Three holidays, three movies to add to the holiday horror page. Let’s get right to them.
THE LEPRECHAUN’S CURSE (2021)
The sequel to The Leprechaun’s Game is its own story, so you don’t need to see the first film to watch it.
This plot is just bizarre. A couple inherits a house and invites their friends over to party. The leprechaun is up to his old tricks trying to reclaim his gold, but the problem is he seems to be planting it on victims that don’t even know anything about gold this time.
In fact, the movie is more about the main guy being a cheater and the main girl’s relationship with her mother.
The leprechaun is virtually an afterthought, and he’s much less of a slasher killer this time. Most of the time he opts to use his magic to just supernaturally choke people to death.
The only satisfying death scene has leprechaun plucking a bitch’s eye out with her own high heel.
And the most laughable moment is when the main girl tries to conquer the leprechaun by teasing him with the promise of a kiss.
EASTER BUNNY MASSACRE (aka: Easter Killing) (2021)
This little indie flick simply checks off all the most obvious slasher clichés, so it will be a welcome addition to your killer bunny Easter weekend marathons each year.
A group of young pretty people is celebrating Easter by a campfire. One girl in particular seems to be a bitch willing to ruin everyone’s lives by exposing their dirty secrets. The most obvious secret right from the moment she threatens to expose it without naming it is that one of the guys is gay. Ah, a closeted gay guy afraid of being outed to his friends in 2021. How antiquated. Even so, it scores this one a spot on the does the gay guy die? page.
Anyway, before she can spill her guts, it is the killer bunny to the rescue to spill her guts for her!
The big, unpolished bunny head is definitely a highlight here compared to the sleek looking bunny masks in other killer bunny movies.
When the group finds her body after passing out for the night, they all have blood on their hands (literally) and can’t remember what happened. So they assume one of them killed her.
Clearly they’ve never seen I Know What You Did Last Summer or dozens of other slashers with a similar setup. Flash ahead and they all get Easter reunion invitations signed by the dead girl…and they all show up! WTF?
There are some tight camera shots of the bunny lurking in the shadows, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking or particularly suspenseful. The group is drawn into an Easter egg hunt that instead leads to tape recordings that slowly chip away at their emotions.
Meanwhile, the bunny starts some okay kills. Other than covering a guy with melted chocolate, there’s nothing mind-blowing or even particularly gory. And it is kind of odd when a chase scene leads into the woods and the bunny has a flashlight!
Instead of a final girl, we get a final boy, and he does some major ass kicking. There’s a classic body reveal party, but the film goes for an excessive exposition final act, as made famous by Scream decades ago.
JACK LANTERN (2017)
This is a low budget indie—as in, the image looks washed out because of lack of proper lighting and the majority of the film looks like it was probably shot in the house of someone involved in making the movie.
On the bright side, it’s totally a Halloween movie.
On Halloween night, a group of friends makes it clear they think one girl is fat, but invite her brother along for a trip to a graveyard because they like him. Sadly, things end tragically for his sister.
Four years later there’s a Halloween party. The same girl who taunted the sister most about being overweight is still a hater, while everyone else is just partying.
Someone in Day of the Dead skeleton makeup comes in, has a weird black and white fantasy about slaughtering everyone at the party right there on the spot, and then starts to make fantasy a reality.
Considering the person in costume isn’t overweight, we know it isn’t the dead sister back from the dead. And because of something else that happens before the party, well, we know exactly who the killer is, so this is not a whodunit at all.
It’s also a very unpolished film that barely feels like it had a script, and the kill scenes are just as rough as all the filler scenes (there’s really not much in the way of entertaining non-death scenes here). If you’re aching for a new Halloween themed horror film, I guess you might as well check it out, but I don’t imagine it’s going to land on your annual Halloween season watchlist.
