Warwick Davis

  • Leprechaun (1993)

    Leprechaun (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Willow (1988)

    Willow (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu Ray, September 2019) I’m aware that Willow has its fans—if you were a fantasy fan of the right age in 1988, Willow was supposed to be a genre-defining event, a bit of hype that was helped along with having George Lucas as the film’s screenwriter. The intent was to deliver a fantasy equivalent to Star Wars (you can recognize themes running through both), working from an archetypical plot executed through state-of-the-art technology. The result, well, isn’t quite as successful. Drawn-out, dull, repetitive, predictable, it’s somewhat balanced with a great lead performance by Warwick Davis, some oddly likable bits of worldbuilding, Val Kilmer in a breakout role, and some digital special effects that, in retrospect, demonstrate the road to even more sophisticated CGI. Watching the film as a middle-aged man, I can’t quite say that it has aged well—the film’s young target audience is obvious, and part of the point of fantasy stories is the immersion that the sometimes-dicey special effects break. For every good thing that makes us like Willow, there’s at least one other bad thing pulling us farther away. Clearly, I’m far too old to watch it as intended.