Being out on medical leave and stuck at home recovering from surgery last week has left me with plenty of time – and unfortunately, not much else to do – so I’ve been using up a lot of streaming services. The more restless I've become, the worse my movie selections have been, and last night, regrettably, I ended up watching something called Leprechaun Returns. It’s branded as a SyFy exclusive, which immediately set my expectations pretty low, but I was in the mood for some gore, so… Basically, it wasn't good. What made it even more disappointing was that it felt like a real waste of potential. There were a few moments that were genuinely entertaining or at least mildly amusing, but the entire film suffered from really poor writing and unremarkable performances. The plot could easily be summarized in just a few paragraphs; it’s very thin, though I suppose that's acceptable for this type of movie. You get all the standard characters: the attractive woman, the foolish, hard-drinking woman, some guys who seem to think about nothing but sex, and so on. This film also included an unbelievably naive environmentalist who couldn’t act and just became irritating. The female lead is probably the only character that seemed remotely normal. Then there's the Leprechaun himself, and he’s really the only reason to watch this movie. He was actually pretty great; a perfect fit for a horror/comedy. However, everything else was mostly terrible. There was constant lecturing from the eco-zealot about needing to work, and endless drinking by the silly woman. I stopped counting how many times the attractive woman insisted she wouldn’t sleep with one of the guys, only to then do exactly that. Of course, there were also those predictable moments of sheer stupidity that only a truly awful Hollywood writer could come up with. Like the guy who just stood there watching a drone approach him for minutes on end – a drone capable of slicing through someone’s throat and neck with its propellers, no less. That just added to the film's absurdity. There were some satisfying moments, though. For example, when the foolish woman, while intoxicated, realized that “not lay a hand on you” isn’t the same as “not kill you.” And, as I mentioned earlier, many of the scenes featuring the Leprechaun were quite funny. It's actually a shame because with better writing this could have been a decent, maybe even good, comedy/horror film. Now it will just join the ever-growing pile of low-quality SyFy movies.

Source on TMDB