by Tim May
Leapin’ Leprechauns is one of the lesser known titles in Charles Band’s incredibly successful division of Full Moon Pictures, Moonbeam Entertainment! Most well known for the Prehysteria! trilogy, the label was geared at children. Band described the venture in a 2005 interview, “My idea from day one was: let’s make, at a budget, Disney-esque films, like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or something like that which tapped into the genre that I enjoy and let’s have the leads be boys and girls somewhere around 11, 12, 13.” I never really cared much about Honey I Shrunk the Kids when I was young, but Leapin’ Leprechauns makes it look like Back to the Future.
The film’s credits inform us that the film is based on an original idea by Charles Band. Apparently this original idea was…dude walks around with a suitcase of leprechauns. Crazy old man Michael Dennehy lives on a magical piece of land in Ireland with fairies and leprechauns and shit. He runs tours of his land and brings joy to all the children, but his ungrateful son knows he’ll inherit the land and wants to build an amusement park on the grounds. I’m sure that will make all the children of Ireland suicidal. Dennehy travels to America to convince his son to change his mind, packing along a suitcase full of shit eating leprechauns to scare the shit out of him. Problem is, the leprechauns and fairies are invisible if you don’t belieeeeve in them. Of fucking course. After the fairies put his son through one hell after another, Dennehy finally convinces him that they’re real, and the amusement park is called off. Of fucking course.
In one particularly hilarious sequence, the leprechauns are telekinetically controlling Dennehy’s grandchildren in a playground, working their ridiculous magic simply by waving their arms in seemingly random patterns.
The film was directed by Ted Nicolaou, a perennial favorite of Band’s, having directed the entire Subspecies series, the popular Moonbeam film Dragonworld, and most recently, Puppetmaster Vs. Demonic Toys. It looks more competently made than most Full Moon movies, but it’s still a boring pile of shit, more concerned with aping bad early ’90s Disney movies than actually entertaining children.
Postscript: There was sequel to this film called Spellbreaker: Secret of the Leprechauns. Don’t expect a review anytime soon.