Isaacs Picture Conclusions

SHITFEST 2015 ~ SUMMER: LEPRECHAUN (1993)

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SUBMITTED BY:

johnlincoln

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Tried this format to change things up. Had a feeling LEPRECHAUN would be a movie that would not be fun to watch without distracting myself, so I figured I’d comment as the movie progressed.

0:20 – First image of the Leprechaun ain’t so bad.

0:45 – Oh never mind. He looks like a poorly drawn Celtics logo. If they kept him in shadow we would all be better off.

1:20 – This theme is terrible. Sounds like a second grader trying to play Irish music on a recorder.

2:30 – I genuinely can’t tell if this lady is trying to do an Irish accent for real or just trying to pronounce names with one. Acting off to a great start.

4:05 – The production value in this movie is poor. I can tell they are going for horror/comedy based on the overacting and the musical score, but there’s nothing fun about this so far. Two old Irish people who are probably about to be butchered by Warwick Davis aren’t my bag, I suppose.

5:00 – I started this with the idea that this MIGHT be a Shiftest movie, but it would at least be a fun experiment and a change of format. But, nope, five minutes in and I KNOW this is a Shiftest movie.

7:55 – The Leprechaun gets shot and dies. In case we think this might be the end of the movie we get a poor post-production dubbed line of the thing saying it will “keep coming back”.

10:01 – I’m already all set with the annoying ghostly voiceover. It sucks.

11:25 – Oh. Right. Jennifer Aniston is in this. And she plays a character who mixes up New Mexico and North Dakota. I wonder what the odds were when she was making this movie that she would become a major star within a couple of years. 1,000,000 to 1?

13:35 – Jennifer Aniston reacting to walking into a cobweb is probably not on her demo reel. Nor is “Dad?! Do you see that spider?!? It’s huge!!! That thing could kill us!!”

15:55 – The dialogue in this movie is unrelentingly terrible. Any movie script which had the phrase “This is the 90s” in it should have been burned after reading.

21:05 – Sorry. I think i blacked out for five minutes there. The big dude is walking down the scary stairs and the Leprechaun is talking like a little kid again. I think the same thing is going to happen to this guy that happened to the last person who responded to the voice.

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23:15 – The green ‘magic’ special effects are glorious. But, hey, the guy made it out of the basement. That is a surprise.

25:15 – I often decry the fact that television has changed the type of movies which are getting made, most notably the suspense films of the 90s like NICK OF TIME which would be turned into a TV episode now. But at least a movie with production values this low don’t get theatrical releases anymore.

27:06 – I hate to go after children, but the child actor wearing the 49ers hat is really bad. I blame the Director (Mark Jones) not him.

31:11 – The horny Warwick Davis Leprechaun stroking the leg of a young Jennifer Aniston is as creepy as I care to go. Somehow, when the stroking is blamed on a cat, that is less weird.

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33:40 – Aaaaaand Warwick Davis on a tricycle is probably not the apex of Little People in entertainment.

35:40 – Really? We’re going to devote thirty seconds to a backstory and history of the Leprechaun’s gold? Can we get to the next embarrassing scene where Warwick Davis is exploited for his stature please?

37:50 – Pogo-stick death. This was clearly made after Freddy Krueger and Mike Myers and Jason had exhausted all of the other absurd death scenarios.

40:00 – Cop pulls over a Leprechaun in a miniature car and I am still waiting for the first time this movie is going to make me laugh.

40:45 – Can we at least get to see someone on screen for more than 37 seconds before they are killed off? I suppose this is part of the reason the genre was in crisis until SCREAM came around a few years later to save it.

41:20 – This is the most terribly directed POV shot (and Evil Dead rip off) ever – in a genre laced with them.

44:00 – Ugh. I’m only halfway through this movie. My wife is asleep on the couch next to me. I’m jealous.

44:30 – Hey. A moment of quiet and an effective ambient shot of the woods. It took 44 minutes, but that’s not a terrible moment.

44:50 – Oh well. Leprechaun is back. Never mind.

45:20 – Jennifer Aniston “I don’t kill living things.” I suppose this movie didn’t qualify as living.

46:10 – For a movie called LEPRECHAUN, this movie would be much better if it didn’t have a Leprechaun. I say this as he is eating Lucky Charms (or a generic rip off of it so as not to get sued). That’s clever. This movie feels like something my middle school students would come up with. Actually if I went into a theater class and said “You guys have 12 minutes to come up with a scene involving a Leprechaun, a tricycle, gold, and an angsty teenage girl” my students would probably come up with a far superior script.

48:58 – I’m actually impressed any of the characters not played by Jennifer Aniston or a child have made it this far into the movie. Especially the painter who reminds me of Lennie from Of Mice and Men:

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51:04 – Oh man. There are still 40 minutes left in this movie. Sigh.

51:10 – Can the hunky dude in the cut off shirt (Ken Olandt) please wash that paint stain off his bicep? The continuity is killing me.

52:32 – After another ineffectual fight, this Leprechaun has to be one of the least intimidating and scary movie monsters of all time. If he was in the NCAA tournament of movie monsters he would definitely be a 16 seed. And that’s only if he managed to upset a few guys to get out of the NIT bracket.

54:14 – Hey, I have limited ammo and am fighting a supernatural creature. Let me just unload my bullets into this bush here that almost certainly doesn’t have anything in it.

55:17 – This just in! Jennifer Aniston is sporting some mean jean shirts in this movie:

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56:42 – A horror movie in which the car doesn’t start? That’s an original idea. To change things up, at least we sent the child out of the car to check out the problem.

57:56 – And once again the Leprechaun attacks, mildly injures someone, and is then outsmarted by some of the dumbest characters in the annals of horror. But, really, he’s a scary villain!

