﻿Hey guys, I’m Kya,
and with St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner,
it’s time for ‘How to Kill’ to tackle our first mythological creature:
Sweetie, it's me, it's me...
The Leprechaun! I'm the Leprechaun!
The naughty little elfs are notorious for hoarding gold,
cleaning shoes,
and rotting the teeth of marshmallow-loving children across the world.
Now, there hasn’t been a real-life Leprechaun sighting since 2006,
This amateur sketch resembles what many of you say the Leprechaun looks like.
but that’s okay, because we’re not just talking any Leprechaun,
we’re talking about the horror movie icon that packs the brutality of Jason Voorhees,
and the sass of Freddy Krueger into one compact package.
Now that was fun! Ha ha!
You better hope the luck of the Irish is with you, because today, we’re gonna tell you
How to Kill the Leprechaun
We first met Warwick Davis’s iconic Irishman in 1993’s ‘Leprechaun,’
which also taught us the golden rule, literally.
Don’t mess with the Leprechaun’s gold.
Try as they will, and try as they might,
who steals me gold, won't live through the night!
Dan O’Grady learned that the hard way.
He returns from a trip to Ireland with a pot of pilfered gold,
but his wife is understandably skeptical when he says he stole it from a Leprechaun,
at least until a rhyming little monster man dressed in green pushes her down the stairs.
The Leprechaun followed O’Grady home to North Dakota,
and he’s not going back to the Emerald Isle until Dan returns every karat of his precious pot.
Luckily, the Irish native O’Grady knows the Leprechaun’s secret weakness:
A Four Leaf Clover
After Dan pumps the Leprechaun full of lead,
the power of the plant keeps him sealed in a crate,
but sadly, he suffers a stroke before he can torch it.
Ten years later, a new family moves to the farm,
Including Jennifer Aniston in her very first movie role.
Jen and her friends,
the other kid from ‘Rookie of the Year’ and Francis from ‘Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,’
I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I infinity?
No, I'm not, you are!
accidentally unleash the Leprechaun,
who hunts down our heroes using a variety of vehicles.
We’re talking tricycles,
go-karts,
wheelchairs...
even a pogo stick is a deadly weapon in the Leprechaun’s little hands.
NOOO!!!
This old Lep, he played one, he played pogo on his lung!
Teach you to steal me gold!
Yeah, I can't even get mad at him, he was robbed. He's just protecting his rights.
He'll bounce back in no time!
Eventually, Jen finds O’Grady and learns the secret to slaying the sprite,
so while he’s busy ripping the last coin out of Francis’ belly,
they take a page out of Beverly Marsh’s playbook and shoot a clover into his mouth with a slingshot.
Forget you, Lucky Charms!
He starts melting into muck,
Giving them the perfect opportunity to blow him back to begorra.
That’s all well and good,
but what if you can’t find a four-leaf clover?
Well, lucky for you, the Leprechaun has a much more readily available weakness,
literally the most common element on Earth, in fact,
I’m talking about
Iron.
When the Leprechaun returns in the sequel,
he’s not just looking for gold,
he’s looking for love.
It's a special birthday for a Leprechaun! I'm 1,000 years old!
Tonight, I can claim me bride!
Every 1,000 years, the Leprechaun can claim a bride,
provided she sneezes three times and nobody says ‘God bless you.’
God bless you, my child.
Always say God bless you, thank you, please, and you're welcome. It saves lives.
Something tells me you won’t find that in any books on Celtic folklore,
but it still makes more sense than the curse of Thorn.
[DONALD PLEASANCE SCREAMING]
The first movie was a little light on the kills,
but the sequel has some excellent deaths,
like when he rips a pot of gold out of this guy’s stomach,
[SCREAMS]
and tricks some poor sucker into making out with a lawnmower.
It's always awkward to make out with lawnmovers, they never call you back.
That's not a good joke!
He also gets completely wasted at a St. Patty’s Day party,
and even though he’s way over the legal limit,
we get even more go-kart carnage.
Because nothing says spine-tingling terror like a Leprechaun in a little bitty car.
Our heroes manage to fake-out the monstrous munchkin with a chocolate coin,
and impale him with a wrought-iron crowbar.
Unlike the sneezing thing,
iron is a well-known countermeasure for all kinds of supernatural beings.
It’s one of the reasons horseshoes are considered so lucky,
and when you introduce it to a Leprechaun’s insides,
they go boom in a big way.
