You've read the last five, what's one more? It's "Leprechaun: Hood Bookend"!!

Fun fact for the day: this movie, the LAST (finally) film in the franchise to date, was originally supposed to be Leprechaun: Destination Spring Break.  The title may have been less stupid, but that was indeed the premise.  For God knows what reason, the producers reniged on this idea, and instead, we get this - Leprechaun: Let's Just Copy What We Did in the Last One. 

That's all the introduction I feel like this week. 

THE MOVIE!!

The film opens with a double prologue - and it's a doozy.  Firstly, we're treated to what's actually a pretty well-done animated short detailing the back story of Leprechauns and their fascination with gold.  Turns out that the little guys were once called by an Irish king to protect the treasures of the land.  Only one of them didn't return to the forest after these fictional wars were over, staying behind in our world to become twisted and evil over time.  So...wow, six movies in and we've finally got some semblance as to just what the hell Warwick Davis is supposed to be.

Prologue #2 is decidedly less interesting, as a old and very sweaty priest dukes is duking it out with the Leprechaun at a youth center's construction site.  I swear to you, this is what's happening.  In a darkly-lit scene that rivals anything in A v P: Requiem when it comes to incomprehensibility, the priest - who presumably has used to the Leprechaun's gold to fund a youth center - succeeds in banishing our pint-sized hero to the nether world with some clover-laced holy water, only to keel over immediately afterward due to a heart attack.  Leprechauns, heart failure, some guys just can't catch a break.

Unfortunately, this means that I've got to introduce you to our protagonists.  It's an exercise that I'm not looking forward to, but here we go.  Our leads Emily (Tangi Miller) and  Lisa (Sherrie Jackson).  Want some defining characteristics that make these two characters pop out a bit more than just first names?  Emily = nice, sweet, likable hairstylist trying to save up enough money to attend college.  Lisa = stuck-up, sassy, materialistic.  For what it's worth, Tangi Miller isn't bad in the movie; she's got a fair amount of charisma, and actually manages to elicit a few moments of sympathy throughout the film.  I said a few, don't get your hopes up. 

For secondary characters, we're blessed with Jamie (Page Kennedy), an idiotic stoner who gives us no less than ten "humorous" scenes that are anything but.  For an indication of the material that we're working with, an early scene shows him getting high and barking to his dog (bad pun, I know) that he can't have any weed.  His mom walks in, pissed expression on her face, and says "damn, boy -- you talkin' to the dog again?"  There's also Rory (Laz Alonso), a drug dealer who used to date Emily.  And it's just as Romeo-and-Juliet-esque as you'd think.  It should also be pointed out that the clothing label 57 Fake probably provided half of this movie's budget for the amount of times they are seen wearing shirts blaring their merits throughout the film's duration.

Well, if you know your Leprechaun history (and if you've read all of these reviews, you do, in addition to being a very patient soul), you know that every one of these movies has a lynchpin event where our idiots who aren't in peril put themselves in peril.  This happens when our four lead characters decide to have a picnic on the abandoned youth center site, where Emily promptly falls into a covered hole and finds the Leprechaun's gold.  It all happened so quickly and without intrigue, and I really wish I had some big epic story for you, but I don't. 

Anyway, the four friends split up their gold findings - amounting to roughly $250,000 a piece - and commence spending, awakening our pint-sized hero in the process.  We get our first kill out of this, as Warwick Davis enacts the obligatory "Leprechaun gets high" sequence before shoving a bong through a dude's stomach.  Let's see, we've already seen him get drunk in the second film and high in the previous "Hood" entery.  And all of these sequences dragged FOREVER.  I don't quite get why the makers of these films felt that little people getting all sorts of f**ked up equaled comedic gold, but you take what you're given, I guess.

Within short order, we enter full-on, tried-and-true "I want me gold!" murderous rampage mode.  In a move that somewhat surprised me, Lisa is one of the first ones to be killed off.  Surprising because (a) she was starting to warm up to Jamie's awful attempts to woo her, and (b) she looks utterly fantastic in booty shorts, which she parades around in during her murder scene. 

Emily and Rory go on the run from the Leprechaun now (Emily had encountered him earlier, barely escaping his wrath at the hair salon, and thinks that maybe - just maybe - their dead friend had something to do with the hideous-looking fiend who accosted her).  The bodies begin piling up from this point on, mostly of a bunch of completely irrelevant characters who had been vaguely introduced at some earlier point only to serve as murder fodder later.  One of them is Rory's floozy girlfriend, who stole a gold coin at a house party to turn it into a gold cap for her tooth.  Meaning that the Leprechaun rips her jaw off and begins walking around with a gold tooth of his own.  You know, Jon Lickness is one of the whitest white dudes you'll ever meet, and some of these stereotypes are making ME uncomfortable.  There's also Rory's drug-dealing rivals and a pair of idiot cops who had been hounding Jamie and Rory throughout the movie.

