*. I think at some point the producers of this series understood that they had nothing, so the only way to keep the franchise going was to throw the evil little bastard into various incongruous situations. So the Leprechaun (or a leprechaun, since they all seem to be different demons) went to Vegas, and then into space, and now, yes, he’s even gettin’ jiggy with it in the ‘hood.
*. You may find something in that premise funny. Or at least you might have found something funny in it twenty years ago. If so, it’s the only smile you’ll get out of this movie. Despite being a horror-comedy franchise that goes for broad laughs a lot of the time, I can’t think of any moment in this entire series that succeeded in being funny. On the one hand I’m glad that the Leprechaun is back rhyming in this movie, though not busting rhymes proper until the closing credits, where he sings his “Lep in the hood, come to do no good” with his zombie fly girls. But his rhymes are, alas, all lame. They’re not even groan-worthy.
*. Just to stick with his hip-hop moniker, it actually took me a moment to twig to “the Lep” being an abbreviation of leprechaun. I kept thinking of it as being short for leper. Not an association I’d have thought he wanted to make.
*. That said, the word that most came to mind watching this dreck is sloppy. It’s a sloppy movie. On a few occasions the actors appear to flub their lines, but I guess they didn’t want to do a retake. In other places there seem to be chunks of film missing that would have explained new directions in the plot. Who is it that kills the pawn-store owner Jackie Dee? One of the zombie girls? But they haven’t been introduced yet. I still don’t know.
*. Other points are just rehashed from earlier films. The scene where the Leprechaun rips off a guy’s finger to get his ring, and another scene where he launches through a doorway only to get trapped in a safe, are both taken from Leprechaun 2. As if such material was worth repeating.
*. Nothing about the plot makes sense. Again they’re making up new leprechaun folklore as they go along, this time adding a golden flute with some kind of magical properties. The heroes (a trio of aspiring hip-hop performers) read Leprechauns for Dummies and come up with a plan to destroy the Leprechaun by getting him to smoke a joint laced with clover. But all it really does is make him fall asleep. They go to a church to find sanctuary, but (as inevitably proves to be the case in today’s horror films) God is of no assistance.
*. Even the kills are mostly elided. There are only a couple of torsos bursting open for gore. Ice-T gets above-the-line billing as the rap promoter Mack Daddy. The kids wear droopy pants and ball caps and call each other “nigga” a lot. There’s a blind woman introduced for . . . comic relief? I wasn’t sure. Just a terrible movie. Perhaps not quite as bad as Leprechaun 4, but that’s the very best I can say for it. And that is low praise indeed.
*. Look, it’s clear these movies were never meant to be anything but cheap trash, but they did at least have some budget to work with here, and with Davis back as the Leprechaun they should have been able to come up with something better than this. But I really don’t know if, at this point, they were even trying.