop a match on it from the top of the basement stairs when – stroke! (Which, according to the creative forces that be, looks just like having a heart attack, right down to clutching his chest.)

Ten years later, then, we get to meet two of our for-real cast, an estranged father-and-daughter duo who are going to spend some quality time cleaning up the old O’Grady place, which he bought for a song. At least, that’s the dad’s (John Sanderford) idea. It is met with sophisticated, city-bred derision by daughter Tory, played (in her first theatrical appearance) by Jennifer Aniston. As a character, Tory is a direct precursor to Rachel, Aniston’s character on Friends, before her zany assortments of roommates and friends taught her about life and friendship and such. In other words, she’s whiny, self-important bitch. I continue to be amazed that Hollywood storyteller types think that moviegoing audiences will find dismissive, bratty women endearing. Maybe these are traits highly sought after in the enclosed microcosm which is Los Angeles, but here in the vast hinterlands known as The Rest Of The World, most of us find such characters as irritating as a dentist’s drill.

Anyway. The house – which, it is established, is in North Dakota, which Tory can’t tell apart from New Mexico, and which was obviously shot in southern California – is all cobwebby and filled with rats and the occasional tarantula (?!), and Tory’s all set to find the nearest motel in town and stay for the summer, but then she runs into hunky housepainter Nathan (Ken Olandt), who makes some comments (well-deserved, in my mind) about girls and spiders and such, and in a surge of pride Tory decides to stay around.

Two Americanized pop-cultural bastardization of Irish folklore.

Accompanying Nathan are his pre-pubescent brother Alex (Robert Gorman), the business brains of the outfit, and Ozzie (Mark Holton), the slow but goodhearted local they’ve taken on more from kindness than anything else. And with that, our cast is established!

And then Ozzie brushes the shriveled clover off the crate in the basement, and the leprechaun is out!

And really, there’s no need to describe the plot any further. Imagine, if you will, the movie idea that you and your friends come up with late Saturday night after several hours of diligent alcohol consumption, and which really seems hilarious through the fogs of hard liquor on your brain; now imagine that you type up the script on Sunday morning, with a hangover wrapping all of your senses and each individual neuron in soggy cotton that thuds along to your pulse. That’s pretty much the screenplay for Leprechaun. The worst part is that it doesn’t feel as if Mark Jones was aiming for intentional camp, winking at the audience by wrapping the most hackneyed of plot elements around the unlikely element of a leprechaun; instead, it all just feels unambitious, as if everything after the initial poster concept were created on autopilot.

Now there’s something you don’t see every day.

For instance: Just to get Dad out of the way for the rest of the movie, the leprechaun bites his hand (from inside a hollow log, so Dad thinks it’s a cat). Everyone drives him in to the hospital in town, where he’s kept overnight for observation. For a bite. On the hand.

For instance: Alex and Ozzie, having found the stash of gold coins, leave one with a pawnbroker (John Voldstad) in town to research. Because horror B-movies must always kill minor characters before getting to protagonists, the leprechaun attacks and kills him by bouncing repeatedly on his chest with a pogo stick.

For instance: Most of the second half of the movie revolves around our protagonists either chasing the leprechaun or being chased by it – the former despite evidence that a bullet to the head will only slow it down momentarily, and the latter despite the leprechaun using Off-Screen Teleportation (TM Jabootu) to an extent Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees could only dream of. (It’s reasonable, I suppose, that a magical creature can vanish and reappear in the blink of an eye, but the leprechaun himself seems to forget this resulting in chase scenes that end when the leprechaun suddenly remembers that, duh, he’s a leprechaun, and pops out of someplace he otherwise couldn’t get to.)

I already used the “Lecher-chaun” caption, didn’t I?

I will say this for Warwick Davis, though; he obviously put his heart into this role. Not as an actor per se — there’s only so much one can emote when cackling, “I want me pot o’ gold!” — but as a physical performer. Those few occasions in which “stunt leprechauns” are used plainly stand out, mainly because none of the stand-ins can mimic Davis’s peculiar body proportions, but for most of the movie it’s Davis running in ridiculous boots, Davis scampering across the floor, or Davis being hauled back on a pullcord to simulate the impact of a gunshot. He gets a workout here, if nothing else. That probably explains why the leprechaun has a particular affinity for wheeled contrivances; through the course of this movie, the leprechaun uses a tricycle, a child-sized motorized car (which I immediately dubbed “the leprecar”), a skateboard, roller skates, and a wheelchair.

By the time the finale arrives – with a bizarre conflation of “you gotta believe!” affirmations and liquid gasoline which explodes in a way that real-world gasoline simply doesn’t – the whole production has outstayed its welcome… which makes it even more bewildering that there have been five sequels to Leprechaun, the first of which were also theatrical features before the franchise moved direct-to-video. (I don’t begrudge Davis a paycheck – there aren’t a lot of leading roles for an actor under four feet tall – but come on.) I think the fact that the fourth Leprechaun movie is set in space clearly demonstrates that the unambitious ethic of cliched slapdashery is a congenital part of this franchise’s DNA.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• spring-loaded rats: 1
• spring-loaded fat guys: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
  • Ken Olandt (Nathan) played “Jason Vigo” in the TNG episode “Bloodlines”
  • Mark Holton (Ozzie) played “Bolian” in the DS9 episode “Nor the Battle to the Strong”
  • Shay Duffin (Mr. O’Grady) played “Ned Quint” in the TNG episode “Sub Rosa”
  • William Newman (“Sheriff Cronin”) played “Kalin Trose” in the TNG episode “The Host”