Despite that the first film was a critical flop, it surprisingly did financially well at the box-office since many people enjoyed Warwick Davis' performance as the Leprechaun even though he wasn't scary. In fact, in the same exact year when this film was released, even Mike Myers and Dana Carvey talked about the film and made fun of it in their film "Wayne's World 2". So with the film doing financially well and people talking about how fun and entertaining Warwick Davis was as the Leprechaun, a sequel was made exactly a year after the film's release to cash-in on its success, with Warwick Davis' reprising his role as the Leprechaun. Since the film is a sequel to an awful and goofy movie that's hardly ever scary where it would be impossible to make frightening in a sequel considering how over the top Davis and his character was in the first film; is the sequel at least just as enjoyably entertaining as the first film was with possibly a few improvements, or is it just a plain dreadful cash-grab sequel where Davis' performance isn't as enjoyable as he was in the first film; ON WITH THE REVIEW!
The film starts out on St.Paddy's Day 994 A.D. in Ireland, where the Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) has just turned a thousand years old and is finally allowed to claim a bride as he promises his human slave (Who the Leprechaun captured for trying to steal his gold) to set him free if he helps him find a woman and doesn't interfere with the process of using his powers to claim a helpless woman as his bride. His slave agrees to do so, that is until he discovers that the woman that the Leprechaun plans to marry happens to be his own daughter. As the Leprechaun nearly succeeds with gaining a bride, his slave stops him and now the Leprechaun for some reason must wait another thousand years to gain a bride, but vows to marry a descendant of his slave as revenge for his interference before he kills him. A thousand years later, the Leprechaun goes to modern day L.A. during St.Paddy's Day to marry a young descendant of his former slave named Bridget (Shevonne Durkin) and succeeds with making her his bride and takes her to his evil lair where she'll be serving him for the rest of her life. However, when the Leprechaun discovers that Bridget's boyfriend Cody (Charlie Heath) has taken a gold coin from him, the Leprechaun goes out in search for Cody to get his gold back, as Cody takes on the Leprechaun to free his girlfriend from him.
Remember how silly and stupid the first film's overall tone was while also having logic that hardly makes any sense? Well this film definitely has its fair share amount of over the top stupidity and confusing logic, especially when being a sequel to an already stupid movie! For starters, the method of how the Leprechaun claims a woman to be his bride is by making the woman sneeze three times without someone saying "God bless you", which has got to be one of the most ridiculous rules of a villain with magical powers enslaving a person that I have ever seen in a horror film! I mean seriously, a girl sneezes three times and boom that automatically makes her the Leprechaun's Wife, what sense does that make? Wouldn't it make more sense for the Leprechaun to use a magic ring to claim her, or his magical powers to simply just capture her and take her away? I mean sneezing that's the best that the writers can come up with? Well if that piece of logic isn't stupid enough for you, remember in the first film how a Four-Leafed Clover can kill a Leprechaun? Well in this film its iron! It not only goes against the logic that was developed in the first film, but come on iron, that's the Leprechaun's Kryptonite? I can buy a Four-Leafed Clover being an evil Leprechaun's weakness since it's supposed to bring good luck to those who use it, but iron, really? The Leprechaun can take abuse from anything, except for iron? It makes no sense. Also, remember in the first film when Mark Holton accidentally swallows one of the Leprechaun's gold coins which causes the Leprechaun to take off one of the buckles on his shoes to use it to slice Holton's belly opened? Well it now turns out that carrying a piece of the Leprechaun's gold can protect you from him! Did the people making this movie actually pay attention when watching the first movie? To make this ignored logic from the first movie more confusing, despite that the Leprechaun's gold can now suddenly protect you from being killed by him, even when carrying the gold coin the main character still finds himself to be in life threatening danger! The film's logic is just driving me insane the more I think about it!
