970x125
It is St. Patrick’s Day. You have consumed some amount of green liquid. You are wearing something you would not wear any other day of the year. And somewhere, on a television in a house near yours, a man in elaborate prosthetic makeup is delivering a pun before murdering someone with a pogo stick.
This is tradition. This is culture. This is the Leprechaun franchise, and today of all days it demands to be taken seriously. Or not seriously. Honestly not seriously at all.
Here is the thing about these eight films: none of them are good in the traditional sense and all of them are good in the only sense that matters. They exist on a spectrum that runs from “deliriously entertaining chaos” at one end to “an act of aggression against the viewer” at the other, and ranking them requires a calibrated understanding of what you are actually asking when you ask whether a Leprechaun movie is good.
What you are asking is: does Warwick Davis appear to be having the time of his life? Does someone die in a manner that is simultaneously creative and deeply stupid? Is there at least one rhyming couplet? These are the metrics. These are what we’re working with.
Let’s go worst to best.
8. Leprechaun: Origins
The only Leprechaun film on this list that has no business existing.
WWE Studios produced this one, presumably after a meeting where someone said “what if we made a Leprechaun movie but removed everything that makes Leprechaun movies work,” and everyone in the room nodded. Warwick Davis is not in it. The titular creature looks like one of the cave dwellers from The Descent if you forgot to finish rendering it. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t rhyme. There are no puns, no gold, no pogo stick, no sense that anyone behind the camera had ever heard of the previous six films or cared particularly about the one they were making.
They cast Hornswoggle, a wrestler known, and I need you to really sit with this, for dressing up like a leprechaun, as the leprechaun, and then put him in a body suit that makes him unrecognizable. This is like casting Paul McCartney as a Beatle and then immediately covering him in a horse costume. The whole enterprise is a philosophical failure before frame one.
It also takes itself seriously. A Leprechaun movie that takes itself seriously is the horror genre equivalent of a clown walking into a funeral and being annoyed that nobody finds him funny.
Watch it if: You want to know what absence feels like.
7. Leprechaun 4: In Space
Every horror franchise in the 1990s eventually sent someone to space. Hellraiser did it. Jason did it, technically, though Jason X was technically 2001. The Critters franchise had already been there twice. There was apparently a moment in the mid-90s where someone in Hollywood decided that outer space was the logical next frontier for supernatural Irish mythology, and nobody in the room had the courage to disagree.
Leprechaun 4: In Space features Warwick Davis holding what appears to be a lightsaber, which is either a tribute to his role as Wicket in Return of the Jedi or the prop department worked with what they had. It is set on a spacecraft. It is an almost one-to-one Aliens rip-off, except instead of a xenomorph you have a murderous creature in green felt who wants to marry a space princess and has opinions about his gold. The production design looks like a community theatre’s interpretation of a science fiction film. A man explodes out of someone’s genitals at one point, which is the most interesting thing in the movie and I want to be clear that this is not a sentence I enjoy writing.
There are people who rank this one high because of how broken it is. I understand those people. I am not those people.
Watch it if: You want proof that the 1990s had no brakes.
6. Leprechaun 2
Here is the thing about Leprechaun 2: it is fine. Just fine. Terminally, inescapably, almost admirably fine. It is a sequel that does what sequels do — bigger, louder, slightly cheaper-looking despite technically having the same budget — and it introduces a new motivation for the Leprechaun (he wants a bride, apparently, having apparently resolved the gold situation offscreen between films) and a weakness in cold iron that will never be mentioned again in the entire subsequent franchise because continuity was never really the point.
Clint Howard is in it. The Leprechaun enchants a man into an encounter with two industrial fans that I will describe only as “memorable.” Warwick Davis is clearly already understanding the assignment better than the film around him does. It is a fine time. It is not a great time. It is the kind of film that exists to prove the original was worth following up, which it does, narrowly.
Watch it if: You have already watched everything ranked above this and need the gap filled.
5. Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood
This is the last film in the franchise where Warwick Davis plays the title character, and it is a strange way to end a decade of work in green makeup. The movie tries to have a more serious emotional core than its predecessor, Tangi Miller is genuinely giving a performance that deserves better surroundings, and Davis responds by blending his usual chaos with something approaching genuine menace, which is more tonal complexity than this franchise has any right to ask of itself.
The kills are solid but less inspired than the first Hood entry. The budget looks like it was located between a couch cushion and a filing cabinet. It doesn’t connect particularly well to anything that came before it. But Davis is clearly giving the role everything he has on his way out the door, and there is something genuinely a little sad about watching him disappear from a franchise that would never quite work without him.
