171) Leprechaun in the Hood (2000)

Halloween 2023's Somehow Leprechauns are Scary... Extravaganza!  (Part 5) 

"Look at all these glittering goods - I've got more loot than Tiger Woods!"

Director

Rob Spera

Cast
Warwick Davis - Lubdan the Leprechaun
Ice-T - Mack Daddy

Anthony Montgomery - Postmaster P. 
Rashaan Nall - Stray Bullet
Red Grant - Butch
Dan Martin - Jackie Dee Redding
Lobo Sebastian - Fontaine Rivera
Ivory Ocean - Rev. Hanson
Coolio - Himself
Barima McKnight - Slug
Jack Ong - Chow Yung Pi

I can't believe I'm saying this but "Leprechaun in the Hood" (aka "Leprechaun 5") might be better than the previous three sequel movies. That doesn't mean I think it's a good movie. I'm just saying it's an improvement. It has more of a "creature feature" feel to it than the previous "Leprechaun" movies, all things considered. The other sequels are just goofy comedies with some "horror" simply to keep the franchise within the boundaries of the genre. 

This time, Lubdan the Leprechaun finds himself in "the hood." That "hood" is in Los Angeles. There's a lot of hoods down there, evidently. And he's been to L.A. before in part two. So, he should know his way around.  

The movie starts in the 1970s as these two guys, Mack Daddy O'Nasses (Ice-T) and Slug (Barima McKnight), find a hidden chamber someplace underground. Maybe it's under the hood? I don't know.

Inside, they find a solid stone leprechaun statue with that same amulet from part three around his neck that turns him to stone. 

His pot of gold is next to him which is obviously what Mack and Slug are looking for. 

Mack Daddy takes a gold flute sitting on top of the pot of gold. And Slug takes the medallion off the statue's neck. 

When he does, Lubdan returns to life and kills Slug with his own hair pick.

Mack Daddy and Lubdan start to fight. During their scuffle, the amulet is flung into the air and lands around Lubdan's neck turning him back to stone.  

Twenty years go by. Novice rappers, Postmaster P. (Anthony Montgomery), Stray Bullet (Rashaan Nall) and Butch (Red Grant) audition at a club with hopes of heading to Las Vegas to perform and make it big as artists. Unfortunately, their speakers explode during their performance. 

So, they try pawing a guitar with a fake Jimi Hendrix signature to help pay for a new speaker, but no one's fooled by it. 

Mack Daddy stumbles across these three and decides to give them a meeting to see how good they are.  

Postmaster P tells him they want to write tunes that don't promote violence, drugs. and all that. 

Mack thinks that's "whack" as he puts it, and tells them their music needs to be more violent and gritty. So, he kicks them out of his office. 

The three of them decide to inflict revenge on Mack for humiliating them. So, they break into his office and rob it later that night. 

As they ransack his office, Mack walks in on them. Postmaster panics and shoots him. During the chaos, Postmaster steals the gold whistle that Mack stole from the Leprechaun 20 years before. And Butch unknowingly frees Lubdan from his statuary state when he snatches the gold amulet. 

The three of them escape. Lubdan comes to life and immediately searches for his stolen gold.

During his search, he turns some "flygirls" into a small army of his own zombies to go find his flute. Lubdan himself goes after the three friends as well. The three rappers soon realize the flute has power to place listeners into a hypnotic euphoric trance. Anyone in the flute's magical trance are easy to manipulate.

Warwick Davis and Ice-T in "Leprechaun in the Hood."

Also, Mack survives his gunshots and goes after the three to retaliate for their shenanigans. 

The film goes back to a more plausible scenario, even with the fantastical elements, which is seen in the first movie. Despite being about a killer leprechaun, the movie sets him in a relatable premise - the "hood" - with more relatable characters. And somehow, the movie manages to accomplish, even if just barely, making these characters interesting enough for the audience to care what happens to them. 

It's not set out in space sometime in the future, or in any other ridiculous premise. It's a movie about a creature terrorizing an otherwise normal group of characters in a rather normal scenario. It's like Jason going after the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, or Michael Myers going on a killing spree in Haddonfield, Ill. Let's keep this kind of horror simple. After all, outrageous settings didn't work before in the "Leprechaun" films.

There's enough solidity in the movie's general plot that kept me interested. The story of three aspiring young rappers in Los Angeles trying to enter the entertainment industry and then seek revenge against the record producer who humiliates them and kicks them out is an intriguing story in itself. They're suddenly up against a killer folklore creature going after his gold. At times, Lubdan feels like a third wheel in his own movie. If he wasn't involved in the story, I'd still be interested enough to watch. 

But to tie him in, the writers came up with the whistle as something for him to find other than his pot of gold.  

Even with the Leprechaun's inclusion, the story does feel a lot more focused. Kudos to the writers for clearly trying to come up with a better story than the previous films.  

The movie still has its campiness, lame dialogue, and bad acting. There's also a scene with Lubdan smoking weed because, I guess that's what's expected if he's in "the hood." During this scene, he states, "A friend with weed is a friend indeed, but a friend with gold is the best I'm told.

I criticized the last Leprechaun movie as looking low budget, which it does. Its budget was $1.6 million.

Part five looks like it would have a bigger budget, considering the movie has a better cast with bigger names attached such as rapper Ice-T and a cameo from rapper Coolio. The budget for part five is $1.4 million. Go figure.

As the series heads farther away from being horror to being a corny comedy, this movie turns the franchise around in the direction towards being much more of a creature feature horror flick. I mean, they're all creature feature flicks. This one feels more so.