A Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) has his gold stolen and he is stuck in a crate for ten years due to the power of a four leaf clover. After Tory Reding (Jennifer Aniston) and her father move into the house, a childlike house painter frees the Leprechaun who will kill everyone between him and his gold.
This is a kids’ movie, something Disney would have made in the sixties, with some gore added. Replace the murders with wacky confinement scenes (you know, knock out someone with a bowling pin, duck tape another to a table) and you’ve got a really drab G-rated flick. The characters are family-fare regulars: an L.A. girl who needs to learn that there’s more to the world than shopping, her back-to-nature father, a smartass kid who acts thirty, his mentally challenged, overweight adult friend, and the hunky leader of the house painting squad. You know from the start that nothing bad could happen to these folks. They run around doing kooky things: painting the house red and blue, falling off a ladder and spilling paint on themselves, swallowing a coin. It’s comedy for eight-year-olds. The Leprechaun would be the perfect children’s movie villain (if he’d stop biting and bouncing on people with a pogo stick). Warwick, the best part of the film, is an amusing green fey, but he doesn’t have enough to do. He kills, shouts for his gold, and cleans shoes (the shoe cleaning bit is pretty funny). Jennifer Aniston is nothing special here, and is only noticeable because of the fame she would gain in following years.
No worse than a majority of Slashers, Leprechaun is also no better.