LEPRECHAUN RETURNS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, NOT THAT IT MATTERS

Following the lead of the 2018 Halloween, which positioned itself as a Forty Years Later sequel to the original Carpenter film and pretended all those sequels with Danielle Harris and Busta Rhymes never happened, this latest instalment of the not-even-a-good-idea-at-the-time horror comedy franchise is actually Leprechaun 2, rewriting genre history to get rid of Leprechaun In The Hood and Leprechaun In Vegas and Leprechaun Goes To Sainsburys. For whatever reason, they couldn't get Jennifer Aniston back, so the film reduces her character to a post-mortem voiceover by somebody else and focusses instead on her daughter going back to the same old house Twenty Five Years Later for very flimsy reasons.

Except it's not the same old house: it's now being put together as a green, carbon-neutral eco-project by local students, with solar panels, a well, goats and specially designed gardens. Unfortunately, said students are the usual teen horror mixture of hateful halfwitted hotties and despicable sex-and-beer fratboy morons, leaving you on the side of the newly resurrected Leprechaun (now played by Linden Porco instead of Warwick Davis who has apparently backed away from horror films now) as he hacks his way through them, nowhere near swiftly enough, looking for his gold...

But despite all the welcome lashings of gore and gloop, and effects work that looks more physical that digital, Leprechaun Returns really isn't very good. The Oirish rhyming couplets gimmick only goes so far, all the characters are either tiresome or actively unpleasant, and the film seems to fall into that horror comedy chasm between graphically horrible and verbally stupid: there seems to be very little cleverness or wit involved. I gave up on the original series ten minutes into the first Hood, and while 2014's Leprechaun: Origins is a substantial step up from Leprechaun 4: In Space, this is several steps further down and absolutely not worth watching. Shot in South Africa.

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