Leprechaun: Origins

This is hands down the worst Leprechaun movie, and it's also one of the worst remakes. That's a twofer, right there. As much as we all loved the Leprechaun series and horror remakes, that's saying something. Do yourself a service and watch something else—watch the 1998 Psycho remake. At least that one borrowed from the source material.

It doesn't feel at all like a Leprechaun movie. I don't know anything about wrestling, but when I heard that someone else was going to don the role of the title character, a role that Warwick Davis made infamous, I figured they were just going to redesign the character and feed him all of Davis's lines. Maybe they'd even throw in a few rhymes here and there.

Well, there was absolutely no reason why they needed a wrestling star to play this character, because the Leprechaun in this movie isn't a character. He's a monster. Yeah, he's a guy in a rubber suit, hopping around like Gollum from Lord of the Rings and growling like some disturbed beast. He has no dialogue, and he doesn't even resemble what a leprechaun is supposed to look like. He looks like kind of a decrepit Pumpkinhead.

They must have known early on that it was a terrible choice, because whenever you see the creature, he's all blurry. What, did they just smear Vaseline over the camera lens? And they don't do this just for certain scenes—it's every time they show us the monster. He has a fair amount of screen time, but they rob us of every potential scary moment because you can never see the damn thing. It also doesn't help that most of the time, they do these weird POV shots, and apparently the Leprechaun possesses infrared sight, like the Predator.

That brings me to my second point: the editing and all the shaky cam. I honestly had no idea what was going on during the whole movie. The monster just pops out of nowhere, tries to eat the main characters, and then—I don't know, it's all over the place. Rinse and repeat. The characters run back and forth into this one cabin in the woods, never accomplishing anything. Every time they go back, someone else dies. It's a terrible paint-by-the-numbers set-up, and again, because they feel the need to make the picture blurry whenever the monster shows up, we can never tell what's going on.

It doesn't matter anyway, because I just didn't give two farts about the characters. That's very common in modern slasher movies. Since when did they make this rule that characters don't need personality in horror movies? Is it really that hard to give characters some personality traits? I know you spend a little more money on ink, but come on? Slashers used to be fun. But here, I cared even less about the protagonists. They just didn't have anything interesting to say. I couldn't even hate any of the characters. Lately, it seems to be a fad with horror movies—there has to be at least one blatant dickhead for the audience to hate. But here, everyone's just kind of there, enjoying the scenery until the Leprechaun arrives. There's no reason to cheer for anyone, there's no reason to hate anyone. It's the most severe case of bland I can think of, and I sat through eleven Puppet Master movies—I know what I'm talking about.

The only connection this movie has at all with any of the earlier films is that the surviving character at the end actually says, "Fuck you, Lucky Charms." I was actually surprised to hear it, because after watching this lifeless piece of crap, I was beginning to wonder if the filmmakers just didn't bother with watching any of the prior movies. Not that they would have a lot to look forward to, but that's beside the point.

I think it's obvious, I hated this movie. And to add insult to injury, they gave us twelve minutes of credits. Twelve. Frickin'. Minutes. The actual move is only an hour 18 minutes. Pay no attention to the 90 minute runtime. The last twelve minutes are purely credits. And no, there weren't a lot of people who worked on it…they just felt the need to give us boring glimpses of movie stills in between showing us the names of people who would go on to become raging alcoholics after making this movie.

This was a total waste of time, an abomination of movie-making proportions, and it needs to be outlawed in at least thirty countries, including this one. I think I found a contender for worst movie sequel of all time. Leprechaun: Origins has the potential to give me cancer. Steer clear, because there's no cure. The only remedy is to just forget it ever happened.

I thought long and hard about adding this review... After all, I'd be adding nothing that others had not already said: no mythology, no fun, no seeing the creature, poor script, etc. I mean, it says "A horror icon is reborn", and even the title is misleading, "Leprechaun: Origins". With a name like that, you'd think it was a prequel...but nope, all you really get it a movie that feels like it began as a spec script and was slightly tweaked to try and fit the Leprechaun series...which it doesn't. What baffles me is that this is as far from a Leprechaun movie as you can get. No one really expected these movies to be scary, and a large part of their charm was the goofy nature of the films. That's what we wanted to see: a wisecracking midget that would just as soon kill you, and make fun while he did it.

