Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

(1998)

I can’t. I just can’t be kind to this one. I’m sorry. I could barely pay attention to it. It was terrifying!

IMDb has this listed as an adventure/fantasy/drama/family film. Google has it listed as Family/Horror.

FAMILY/HORROR!!! A better description of this film there could NOT be!!! The leprechaun, Finn Regan McCool, is supposed to be a fun quirky character but I tell you he is nightmare fuel!

Mick “Big Mick” Walter is the little actor who plays Finn. He seems like a fun guy and much younger than the makeup made him appear on screen. For whatever reason they (gnomes) put him in this weird pale makeup that just turned him into a red-haired bushy-eyebrowed ghoul! I seriously could not look directly at him.

David Warner opens this film with a summoning scene. Foolishly, he summons a banshee who immediately starts upstaging him. Whoopsie!

I feel bad saying this because I imagine the person who did the makeup for this film is probably the director’s grandma who went to beauty school in the 1920s  and “knows everything about makeup” and she’s happy to help her director grandson with his cute little moving-picture film project but she sucks!

Seriously, the banshee looks like a film star from the 20s where they had to figure out what colors looked good in black and white so everyone basically is painted up like a clown.

She looks like she got her face painted at a fundraiser carnival where the volunteers are art students who are failing their classes but still tell people they’re art majors. Homer Simpson’s make up gun did better makeup even on the “Whore” setting.

It’s your standard “Dad’s bewitched by the banshee soon-to-be stepmom but no one believes the kids” plot. Finn Regan McCool to the rescue! Also the banshee wants to flood the valley and kill the leprechaun or steal his gold. Or something. I do not care!

Oh, and get this! You know what happens when a leprechaun loses his gold? He gets bigger and bigger and BIGGER until he explodes! I’m not making this up. Someone else made it up. I assumed this explanation was a “Chekhov’s gun” but alas, no leprechauns were exploded in the making of this film.

I suppose the explanation did pay off in suspense later as the leprechaun started to grow much much bigger, bereft of his gold as he was. Unfortunately for the sake of my interest and likely anyone else who sat through this, we are left unsatisfied. Boo!

It’s called The Last Leprechaun. Now I’m more interested in what happened to the second to last leprechaun. Did HE explode? Lame.

Boxart!