One thing that immediately stood out to me about this movie - remember how in four non-Hood films the Leprechaun actually had some pretty cool powers consisting of trickery, voice-changing and so forth that led to some gruesome and cringe-worthy death scenes (like a guy eating a lawnmower blade in Leprechaun 2?  In this movie, he's way more into duking it out with his bare fists, choking, gouging and so forth, as we get two scenes within close proximity to each other where he challenges various characters to a fistfight, gets beat up for a while, and eventually rips a body part off of his opponent.  I don't know, I guess I just liked the character who was a threat because of his supernatural powers better than a tiny guy who happens to be a good boxer.  Either that, or God, I'm a nerd.

For more nerd trivia, Sticky Fingaz is in this movie.  So don't say I didn't mention it.

Having nowhere else to turn after witnessing so much death and debauchery, Emily, Rory and Jamie head to the local fortune teller who has made a few appearances throughout the film so fascinating that I didn't even bother to mention them.  Armed with new knowledge about a Leprechaun's weakness, Rory makes some clover-infused bullets (and I've got to admit, that's actually a pretty clever plot idea) before the Leprechaun himself shows up and pops down the door.  Rory begins peppering him with bullets, and just as it appears that the movie is about to be over at the 72-minute mark, his Glock jams.  Brilliant plot device alert.

Begin ending sequence.  I know that I've used this phraseology before, but after six freakin' Leprechaun movies, sue me, I want to wrap this up quickly - do you really need me to spell out that the good guys win?  Jamie is incapacitated due to a wooden bat getting lodged in his knee, meaning that we are without his services for the remainder of the film.   We get our usual batch of false-finishes (including Rory giving the Leprechaun a very Leprechaun 1-style Rodney King beating in a scene that made me laugh for all the wrong reasons).  The endgame?  Rory fixes his gun, pops a cap in the Leprechaun's ass, and gets thrown off a roof into a puddle of wet cement.  And everyone lives happily ever after.  Although we do get a similar animated ending to what we got in Prologue #1, involving a hand coming up out of some concrete as the cliffhanger leading toward the sequel that never happened.

FINAL ANALYSIS:  I'm going to do my best to sum up my thoughts on this movie first: ugh, just ugh.  As the last movie in the first official Leprechaun series, Back 2 Tha Hood is the very definition of a Euthanasia treatment.  The franchise was clearly on life support by this point, both in budget and execution.  And, it sucked.  Ordinarily, I try to provide at least some empirical evidence of those blanket statements, but really, just read the above recap and that shoudl spell out all the reasons why that statement is correct.  1/2 * out of ****.

Now for some words on the series itself:  I'm done?  I'm really done?  Man, this was an endurance test of epic proportions.  The third film was the closest thing that we ever got to a GOOD movie in the entire series, and even that film made me occasionally want to gouge my own eyes out with pliars.  The Leprechaun films run the gamut of pretty much everything that a stuffy film major would deem to be "bad": bad screenplays, bad acting, bad stories.  However, as is the case with most micro-budgeted horror films, there is one catch - I always felt like the people who actually MADE these films had a ton of fun doing them.

Especially Warwick Davis.  I've mentioned it several times throughout these reviews, but the dude really did look like he was having the time of his life while making these films.  The way I understand it, he has said in more than a few interviews throughout the years just how much he loved the character that he got to play no less than six times.  It definitely showed on screen, as he put every bit of his 3'6" frame into a murderous, rhyming mythical Irish demon.  Fifteen stars for this guy, and a true class act all the way. 

Unfortunately, this means that I have to switch gears and talk about the future of this franchise.  You know, upon completing my reviews of the Ghoulies and Critters films, I said - with full confidence - that these things were effectively remake-proof, mainly because I don't believe there is a movie executive out there willing to shell out the money to acquire the franchise rights and trout out a remake to appease the three fans that each series had.  I also believed that this was true for this series - but apparently some geniuses out there believe that marketing to three people is a wise film business strategy.

Those geniuses, of course, would be WWE.

It goes without saying that I'm a huge wrestling fan.  I've dropped a few references to it in my reviews that hopefully a few astute souls have picked up on, and to make a long story short, while I bitch and moan about it a lot, much like horror films, I WANT this particular art form to succeed.  So here's some sobering facts for ya - WrestleMania XXVIII, their biggest pay-per-view event of the year, was a phenomenal success this year, having sold 1.3 million buys and putting 75,000 people in Sun Life Stadium.  Yet, if you looked at their stock price, you would never have even thought that the event took place. 

While the company continues to make money by the boatloads with their TV programming (no matter how inane and backwards it has become, but I won't get into that particular rant), they continue to sink millions into their film division, which cannot be considered anything other than a complete, utter, colossal failure.  They've released something like 18 films in the past seven years, and I believe a grand total of three have turned a profit.  It goes beyond value on a balance sheet, though - their movies completely, utterly suck, and while we've all been aware that Vince McMahon is an ancient, decrepit, borderline senile guy with his finger on the pulse of pop culture from 15 years ago, it still legit amazes me that he thinks that, at some point, he's going to make bajillions of dollars making horrible films about prisoners chaperoning field trips and John Cena rescuing random love interest #2.

The point of all this?  I'm anything but a fan of the Leprechaun series.  But I'm not in favor of remaking it - especially if it's from WWE, and especially since we no longer get Warwick Davis.  We get this guy.

I rest my case.