Now there are two theories of why the film ignores the logic and events that happened in the first film. While some would say that this film isn't really a direct sequel or a prequel to the first film since it acts more as a stand-alone movie just with the same character, many would say that it's a different Leprechaun who's just played once again by Warwick Davis. In many respects I can see that since he has a pot full of gold where he stores all the gold that he steals, instead of carrying a bag full of 100 gold coins. He claimed that was 600 years old in the first film, when in this film he's 2,000 years old, with a completely different back-story. And he can do more with his magic like create illusions, instead of just mimicking voices and making himself magically appear out of nowhere. Now if he is a different Leprechaun, then why not get a different actor to play the villain? The most obvious answer is because not many people would see the sequel if Warwick Davis wasn't playing a Leprechaun like he did in the first movie, which I guess must mean that all Leprechauns in these two films resemble Warwick Davis. That's pretty confusing if you ask me, because if all Leprechauns look and sound alike then how can they tell each other apart? Plus whether Davis is playing a different Leprechaun or not, it still doesn't excuse the amount of times when the film goes against the rules that were both established in this film and previous one. The first film literally set-up the rules for not just one Leprechaun, but for every Leprechaun in general that exists in the film's world. And considering that we see a Leprechaun in this film that not only resembles the first Leprechaun but carries the same traits by having him going after his stolen gold coin and briefly shining shoes on one or two occasions, you'd think that the same rules would apply to this one as well. On top of it, the first film ended with a bit of a cliffhanger implying that the Leprechaun is still alive and will be back to take back his gold back. So despite that the ending of the first film was leading up to a possible sequel, this sequel doesn't even take advantage of where the previous film left off by instead just giving us a completely different Leprechaun even though he is played by the same exact actor, which is without a doubt in my mind a completely missed and wasted opportunity!
Much like how Davis was hardly ever scary in the first film; in this film he is 100% not scary at all. In the first film I at least found Davis as the Leprechaun a bit unsettling in earlier scenes of the movie when he's in the shadows and mimics a voice of a trapped little in a dark room; but in this film, aside from the cool and creepy looking Make-Up, he's miles away from scary. In fact, the film never even builds up to his presence and reveal like the first film did, we see him right away acting all comical and over the top! Even the way he murders and injures people as gory as they are, are actually pretty funny in its own twisted way than they are scary. I swear every time I watch Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun on-screen either killing people or threatening them, I wasn't at all intimidated by him! If anything I felt like sitting at a bar with this crazy Leprechaun to hear him talk about how much he loves gold as he gets drunk, and yes there's a scene in the movie where the Leprechaun gets wasted in a bar full of screaming little people cheering for him, where he later on has to go to a Coffee Bar to sober up as he lies on the couch looking sick as he drinks 4 cups of Coffee. Oh yeah, he’s really terrifying! The only audience that Davis' performance as the Leprechaun can ever scare are children! I think the only scene in the movie where the Leprechaun is almost close to being scary is when he sexually harasses Bridget, but even that's not scary, disturbing, or funny for that matter, it's just uncomfortably awkward! The way the film is shot, paced, and edited doesn't help make Davis' over the top portrayal of the Leprechaun chilling either. When we see the Leprechaun fight against Cody in Bridget's house for example, the pacing and editing looks and feels so rushed that the timing for when Cody and the Leprechaun get injured feels completely off where it doesn't at all look humorous or feel painful. There are even times in the film where the camera shakes so much that it almost looks as if that the person holding the camera is having trouble keeping it still. The jump scares and twists aren't even scary or surprising either, they're very predictable, especially in the scenes when the Leprechaun creates a vision of Bridget to fool the characters into doing his bidding; and the moments of suspense that lead into jump scares where you can easily tell when it;s going to be the Leprechaun and when it's going to be false; and why should we be afraid if the Leprechaun is going to pop-out, he's too funny to be afraid of! If anything, we want to see him pop-out, so we can spend more time laughing at him for how not scary he is!
