RED CLOVER (2012)

Studio:       After Dark Films
Director:    Drew Daywalt
Writer:       Anthony C. Ferrante
Producer:  Alan Amiel, Katerina Slantcheva
Stars:     Billy Zane, Courtney Halverson, William Devane

Review Score: 

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Summary:

An Irish family unearths a dangerous leprechaun and a deadly curse after a young girl picks a red clover in the forest. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Pop O’Hara takes his granddaughter Karen hunting for boar in the Keening Woods of Massachusetts. When they become separated, Karen picks a red clover that burns her hand. A creature then rises from the ground and begins to attack before Karen manages to fire at it and flee.

Karen’s overprotective father, Sheriff Conor O’Hara, admonishes Pop for not treating Karen more like a teenager. Back in the woods, the leprechaun kills a hunter. Having a reputation for being the town drunk, Pop discusses folklore with the bartender at Happy’s Irish Pub. Karen dreams of the leprechaun attacking in her home. When she wakes, she sees that the clover burned a mark into the palm of her hand. Karen’s friend Amanda asks why Karen is not going to school. Tabloid blogger Karl Morris pesters Karen for the story about what she encountered in the woods. The leprechaun attacks a fisherman in the forest.

Karen starts researching the mark on her hand and learns of the “curse of the red clover.” She shows the mark to her grandfather after learning that she has four days to bury the leprechaun or she will die. Dr. McCormick tells Karen that her body is actively fighting off an infection. McCormick scoffs at her notion of being cursed.

Karen has a vision of the leprechaun while video chatting with her friend Dax Spence. She and Conor also discuss the encounter in the woods. Karen goes into a trance and sketches a drawing of the leprechaun. On her way to school with Dax and Amanda, Karen has a vision of her two friends morphing into creatures. She insists that Amanda pull over the car and Karen then runs away. Dax finds the sketch that she left behind.

Officer Peterson learns that her brother Dax is researching leprechaun legends and mythology. Dax shows his research to Karen and points out that her sketch spelled the word luchorpain, which is Gaelic for leprechaun. While examining a corpse found in the woods with Officer Peterson, Sheriff O’Hara sees the leprechaun.

The leprechaun kills Dr. McCormick. Pop steals the lucky horseshoe from Happy’s Irish Pub. Karl pesters Peterson for information on the leprechaun investigation. The leprechaun kills Happy while he takes out the trash to the dumpster. Karen tells Karl about what she saw in the woods. Karl tells Karen to speak to her grandfather for advice on how to stop the leprechaun. Karl then takes a trophy with gold in it to the forest in order to find the leprechaun, but he ends up getting killed when the leprechaun runs over him with Karl’s car.

As Amanda prepares to be queen in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, her mother tries to give her the family heirloom of a horseshoe. Pop digs through the charred remains of what was once McHenry’s Inn and discovers that their horseshoe is missing. The leprechaun attacks Karen while Dax walks her home after a visit with Amanda. Karen wards off the creature with the horseshoe that she took off the family’s mailbox. Pop arrives and frightens the leprechaun away with his shotgun.

Pop tells his granddaughter that Keening was founded on a gold strike. Irish settlers brought over a leprechaun from the old country and drained the luck from it, turning the creature mean and vicious. When it escaped, O’Hara ancestor Elias was hired to hunt it down. Elias buried the leprechaun in the woods and bound him in place with four horseshoes in accordance with the legend. The fire at McHenry’s Inn dislodged one of the horseshoes and the red clover bloomed. Now, they need two more horseshoes to lift the leprechaun’s curse.

Amanda and her friends Josh and Ben break into the old Silver Shamrock Brewery to look for beer and are attacked by the leprechaun. Dax and Karen share a kiss while researching how to kill the creature. Conor accompanies his father as Pop removes the horseshoe from outside the brewery. Inside, they find Amanda in hysterics and confront the leprechaun. Conor uses a gold coin to bait the creature, but it escapes. Both O’Hara men return to Karen and she remembers that Amanda’s family has the fourth horseshoe.

