Leprechaun (1993)

(On TV, October 2019) If the 1980s got busy in how it spawned multi-instalment horror franchises, the 1990s got stupid about it, which explains why 1993’s unlikely Leprechaun has now led to seven sequels and counting. The original feels like countless other early-1990s horror/comedy movies, playing on so much ingrained familiarity with the genre and the form that it has to resort to a ludicrous monster for inspiration. It’s ridiculous by design, so it can’t commit to the scares, yet can’t quite bring itself to become a full comedy. After a middling opening, it settles for following a bunch of kids and teenagers through the usual nonsense as a diminutive antagonist (Warwick Davis, quite good) prances around in stereotypical garb and spouts Irish one-liners. If this doesn’t seem all that scary, it doesn’t matter: Leprechaun, by this stage of the horror genre, is going through the motions of a horror movie in order to offer some kind of lighthearted experience to fans. That it engendered to so many follow-ups is baffling, but that’s really the producer’s decision. Perhaps the best of what the film has to offer now is a sense of nostalgia for that school of filmmaking (today’s horror comedies aren’t that different, but they do seem more self-aware). Oh, and one of Jennifer Aniston’s earliest film performances: it’s certainly not the best showcase for the acting skills (not with that dialogue, anyway), but she’s surprisingly cute as a teenager, and offers an interesting contrast to her later screen persona. Otherwise, though, Leprechaun is as bland as it comes even with a deliberately eccentric villain—in form, it’s practically identical to so many other films. Whether this is a good thing or not is the point of having a horror genre.