Red Clover originally went by the name Leprechaun’s Revenge when it aired on the SyFy network. Neither title really works for this film. The former suggests a legitimately scary flick while the other denotes a tongue in cheek B-movie a la Sharknado (interesting fact: the writer of Red Clover directed Sharknado).
The story is fairly simple. So simple in fact that they could have just titled this Leprechaun 6 and no one would know any better. A young girl named Karen (Courtney Halverson) is hunting in the woods with her grandfather one day when she is confronted by what is supposed to be a leprechaun. She shoots it, but it doesn’t die and begins haunting her and the town she inhabits. Her sheriff father (Billy Zane-whose recent screen credits suggest he’s having trouble paying the bills) doesn’t believe a word of it, but her grandfather is the outcast of the town that has always told stories of fairies and goblins and such.
Red Clover, available now on DVD, is beaming with bad acting, bad writing and bad everything else. The movie would have worked if it managed to take a tongue in cheek, cheesy look at everything it was doing much like other SyFy films, but it can’t. It takes itself too damn seriously, and that is a shame considering some of these horrendous lines and situations.
Besides bad lines, there is the leprechaun itself. I remember thinking that the Leprechaun franchise presented a goofy presentation of what a leprechaun would look like, but this movie tops all of those films. The leprechaun in this flick doesn’t look scary, funny or anything in between. It’s just a guy in a dark costume. It looks like something the filmmakers threw together the morning before shooting when they all looked at each other and realized they forgot to conceive the most important aspect to the movie.
It’s hard to blame specific actors when the story and script are so bad, but I need to a moment to recognize one actor in particular from this film: Zane. He’s a talented guy. He’s proven that in movies like Sniper and Titanic, but here he seems to be acting badly on purpose. It feels like he’s trying to give a horrendous performance to strike back at the powers that be for putting him in this dreck. He’s an actor that deserves a second shot at doing real material, but movies like Red Clover will never help make that case.
Special features on the DVD include a commentary track.