59:39 – A crawling hand. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.

1:01:02 – Ok, we’re on the back nine now. We can do this. Even if the Leprechaun using someone else’s voice is growing old. Holy crap… wait a second. Speaking of villains stealing voices… TERMINATOR 2 came out a year before this. And the special effect gap between these two movies is astronomical. How does LEPRECHAUN look so bad? Did people in 1993 feel like this was contemporary, or did they feel like it was a cheesy homage to terrible 80s horror?

1:03:26 – Jennifer Aniston goes outside by herself with a shotgun. At least we are in the post-Ripley age where the women can be heroes too! It’s just too bad that the movie spent so long setting her up as the girl who DOESN’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEW MEXICO AND NORTH DAKOTA!!!!!!

1:06:38 – I think the working title for this movie might have been LEPRECHAUN JUMPS OUT OF THINGS PEOPLE JUST OPENED.

1:07:34 – Leprechaun just pinched that guy’s junk. Pinched it. HE ISN’T SCARY! HE’S JUST THE WORST CREEP OF ALL TIME!!!

1:09:00 – I need to calm down. This movie is making me type in caps. If you start to see emoji pop up, please call the authorities and make sure they come clean up my exploded head.

1:10:01 – I wonder if I could get in LEPRECHAUN 2 tonight? What would happen if someone watched more than one LEPRECHAUN movie at a time? Has anyone done a study which tested a person’s intelligence before and after watching a LEPRECHAUN marathon? Can a movie series make us dumber?

1:10:42 – For a change, the Leprechaun jumped out of something they were about to open rather than something that they did open. That’s creativity.

1:11:20 – That hand coming out of a phone bit was better when it was a tongue in a Freddy movie….. That’s a sentence nobody in history has probably ever typed.

1:12:38 – They are still trying to get out of this house? I guess they had limited locations for this movie. Which is fitting because the budget looks to have been somewhere in the $14-$19 range.

1:13:32 – Just looked it up. Budget was $900,000. I’m not sure what they did with the other $899,986.

1:14:12 – I hope the actors got a lot of take out. I hope everyone was well fed at least. Maybe they had nice hotel rooms to stay in. Maybe Warwick Davis signed some bright green Reeboks. None of it got on screen, is what I’m saying, so I hope someone at least had a good experience.

1:15:00 – Oh, never mind. This probably cost another $29 dollars at Home Depot:

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1:18:25 – Jump scare! (Though, in fairness, it didn’t make me jump. Nor was it scary).

1:19:14 – Please. Please. Please. JUST LET THIS END!

1:20:00 – As we wind down here, I have to say that writing like this at least made these 90 minutes tolerable. I don’t know if I could have made it through this without having something to distract me. As I say this, the Leprechaun is delivering “Little girls shouldn’t look for four leaf clovers” but he’s saying it like it means something else. I just don’t know what.

1:21:32 – Leprechaun steals an eye from a dead guy. Goriest moment in the movie. Wasted on a guy who is already dead.

1:22:40 – While this movie slows to a crawl for all of these characters to get on their hands and knees searching for a four-leaf clover, let me take the time to point out that it is usually in the best interest in a horror-comedy to be either scary or funny, though ideally you’d shoot for both. This movie can’t even get into so-bad-it’s-good status. There are very few redeeming qualities here.

1:24:46 – We all know you aren’t going to kill off the kid. So stop wasting your time with this.

1:25:00 – Hey! Thanks for listening!

1:25:35 – Assault by belt buckle. Death by slingshot. This is the most tame R rated movie ever.

1:28:00 – Man, I was hoping that more time would be devoted to the end credits. Can we just get there please?!?!?!

1:28:21 – We made it! Thank you! Goodnight!

130 comments

  16. GaryGreg828

    I’m thinking that Terminator2 may have had a slightly bigger budget than Leprechaun. Next, you need to watch Leprechaun in the Hood! lol.

    As far as the movie, like another classic Jennifer Aniston film where a character says, “Um, I’m gonna have to kind of like disagree” is my take regarding your assessment of this film; this film does classify as “So bad it’s good!” I think. It definitely has some humorous moments…

    I am surprised more readers in the IPC community have never seen this. I thought Isaacs told me he and Brian cuddled to this one a while back.

    John, one positive for this movie, though, is the prosthetics for the Leprechaun look pretty good; he does look pretty creepy. I think prosthetics work so much better for characters than CGI effects. i.e. the 2002 Spider Man where they made the Green Goblin CGI instead of putting William DaFoe in prosthetics; how awesome would Goblin have been w/ Dafoe under the makeup? Could have been an all-time great villain, but they lazily went w/ CGI. It makes me actually appreciate this Leprechaun make-up.

    Good write-up! 🙂

    Like

    Reply
    • johnlink00

      Thanks! I agree re: prosthetics, for sure. And I was being more than a little unfair as it pertains to budget.
      But this movie just did not make me laugh. I sure WANTED to laugh, I love a good horror comedy. But this one never did anything but make me feel like I was wasting my time.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
  18. the tile doctor

    “52:32 – After another ineffectual fight, this Leprechaun has to be one of the least intimidating and scary movie monsters of all time. If he was in the NCAA tournament of movie monsters he would definitely be a 16 seed. And that’s only if he managed to upset a few guys to get out of the NIT bracket.” awesomeness! well done!

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    • johnlink00

      I’m trying to think of who the other low seeds would be. The high seeds are easy. But low seeds are tougher. I think they would have to be theatrical releases, since there is plenty of low grade stuff that would have to be relegated to the NIT.
      I think the 16 seeds would be the Leprechaun, Dr. Giggles, Uwe Boll as the murderer of every movie he touches, and the Trees in The Happening.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

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