The O’Haras go to find Amanda at the parade. The leprechaun appears during the festivities and kills Amanda and Officer Peterson, sending the parade-goers into a panic. Dax is killed when he tackles the leprechaun, but the creature is rendered unconscious. Pop takes the leprechaun’s body and sets off hurriedly to bury it in the woods.

Conor and Kate try to find Pop. While they have a heart-to-heart conversation about Karen’s mother, the leprechaun appears and kills Conor. Pop saves Karen when the leprechaun attacks her next, but he dies as a result. Karen tracks down the leprechaun and shoots it with a shotgun. She then takes an oak staff with the four horseshoes tied to it and drives it into the creature’s heart before burying its corpse.

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Review:

Call me a snob, but unless your leprechaun-related horror movie takes place in the same continuity made famous by Warwick Davis and Jennifer Aniston, then chances are I will be even less interested than I was when that preferred incarnation of the Irish myth went into outer space.  Nevertheless, SyFy and After Dark Films joined forces for a take on the fabled creature only slightly more serious than the film series that saw not one, but two ill-fated trips to the hood.

Courtney Halverson plays teenager Karen O’Hara.  If you read this before watching the movie, you will either thank me for that sentence or think I am a fool for having to mention it.  When Karen is introduced in a scene where she refers to William Devane’s character as “Pops,” I assumed they were father and daughter.  So after Billy Zane shows up with a matching last name, the next logical conclusion was that Zane must be Karen’s brother.  Except he starts calling her “honey,” which moved him over into boyfriend/husband status.  Then he made her breakfast before she went to school and it was finally clear that Karen was Zane’s daughter and Devane’s granddaughter.  This is the kind of confusion that takes place when twentysomethings are cast as high school teens.

The other important thing to know before going into “Red Clover” is that it was written by Anthony C. Ferrante, who went on to direct “Sharknado” (review here) a year later.  That is either good news or bad news, depending upon personal tastes, but it should be enough information to have expectations tailored accordingly for this film.  In fact, Ferrante even foreshadows his cult classic epic with a brief dialogue exchange that name drops “sharknado” in reference to a storm that brings sharks to a lake.  Did someone just want to see if this throwaway one liner could be turned into a real movie as a lark?

Karen picks a red clover while hunting in the forest with Pops and unknowingly unleashes an evil leprechaun that had been buried there by her ancestors.  The mythical creature in “Red Clover” will not be rapping or appearing on cereal boxes any time soon.  This is a version of the Irish legend depicted as a feral entity conjured from gnarled wood and sans a green hat or shiny brass belt buckle.  While the sinister leprechaun busies himself with killing townspeople and fishermen, Karen and her family have four days to figure out how to reverse the curse and put him back in the ground where he belongs.

“Red Clover” starts with dire enough straits, but abandons its straightforward approach before the midway point in favor of trying to have more fun during the latter half.  It is a decision that is for the better as the reliable actors mix the right amount of serious and flippant for a tone fitting of a movie about a killer leprechaun.  Everyone is acutely aware of the level of production they are on and gives their roles exactly what is required without leaving an impression that they cannot wait for the gig to be over.

A few scenes appear to be ad-libbed as well, although the script already crackles with a surprising amount of self-aware humor.  This example exchange illustrates exactly what I mean about both the actors and the characters knowing exactly what kind of movie they are in:

Sheriff: “What if I told you that I just saw a leprechaun?”

Deputy: “Are you kidding me?  I’d say, what the hell is wrong with you.”

Sheriff: “Yeah, that’s about right.”

Not everything about the story makes sense.  For one thing, Karen takes it surprisingly well when every person close to her is eviscerated in front of her eyes one right after another by a fairytale creature.  And not everything about the production makes sense either.  For some reason, “Red Clover” uses more wipes than a nanny in a room full of newborns every time there is a scene transition.  But the movie is everything that is to be expected from a horror story about a deadly leprechaun.  It has humor, a few splattery kills, a solid acting roster, and a shout out to Silver Shamrock of “Halloween III.”  “Red Clover” is as good as any other monster movie on SyFy and it is certainly no worse than any of the entries in that “other” series of films about killer creatures from the Emerald Isle.

NOTE: “Red Clover” originally aired on SyFy as “Leprechaun’s Revenge.”

Review Score:  65

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