Leprechaun In The Hood (2000)

NOVEMBER 10, 2008

GENRE: COMEDIC (?), CRAP, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: CABLE (FEARNET)

Apparently, I have Fearnet. I don’t know when this development occurred, but it must have been recent. Part of what I love about HMAD is that I often don’t know what I am going to watch, so having a revolving group of a dozen or so horror movies (free to view) at my disposal is pretty grand.

And that, of course, is the only reason I found myself watching Leprechaun In The Hood today.

No one puts on a Leprechaun movie and expects to be blown away with its story, performances, or even production value, but for the love of God, this is truly wretched in every sense of the word. I never saw the one where he went to space, so maybe this movie has a lot of subtle thematic payoffs to ideas presented in that film, and they were simply lost on me. But even with that benefit of the doubt, this movie is still complete horseshit.

The first movie was kind of fun in a B (ok, C) movie way: it moved along, had a couple of nasty gore effects, and was just so ridiculous that you couldn’t help but be entertained every now and then. I mean, the last line was “Fuck you, Lucky Charms!” – awesome. Plus, how fucking cute was Jennifer Aniston in that movie? THIS, however, I can’t even find the smallest shred of entertainment value. For starters, the fucking Leprechaun is barely in it; he pops up every now and then to say a limerick, but half of his scenes don’t even seem to be related to the rest of the movie. I almost suspect that a really abysmal gangster/rapper movie was made, and then some drunk exec decided to film twenty minutes’ worth of Leprechaun footage and try to work it in somehow.

For example, at one point, we see Leprechaun go into an apartment owned by a blind woman, who tries to feed him. Where the scene came from and where it goes is anyone’s guess; one can assume he was looking for someone else (maybe 2nd billed Ice-T, who also barely appears) and got the wrong place, but one shouldn’t have to be drawing their own conclusions for a Leprechaun movie. Plus, half of his scenes have him sitting down doing nothing except rhyming, and Warwick himself doesn’t even seem to be having as much fun as he used to.

But the real problem is how god awful the main story is, which concerns a trio of rappers looking to make it big (they use Leprechaun’s magic flute – don’t ask – to secure a gig playing in Vegas). That would be fine, but the movie seems to be almost trying to reinforce negative stereotypes about African Americans, which just makes the whole thing even more insulting. For example, their rap music is positive, so Ice-T admonishes them for singing about being positive, when kids only want to hear rap songs about smacking bitches and shooting homeys. This leads to our “positive” heroes robbing the guy and shooting him in cold blood. Oh yeah, pretty much every character in the film is either a gangster, a crackhead, a pimp, or a prostitute (not to mention a lot of cross-dressing), and since there are no Caucasians to be found (except for a wannabe record exec who appears for about 12 seconds near the end of the film), it got to the point where I couldn’t tell if the movie was exceedingly racist or merely trying to parody other Afro-centric movies.

It’s also a waste on the horror angle. Leprechaun kills maybe 3 people in the entire movie, and Ice-T gets shot a couple times, but that’s about it. Lep DOES show off a cool move where he uses “magic” bullets that blows someone’s chest apart, but that’s hardly enough to rescue this thing from crap status. Christ, they don’t even bother using the “he has to clean shoes” trick. The one thing they could play for laughs concerning inner city “gangsta” folks would be the sneaker culture; you know some of these guys have like 100 pairs of sneakers in their closet. That would be amazing! No, we get a fucking Coolio cameo instead.

I never thought I’d see the day where part of what I hate about a movie is that it fails to meet the Leprechaun standard, but there you go. I honestly don’t even think that anyone involved even bothered to watch the others, as this one is both gore and cheesy-charm free. On that note, I also assume that the space one didn’t end with him being sent into a Los Angeles ghetto, but even if so, fuck this movie.

What say you?