Leprechaun In The Hood (2000)

Bushwick Bill was born to play this role.

Leprechaun In The Hood tells the authentic Irish legend of the leprechaun in a modern, urban setting. You know how it goes: Steal a leprechaun's gold, and he chases you in his little buckled shoes. Play a leprechaun's flute and you get a hit rap record. Make a movie with Ice T and Warwick Davis getting top billing and your movie will go straight to dvd.

Three wannabe rappers steal a music mogul's pot of gold (previously stolen from the Leprechaun) and his magic flute (ditto) and use the flute as he did - to become hip hop stars. Believe it or not, this concept makes more sense than most of the rest of the movie.

Naturally, the Leprechaun himself hunts for the thieves and kills everybody who had any contact with his stolen gold. You would think that this would be a perfect opportunity for some gory, creative, possibly pun-based death scenes. This is the fifth movie in a series about a green-clad three-foot-tall Irish killing machine. Subtlety need not apply.

But no. For the most part, all we get are bizarre offscreen killings where the Leprechaun is merely listening to the victim dying, just like we are.  I mean, for a couple of them you can't even be sure if the victim was dying at all, much less how. Very cheap, lazy, and odd. The deaths are mostly bloodless until the Leprechaun blows a guy's heart through his chest in a bloody, lumpy mess. That one kinda comes out of nowhere, considering the kills prior to it, so it works. But that's about the height that this movie hits.

The Leprechaun is definitely a fourth-tier evil slasher villain, falling way behind the likes of Freddy, Jason, or Pinhead.  Hell, he even takes a backseat to Chucky (and they're about the same size.) I confess I haven't seen the first four of these movies, but I have a hard time believing he ever had any real scare power. Shuffling his way through this one in his little suit, hat, and curly buckled shoes, with his lines mostly consisting of poorly written rhyming couplets (an attempt at rapping, I guess), he is not scary in the least.

The leads are likable enough louts, and more-or-less believable rappers (lame as their songs are), but they can't overcome the writing.  The movie has a comic energy like a lesser Friday movie, but it can't keep the pacing up in the last 30 minutes or so. 

Leprechaun In The Hood is stupid, senseless, and offensive, the horror aspects basically never work, and the jokes fall flat more often than not.  But somehow it's still entertaining, especially if you're watching with a group on a bad movie night.

Stay through the credits for "Da Lep's" jaw-droppingly bad, Fruity Pebbles-esque rap performance.  This movie is proof that there are not nearly enough rolls for little people in Hollywood and even the most well-known of these actors have to do some terrible movies to keep working.