Leprechaun III

(1995) *1/2

Ugh. They made six of these fucking things?

Seriously, this shit isn't funny anymore. Any kitsch fun I got from the first movie is gone, gone, gone. For the last two movies, I started checking my watch by the time I hit the 40 minute mark. You know how when you're in the middle of finals week and you're procrastinating and all of a sudden, you feel compelled to make sure your apartment is clean and all your laundry is done? Compress all of that angst into an hour and a half and you'd still be having more fun in that span than this movie could ever provide.

This one is set in Las Vegas. The story opens in a pawnshop, where the Leprechaun is lugged in in statue form. The amulet around his neck, keeping him in stasis, is removed and he goes on a tear, beating the shit out of the pawn store owner.

Across the street, meanwhile, an incoming college freshman is losing his entire tuition check at roulette. He goes to pawn his watch at the pawn store and discovers the body of the store owner. He phones the police and, while hanging around the store for them to show up, he discovers a gold coin the Leprechaun left behind in the initial melee. Wishing himself into the casino and on a winning streak, he suddenly finds himself there, up over $100K.

Later, in his hotel room, he's attacked by the little dude and, before tossing him out of a sixth story window (definitely the best thing that's happened in this entire series), he's bitten on the arm, his blood mingling with the Leprechaun's.

He begins to alternate between two states, one human, one a tad leprechaun-y. In this state, his skin gets mottled, his sideburns grow out, he develops a craving for potatoes, and, in a move that made me completely hate my entire life, he starts talking in limericks. As if Warwick Davis's stupid 4th grade rhymes weren't bad enough, he's passing on the shitty verse virus to new carriers.

The Leprechaun movies write their own rulebooks as they go along, always with the Leprechaun saying, "Haven't you read the lore?" or some other such mockery. No, jerkface, because the only lore which would have told us that stupid arbitrary rule you just enforced are these very movies. You could just as well ask, "haven't you seen this movie before?" Of course, the answer would come back, YES -- we saw it in Leprechauns 1 and 2 and it was just as stupid and arbitrary then.

I hate myself and I hate all of you. I feel like the nerdy kid in the after school special that becomes a crack addict because the guy on the football team called him a wimp.