Leprechaun Returns is a much better film than a syfy original seventh sequel to a not-that-good B-movie has any right to be. Because the continuity had gotten a bit... Wait, these movies never had a continuity - they even have conflicting origin stories, an episode set in the hood and another one in space (beaten to the punch by Pinhead, but way before Jason). So, this is more of your traditional 'legacy' sequel in that it follows the events from the first movie and ignores the rest, but it doesn't invalidate any existing sequels. Brian Trenchard-Smith/Leprechaun fans rejoice.
The story picks up twenty-five years after the end of the first film, where the evil leprechaun sealed in a well. As it turns out, that same house has been turned into student housing for a nearby university, and is being refurbished by a sorority to become completely self-sufficient.
Lila (Taylor Spreitler), the daughter of one of the people who put the leprechaun down, has just joined the sorority after her mother passed away. A bit contrived, but... OK.
Her sorority sisters are Katie (Pepi Sonuga), a little ditzy and well-meaning; Rose (Sai Bennett), a nerdy goody-two-shoes, and Meredith (Emilie Reid), a drunken mess. And the first thing they do when Lila arrives... is to connect a pump to the well. Uh oh.
After friendly man-child Ozzie (Mark Holton, returning from the first movie) gets a faceful of leprechauntaminated water, the little guy (played by Linden Porco) bursts out of him and into the scene, hat and all. Poor Ozzie; At least he's got to be in one of the cutest/funniest scenes in the movie before that
From there he starts stalking the girls (and a couple of guests), and you get all the standard slasher-adjacent stuff that are these movies' bread and butter, plus some really obnoxious, forced humor. The Leprechaun's thing, you see, is to be an insufferable little shit, always coming up with really bad rhymes and even worse puns. Sometimes it's funny in a roundabout way, but mostly it isn't. Good thing his sadistic streak is still alive - there are some excellent, very gory kills here.
I'm probably making it sound worse than it is. I mean, I don't think anyone's supposed to find anything the leprechaun says funny, he's just a little twerp. But the script (by Suzanne Keilly) sometimes feels a bit strained as it tries to inject humor into everything - a few scenes with Marvel-style deflating humor (you know: "Let's do this!" People start walking purposefully towards the camera, record scratch: "Umm... I have no idea how to do this"), and it really stretched my tolerance for corny puns.
Other than that it's a lot of fun. The plot is simple. Ridiculous and fairly simple, sure, but this is a movie about a killer leprechaun, so the ridiculous is a given. Enough of the humor works, it's got some clever conceits, and the characters are very thinly sketched but still fun enough to watch as they try (mostly unsuccessfully) not to get killed in ludicrous ways. Not perfect by any means - for all my complaints so far, it saves some of its worst ideas for the end - but it's well worth it if you're in the market for this sort of thing.
A big part of why it works so well is that the effects are a consistent delight - lots of puppets, goo, makeup effects, and one hell of a great-looking explosion. A few CGI missteps doesn't really undo all the great stuff around it.
No surprise, then, that the director is Steven Kostanski (of The Void and Psycho Goreman fame). I'd rather see him follow his own batshit crazy muse and come up with original shit, but he and his crew obviously had a lot of fun whipping up some eye-popping (literally, in one instance) practical effects to depict the crazy shit Keilly dreamed up.
I'd go as far as saying that this is probably the best Leprechaun movie. Sorry, Warwick Davies.
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