The bright side to the film (Especially in terms of not following continuity to the first film) is that we at least don’t have to see those annoying idiotic characters from the first film. Now are the characters and actors portraying them in this film any better, for the most part no. The characters are all cardboard cut-out cliches. A lot of the extras in the film such as the people that Cody scams, "Mad TV's" Michael McDonald as the Coffee Shop manager, and Tony Cox's cameo as the little drunk giving chocolate coins for example, are just as annoying as the characters in the first movie. There's a bully who wants Cody's girlfriend who's hardly ever given any time to shine as a bully, or even an obstacle since he literally gets killed off a few scenes after we meet him. And the character Bridget is not only just your typical hot but boring damsel in distress who's very shallow, but the actress playing her can't act for her life for how fake and at times unemotional her reactions towards the Leprechaun and her boyfriend being in danger are. But I'll admit as bad as the characters and performances in the film are, they're honestly not that bad, especially when compared to the characters in the first movie. The characters in the first movie were so boring, so annoying, and so idiotic, that I was begging for the Leprechaun to kill each and every last one of them, so he can successfully retrieve his gold. There seriously wasn't a single character in that whole movie who I actually gave a crap about, not even so much as an extra! With this film on the other hand, there was one character who I enjoyed and cared if he would live or die and that's Cody's comical Uncle Morty played by Sandy Baron who's a scam artist that loves to drink. Every time I see him on-screen getting drunk, scamming people (Including the Leprechaun), and yucking up his eccentric street-smart personality, I always find myself being enjoyably entertained by his on-screen presence. He just steals every frame of the movie just as much as Warwick Davis does as the Leprechaun where he doesn't once strike me as annoying. As for Cody, while he is a pretty bland and uninteresting character, his character and performance aren’t bland enough to the point where he becomes boring, nor does he become as over the top annoying and idiotic as the characters in the first film, which in my opinion makes the character and performance exceptionally serviceable if nothing special. While the rest of the new characters suck, Cody and his Uncle Morty are definitely improvements over the cast of characters that we had in the first movie, especially Morty.
Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun, while still being far from scary, he's still incredibly fun to watch from beginning to end. Since he's not being restrained from being fun and over the top as he was in the first movie since the first film tried to make him out to be scary but miserably failed at doing so, he really goes full out comical in this film as he chews-up every single scene that he's in with his presence, dialogue, scenes of him getting drunk, violently stealing any piece of gold he sees (Which I like the new addition of him having a pot filled with gold that he's stolen, instead of him having a bag that's limited to 100 gold coins), and committing many cartoony murders. The murders that he commits in the movie are funnier and more creative than they were in the first movie. Scenes like a guy getting his face sliced-off by a pair of spinning blades as the Leprechaun uses his magic to make the blades look like Bridget's boobs; and the Leprechaun filling up a guys stomach with his gold, are so silly and yet so inventive that they definitely top all the murders that the Leprechaun committed in the first film, where the only real memorable and silly death that the first film had to offer was the Leprechaun killing a guy by hopping on top of him with a Pogo Stick. Much like the first film, the film also does have a nice look to it with its sets, colorful lighting, and nice Special effects, and surprisingly the film even tops the look that the first film had, by having it take place during St.Paddy's Day as we see people throughout the film celebrate the holiday; and witness the Leprechaun chase the characters around in his underground maze like lair that contains a few surprises (That are more laughable than they are scary). All the first film just had is an old farm house and a small ordinary town for the Leprechaun to search around for his gold.
Just like the first film, it's goofy, it's stupid, the logic makes even less sense than the first film's logic, the majority of characters are dull and annoying, its miles away from ever being scary, but the visuals look nice and Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun is enjoyably entertaining. However, while having the same amount of good and bad that the first film had, the film does surprisingly have a few things that in my opinion make the film slightly better than the first film by giving us two characters who are fairly decent; having some creative ideas and visuals that are more appealing than what the first film had to offer, even if the result is still silly; and its concept of setting the film during St.Paddy's Day to give it a bit of a holiday feel. I'm not going to say that the improvements make this film good because it doesn't. The film is still by definition a bad movie that's incredibly stupid with no actual scares whatsoever. But just like the first film, it’s still an entertaining guilty pleasure with Warwick Davis giving one hell of a fun performance in a sequel that surpasses the original.
RATING 2/5
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