Exhumed: Jennifer Anniston in "Leprechaun" (1992)

by Joseph Perry and Mike Imboden

In their “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict” film reviews, Joseph and Mike normally give their thoughts on a slice of cinema. However, “Exhumed” will focus on the first (or very early) credits of established actors, giving their roles the GBV treatment.

For this installment it's Jennifer Anniston.

Intro

Most everyone knows Jennifer Aniston from her role as Rachel Green on Friends or maybe in one of the rom-coms she’s starred in like The Break Up or Just Go With It. While she did appear on a few short-lived sitcoms in the early 90s before Friends (Molloy and Ferris Bueller (based on the movie), to name a couple), it’s her movie career that has kept her famous.

But before Jen had Friends she got her big screen start in a movie called: Leprechaun (1993)

The Details

Leprechaun is a wonderful, family friendly adventure about a happy-go-lucky Leprechaun and his wacky adventures as he tries to find his missing gold that has been scattered across the globe by…. No, no – wait. Leprechaun is about a murderous, ticked off psychotic Leprechaun who only wants to retrieve his gold which was stolen from him.

Aniston plays Tory who moves into a farmhouse where, ten years earlier, the Leprechaun was trapped in a crate by a man who stole the aforementioned gold. Tory and her dad meet hunky contractor Nathan, his little brother Alex and their simple-minded buddy, Ozzie, who are painting the house and it’s Ozzie who is tricked into freeing the Leprechaun.

What follows over the next 75 minutes or so is like a fever dream of some crazed child that takes two scoops of Irish folklore and adds in what they would consider scary all while trying to straddle a fine line of being a comedy or a horror movie; The leprechaun gives chase on a tricycle, the kids throw shoes at him to distract him (he’s a cobbler by trade, of course), they shoot him with a shotgun and try to blow him up with gasoline… During all of this we’ve got Aniston trying to kick start her acting career after a handful of failed TV sitcoms, which she more or less manages to do. She’s clearly the lead (other than, we guess, Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun) and she does a fine job coming across as a believable late teen (19ish?). Her acting skills are still rough and some of her delivery is a little unpolished, but let’s face it (and we don’t mean this as an insult), Jennifer Aniston isn’t a GREAT actress NOW, so being a little uneven as a twenty-two year old isn’t that bad. All said and done, it’s a fun movie and Jennifer is pretty smoking hot, so there are certainly worse ways to spend an evening.

The Verdict

Part of us thinks this should stay buried like the Leprechaun’s gold, but on the other hand Jennifer is just so dang hot in Leprechaun it’s hard to not like it. It’s got some fun moments but they are largely offset by head scratching ones which makes it hard to really pin this down. In the end, it all comes down to your desire to see a young Jennifer Aniston throw shoes at a leprechaun.

Leprechaun