Trimark Video, 1997

starring: Warwick Davis, Rebekah Carlton and Guy Siner

directed by: Brian Trenchard-Smith

the plot: The villainous Leprechaun (Davis) from previous installments of the film series now inexplicably lives on an alien mining planet, far into the future. Despite this change of venue, he’s still hungry for money, obsessed with power, and crazy for a bride. He hopes to satisfy all three urges by forcing marriage upon the wealthy and powerful Princess Zarina (Carlton), a member of the Dominian royal family. However, the Leprechaun has been targeted for termination by a group of space marines because of his ongoing disruption of mining operations, and they quickly succeed in blowing the miniature terror to pieces before packing up his treasure hoard and his alien princess. That’s not enough to stop the Leprechaun, of course, and he soon begins to cause death and mayhem aboard the marines’ ship as he searches for both his pilfered gold and bride-to-be.

why it’s good: This is one of those films that not only comes out the other side of bad into good; it does laps around the track three or four times before settling into awful filmmaking hilarity. For one thing, it uses a fantastic premise that horror franchises often touch on when things are circling the drain: take the main character and put him in space. Naturally, this leads to a number of gags where the Leprechaun kills someone with a light saber or laser gun (although the best death by far is when the Leprechaun explodes out of a space marine’s nether regions after sending his essence up the man’s urine stream). The film also uses another franchise tactic of choice: the secondary villain. Indeed, the overbearing “genius” Dr. Mittenhand (Siner) is probably the best part of the movie, all the way up to his transformation into “Mitten-Spider” (a change facilitated by the Leprechaun tying the doctor down, putting a ball-gag in his mouth, and then injecting his brain with a DNA soup made in a blender using a whole spider). On top of that, there’s a space marine cyborg dressed in drag, a shrink ray that accidentally blows the Leprechaun up to enormous size, and a gratuitous topless scene thinly lamp-shaded as a plot point. There’s also a struggle between the male lead (Brent Jasmer) and the female lead (Jessica Collins) to produce something resembling onscreen chemistry (spoiler alert: they fail).

why you should own it: True, the film is not as hilariously bad as other entries in the series, like “Leprechaun in da Hood” or “Leprechaun Back 2 da Hood,” but “Leprechaun 4: In Space” has its own charms. And you can’t have a Leprechaun movie marathon without the fourth installment. I mean, how else would you explain how the Leprechaun gets from Las Vegas to the hood to outer space? OK, admittedly, the film series doesn’t bother with that question, either.