So why am I writing this? My hope, dim as it may be, is that those in charge would read these reviews and think twice before "tweaking" something that didn't need it. There's obviously a desire from people to see these types of films, and there's nothing wrong with that. By changing the nature of the character from wisecracking villain to grunting animal you kill what made it fun in the first place. I honestly haven't been as confused or let down by a movie in a long time.

So there it is, my plea, sent to the Interwebs to anyone that can help.

They took the name "Leprechaun" only so they can sell this, cause believe me, it has almost nothing to do with it. Maybe the mythological beast, but, except the gold thing, which also was very, very bad treated, this movie was down right bad!

So lets see: the acting was OK, I approve to the characters, the Leprechaun had a terrible design, way too look alike "Creep" or "Underground", the habits of the creature were NOT explored properly, and the plot is extremely poor. I will not recommend this one as a "Leprechaun" movie, but as a stand alone, it will go hand in hand with "Animal" (2014) per example, something to pass 90 minutes. Again tho, I am seriously disappointed, I will grade it 4, cause it doesn't even deserve a 5, an above good horror. "Leprechaun: Origins" is not what it seems, what you'd expect or desire, has almost to nothing to do with what you once saw. Look at "Evil Dead", well the remake still had some connections to the first, went the darker path, to which I approve, but maintained some bounds. This one on the other hands, goes solo from start to finish and fails miserably.

"Leprechaun: Origins" or how to waste money and a serious potential. You have been warned, probably quite sure you will still desire to see it, just as I did, but after doing so, please warn people. It almost ruins the first series to be honest. Amazing how bad it is.

Cheers!

VERY disappointing. I'm a very HUGE Leprechaun fan. I love the Warwick movies. I was excited for it to be scary again. It wasn't, in fact the older ones are scarier.

The Leprechaun doesn't speak, just makes animal sounds and growls. You NEVER see a full shot of the Leprechaun. Its not even shown a lot. I don't see why they even needed an actor for the Leprechaun? If you told me it was CGI and a fake puppet.. I would believe it. Hornswoggle had really no acting opportunity here. Who ever was in charge of creating a leprechaun did a LAZY BORING UNCREATIVE job. Its like the Descent meets vampire. I'd rather have a talking, rhyming Leprechaun then one who just growls.

I expected more. It seems like SYFY put this together. Just make Leprechaun 7 with Warwick! This should have been a stand alone killer Leprechaun film by WWE. It should have never been in the remake category.

Only one kill was really fun and shocking, I jumped. I give it a 4 on IMDb - C level grade wise.

Going in to watch this movie the ratings were indeed alarming, at 3.3 one could hardly expect a masterpiece I knew that.

I did think that possibly the low ratings could be due to die hard fans of the leprechaun series being angry with the lack of Warwick Davis and the movie not staying true the story.

And while that is all true, the movie is just completely different in all aspects of the original franchise

Now, I'm not gonna say that the Leprechaun series is a classic, or even good for that matter, they kinda aren't, but one thing that they always manage to do is entertain... This one does not

And while the Leprechaun series playfully played with the silliness of the plot and at many times would be better viewed as a comedy than a horror, the whole comedy aspect is totally disregarded in this "reboot" it takes itself and it's characters way too seriously and that definitely stands in it's way from making this enjoyable

The leprechaun as a character is also completely changed, while Warwick Davis was a witty green faced leprechaun in the original movies, the new Leprechaun can't even speak and he looks more like an alien than the Leprechaun we know and love

He's also a lot taller than the original, the bio says he's 4.4 but he looks average-sized tbh in the movie

The first 45 minutes is bearable but the last 35 minutes is almost exclusive to the cast running back and forward in the woods

On top of that while it's supposed to take place in Ireland, it's filmed in Canada with American and Canadian actors with bad Irish accents

There's really not much good to say about this movie, if anything, even if you look beyond the fact that it's a reboot and watch it as a standalone movie it's still a crappy movie