He got his OBE last week, incidentally, from Prince William at Windsor Castle. The man contains multitudes.
Watch it if: You want to see a finale that doesn’t know it’s a finale.
4. Leprechaun
The original. The one that started it all. The film where Jennifer Aniston, on her way to being Rachel Green, to being one of the most famous television actors alive, to having a haircut named after her, spent her first feature film running from a murderous creature with a shoe fetish in rural North Dakota.
This is important context: the Leprechaun in this film has a compulsive need to shine shoes. If you place a dirty shoe near him, he will stop whatever he’s doing to clean it. This weakness is introduced, used once, and then dropped by the franchise permanently, never to be mentioned again. It is the most inexplicable character detail in the entire series and I think about it more than I think about most things.
The pogo stick kill is the only kill in the franchise that has entered genuine horror lexicon. A man gets pogo-sticked on his chest cavity while the Leprechaun sings. A child screams “Fuck you, Lucky Charms!” at a creature who has done nothing to deserve Lucky Charms comparisons beyond being small and Irish. Warwick Davis delivers his first performance in the role with the commitment of a man who has decided this is exactly where he wants to be.
The film is not as funny as the ones that came after it because it was not yet sure it was supposed to be funny. That earnestness is its own kind of charm.
Watch it if: You want to understand what Jennifer Aniston survived.
3. Leprechaun in the Hood
After two middling Vegas-adjacent sequels and the space disaster, someone at Trimark Pictures looked at the franchise and asked a simple question: what if the Leprechaun met Ice-T?
The answer, it turns out, is cinema.
Leprechaun in the Hood transplants the franchise to South Central Los Angeles, gives the Leprechaun a flute that turns people into zombie backup dancers, and culminates in a scene where the Leprechaun raps. Not incidentally. Not as a throwaway gag. The Leprechaun raps on camera, in rhythm, for a meaningful duration, and it is genuinely the most iconic moment in the history of a franchise that has pogo stick murders in it.
Ice-T plays a villain named Mack Daddy. The film doesn’t really work as horror in any conventional sense. It is not trying to. It is trying to be the exact kind of film where a supernatural entity from Irish folklore ends up in a rap beef in Los Angeles, and it succeeds at that goal completely.
Watch it if: You want to see a man in green felt outspit an actual rapper and be honestly fine at it.
2. Leprechaun Returns
The only film on this list that isn’t a Warwick Davis entry and yet deserves its place this high, which is both a testament to Steven Kostanski’s filmmaking and a mild indictment of the franchise’s overall track record.
Kostanski, who came in off The Void and preceded this with work that would eventually become Psycho Goreman, brought something the series hadn’t really had since the original: genuine craft. The kills are the best in the franchise, full stop, creative, gory, shot with actual attention to visual language. The script by Suzanne Kelly is the smartest the series has produced. Linden Porco doesn’t have Davis’s specific energy but finds his own rhythm in the role, which is the most anyone could ask.
It is a direct sequel to the original, picking up at the same farmhouse and largely ignoring everything in between, which is simultaneously a cheat and a mercy. Mark Holton returns as Ozzie. There’s a callback to the original that arrives as a gut punch. The whole thing moves with a momentum and confidence that makes it feel like a different kind of Leprechaun film. One that was made by people who had actually thought about what they were doing.
Watch it if: You want proof the franchise had one genuinely good film left in it.
1. Leprechaun 3
Las Vegas.
That’s the review. The Leprechaun went to Las Vegas and the franchise finally understood itself, and everything that was chaotic and stupid and charming about this entire series crystallized into something approaching art if you squint slightly and have had enough green liquid.
The Leprechaun gambles. He banters with an Elvis impersonator. He visits a pawn shop. He hypnotizes people, hangs out with murderous sex robots, gives people the finger as a greeting, and at one point is lit on fire and pushed out of a hotel window, both of which are treated as minor setbacks. One character starts turning into a Leprechaun himself after being infected with Leprechaun blood, which the film treats with the same breezy energy as everything else that happens.
The zingers are better here than anywhere else in the franchise. The kills are more inventive. Caroline Williams shows up. Nobody in Las Vegas finds anything unusual about any of this, which is the most realistic thing about the whole movie. Davis is operating at full velocity, loose, committed, genuinely funny in a way that makes it clear he could have been doing more films that let him do this and the industry was poorer for not figuring that out sooner.
Leprechaun 3 is not a good film. It is, however, the best Leprechaun film, which is a category I maintain should count for something.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. May your gold stay hidden, your shoes stay dirty, and your friends be too tall to fit in a pogo stick’s optimal strike zone.
