Guys, there’s something that I need to tell you and I can’t keep it secret anymore. I love the Leprechaun series. Like…love the Leprechaun series. I was watching the Leprechaun movies before I had seen classics like Halloween or The Exorcist. No joke, Leprechaun 3 is one of my favorite horror films.  I even watched the stupendously terrible ones where they take place “in da hood”. Now, imagine my surprise at seeing that there was a new entry in the series and I hadn’t heard about it. Now imagine my creeping horror at seeing that there was no Warwick Davis, the movie was made by WWE Studios, and the villain is now just a regular old monster instead of an weirdly demonic leprechaun. But hey, I’ll give it a shot. How bad can it be?

Our story takes place in Ireland within a little village off the beaten path. Two vacationing couples are looking to spend some time and a local suggests they take a day hike out to a cave that has some historically significant carvings. They get set up in a cabin but then when they go to investigate a noise that night, they find themselves locked in with some creature attempting to get at them. It turns out that they have been set up as a sacrifice for the leprechaun that they had angered by taking its gold. Now the four need to not only try to avoid the bloodthirsty creature trying to kill them but also the locals that hope sacrificing them will appease the beast.

So the first big strike against this movie is the whole no Warwick Davis thing. They apparently didn’t even ask him to be in it as a side character or something. Fine, maybe they don’t want to remind everyone of the other films but that brings me to the main complaint. Why would you take the franchise and turn the leprechaun into a snarling monster? WWE even had their wrestler, Dylan Postl, play the role and he was a standard type leprechaun as his stage persona. You just completely wasted the tie in to your own stupid property by completely ignoring both the original movies and your own wrestler’s background. You honestly didn’t even need to put him in the monster makeup since the movie will literally go out of focus every time it is on screen and the leprechaun does nothing aside from claw or bite at people.

Putting the other movies aside and just judging it on its own, it still ends up being kind of bland. The fact that the leprechaun has no supernatural powers and there is no given rules for who or why he attacks, it makes it so that it might as well be about an angry animal. It appears to want gold but doesn’t just go after that instead of the people and it seems to have a fear of/aversion to bright light and yet the very first scene is it chasing someone down in broad daylight. We also continually see things from the leprechaun’s eyes and it has some kind of weird Predator vision but instead of it being thermal it’s just humans look gold. Just like the camera going blurry when the leprechaun is on screen, this “leprechaun vision” serves no purpose other than to make watching what is going on that much more annoying.

If they wanted to reboot the Leprechaun series and take it in a more serious direction, they definitely could have done better than this. Also, calling it “Origins” makes it seem like it’s going to be about the events leading to the first movie but actually has no connection to the rest. I give the movie a 1.5 out of 5 and probably would have gone lower if I wasn’t trying my damndest to be impartial about it (and failing).

Favorite thing in the movie: One of the people gets killed by an axe to the face in a scene that feels much more reminiscent of the type of thing you’d see in the other movies.

Least favorite thing: The leprechaun itself. I’ve never seen a rebooted character be this unrecognizable from what it was.