‘Leprechaun 3’ doesn’t bother to explain how he comes back from total annihilation,
he just shows up as a stone statue in a Vegas pawn shop.
Sin City is the perfect setting for the leprechaun’s brand of mischief and mayhem,
but it ends all too soon thanks to some unfortunate
Smelting
The Leprechaun will stop at nothing to get his money right,
he’ll conjure up a deadly sex robot,
some killer cosmetic surgery,
and saw a magician in half to get his gold back.
The movie even adds a new power to the Leprechaun’s arbitrary arsenal,
after he bites our hero Scott, he starts to morph into a horrifying Were-Leprechaun,
complete with cheesy accent.
What a lovely treat for a foine lad like me-self!
Why am I talking like this?
His true love snaps him out of it just long enough to melt down the magic gold with a flamethrower,
incinerating the Leprechaun at the same time.
[LEPRECHAUN SCREAMS]
‘Leprechaun 3’ was the first film in the series to go direct-to-video,
and once you’ve made that leap, there’s only one more frontier for your franchise to conquer:
Space.
SPAAACE!!!
And like so many horror icons before him,
this time the Leprechaun is dispatched by
A Big Bang
We find the Leprechaun on a distant planet in 2096,
courting an alien princess in an attempt to become king.
Some space marines spoil the fun and shred him with a grenade,
and when a soldier pees on the corpse to celebrate,
the Leprechaun’s essence travels upstream into his penis.
These horror movies are literally just teaching you good manners.
Don't pee on things, say 'bless you,' and don't steal!
Then he just waits in the urinary tract until he emerges fully-formed on a spaceship full of victims.
What'd I do?!
Kowalski, my God, what is this?!
Let that be a lesson to ye, lad! Always wear a prophylactic!
By this point, the franchise has evolved into a full-blown comedy,
with carnage straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon.
By the end, the Leprechaun is grown to massive size by a bigulator ray,
cast out into the void of space,
and blown to smithereens,
but not before leaving our heroes with one final salute.
So now that our greedy little goblin has been killed in the cosmos,
where could the franchise possibly go next?
Spring Break? Burning Man?
I wish.
Instead, the next two entries take a not-so-great detour:
‘Leprechaun in the Hood’ and ‘Back 2 tha Hood.’
Now, as much as I love the Leprechaun,
These movies aren’t great.
But to be fair most of the movies that came out during that time just don’t hold up.
The racism and homophobia is real guys.
Not even Ice-T and a four-leaf clover joint can save the first one,
but we can skip right over it, because the Leprechaun actually survives,
he even does a rap at the end as the credits roll.
Lep in the hood, come to do no good, Lep in the hood, come to do no good!
As for ‘Back 2 tha Hood,’
there’s only two things you need to know:
a man gets impaled by a bong,
which is just sad because bongs should bring people together not, y’know, kill them.
And two,
the Leprechaun dies after our heroes hit him with some clover-coated bullets,
toss him in an incinerator,
and drop him off a roof into some
Wet Cement,
where he’s presumably buried to this day.
Sadly, that’s the last time we ever see the classic Leprechaun.
I wish he’d gone out on a better note,
but we’re still not done,
because we’ve come to my least favorite part of every ‘How to Kill,’
the shitty reboot.
2014’s ‘Leprechaun: Origins’ has almost nothing to do with the “classic,”
and I use that term as loosely as possible,
Leprechaun series.
The titular creature is now a snarling, little lizard thing,
who can’t even talk, let alone rhyme.
It makes sense when you consider that WWE Films produced ‘Origins,’
and they replaced Warwick Davis with wrestler Dylan Postl,
who played a leprechaun named Hornswoggle that lived under the ring.
Get away from here! What the hell is that? What is it?!
Well, it's got the shillelagh, whatever the hell it is!
He might be a WWE Superstar,
but he’s no Wickett W. Warrick,
and he gets easily dispatched by a simple
Decapitation
Forget you, Lucky Charms!
Warwick Davis was the heart and soul of this franchise.
He is the Leprechaun, just like Robert Englund is Freddy Krueger.
And we all know how well replacing him turned out.
It’s doubtful that Davis will ever return to the series,
but that’s no reason to throw caution to the wind.
It’s not rocket science people,
just stay away from gold that isn’t yours!
And if you just can’t keep your claws off it,
then I’ll leave you with a traditional Irish saying:
May you be in heaven half an hour,
before the devil knows you’re dead.