LEPRECHAUN - Warwick Davis, who appeared during my Covid-era afternoon treadmill sessions on the TV in the corner whenever 'Tenable' played, also starred in this early nineties horror froth. He's the eponymous beastie, out for blood now his treasure's been nicked, and has a habit of yelling "I wants mi gold!" in bad imitation Irish before reverting to whatever the equivalent of RP is for shoe-making, rainbow bothering mythic entities in B movies. 'Leprechaun' is quite interesting in a way because it lies at the point where eighties 'Gremlins'-style small creature horror, 'Nightmare On Elm Street'-style wisecracking killer horror, and something more akin to special-effects based fantasy family comedy, all intersect. It boasts the usual era specific vibes and a pre-'Friends' Jennifer Aniston. Teenage Frankie had had enough of horror at the time it came out - everything was being played for laughs, why couldn't it all be like 'Cannibal Holocaust'? Seeing them stop Warwick in his tracks by bombarding him with shoes put a smile on my face though, after all these years I have a good chuckle watching it now.
GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE - Hard to believe Lamberto Bava followed classic eighties gore banger 'Demons' with this lightweight frippery. Chocolate bar thieves in a Scooby Doo van do a runner from the cops, only to be stalked through a forest by a man in wellingtons with glowing red eyes; they end up spending the night in a cursed crypt. It's obvious Lamberto was having fun here but I'm not sure how much of that transfers to the viewer. The half-baked self-referential movie gags could only ever have fallen flat even in back in 1987, and the weird undergirding that seems full of allusions to Greek myth feels too inexplicable to go anywhere. It doesn't necessarily end there, though. Clunk, bad pacing and awful dialogue might be problems for normal horror fans, but eighties / nineties Italian completists such as myself can take solace in the fact that the tedium is counterbalanced by THAT atmosphere, lots of candlelight, cobwebs and mist (it's heavily into gothic pastiche), plus a bevy of maggot faced undead and bizarre scenes like the freako family's gross out meal. Is that enough? The sane world cries "No!", but I'd probably still get it if VS or Cauldron or TV put it out.
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