“Once you’ve gone to space, can you really go back to the hood?
I think there’s been one good horror movie made in the hood, and that’s the original Candyman.
Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror was bad enough that it’s one of the few movies where I get distracted thinking about the environmental toll of packaging and distributing it.
Candyman New Candyman didn’t really take place in the hood, it was about THE HORRORS OF GENTRIFICATION.
Now, hold on a second, I just looked up “horror movies in the hood,” was given a list of “Black horror movies,” and Beloved is on there…I mean, I read the book, there IS a ghost. But isn’t that a little like calling Harry Potter a horror movie? Because there are ghosts in that shit!
ALSO: Apparently they were kicking around the idea of Candyman Versus Leprechaun sometime not too long after Leprechaun in the Hood. I guess what trainwrecked that was Tony Todd’s “flat out refusal” to do it, which…fair. It makes no sense for Candyman and Leprechaun to duke it out, other than both of them being in series that had a pretty great first outing that didn’t work out so hot in sequels.
I mean, Tony Todd is right, but also, he was in Candyman 3, which starred a Baywatch babe being very much a Baywatch babe, so…maybe the respect for the integrity of the character is a bit misplaced.
Leprechaun in the Hood is one of those movies that barely counts as a movie. There are scenes that seem to be in there for no reason other than spooling out the run time, which is silly because it was released direct-to-video, and believe me, nobody would be complaining if this was 20 minutes shorter.
Among the things that make this movie sound better than it is: Ice-T plays Ice-T and shares a joint with the Leprechaun, there is a full-body burn stunt done by the Leprechaun, which MUST have been done by a little person stunt person because there’s no fucking way you could do that with a kid in the costume, and Coolio makes a wordless cameo, just him standing in the back of a room, watching a rap group perform, and someone goes, “Yo, that’s Coolio!”
Perhaps strangest of all, at one point our heroes sneak into the Leprechaun’s lair dressed as women because the rumor is that he’s bringing babes up to his place and banging them to death.
I figured we’d follow our heroes up and find out that the Leprechaun was, I don’t know, turning them into gold? Doing some kind of rainbow thing?
Nope! The Leprechaun is, nightly, banging woman until they literally die from it. This is the only assumption the viewer is left to make.
It FEELS like something they were going to do more with, but maybe…you know what? Why even bother speculating? It happened, it’s there, there’s nothing I can do about it.
What really trainwrecks this movie is that it’s not good, and it’s also not so bad that it’s good. It’s just a bunch of scenes cut together where nothing really happens, and at times it feels like the scenes all got jumbled up and whoever was editing it was like, “Eh, fuck it. It’s AS good as the intended cut.”
For that experience, I recommend Leprechaun in Space. It’s a bit of a slog here and there, but it’s a movie with at least a little enthusiasm behind it.
I was prepared to come here and tell people that they shouldn’t worry too much about offensive stereotypes in this movie, because given the title, you’d think we were headed that direction. But honestly, I don’t want to remove reasons for NOT watching this movie. Whatever reason you select for NOT watching this one, it’s the right one.
All that said: As long as Warwick Davis is getting paid for these, I’m glad to see him. He does a good job, as always, and his Leprechaun cackle did bring a shimmer to an otherwise dull movie.”