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Fangoria: Leprechaun 2 Flender's Fortune

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Table of Contents description: HE WANTS MORE GOLD! Corman graduate Rodman Flender takes on "Leprechaun 2" and tries to keep it from being a step backwards.

The box office spoke, so the murderous little green man is back with a seasoned Corman veteran at the helm.

Why is there a Leprechaun 2? Let us count the reasons.

"Why not?" counters the film's producer, Don (Doppelganger) Borchers.

"Somebody made money on the first one, so now theres a part 2," chuckles Gabe Bartalos, the makeup man who transformed Warwick Davis in the original and is back in the ring for the sequel.

"Money's definitely the answer,"discloses Davis, who was undoubtedly offered more of it to return as the diminutive demon.

"I don't know - why make a part 2 of anything?" says director Rodman Flender, who appears just a tad impatient with the question. "There's an audience and they make money."

See a pattern developing here? No matter what you thought of the first Leprechaun (and let's face it, not many of you thought much), that connect-the-dots tale of a short dude with a bad 'tude picked audience pockets to the tune of a $9-million theatrical gross and an esimated 120,000 cassettes sold. Needless to say, it didn't take long for the folks at Trimark to put two and two together and rush a sequel into production. The distributor swears that the film, subtitled The Bride Of Leprechaun, will invade theaters in time for St. Patricks Day.

On the Leprechaun 2 set inside a North Hollywood soundstage, where a cavernous underground lair has been built up with flats and fake boulders, leggy young actress Shevonne Durkin (the ill-fated babysitter in Ghost In The Machine) is kicking up dust and spewing threats. She completes a number of takes and appears to be cooking on all cylinders when -

"God! Who farted?" roars the AD. "Too much Mexican food at lunch." responds a crewman, who promptly breaks wind a second time.

The laughs quiet down and the camera rolls - only to be stopped by the AD, whose cheerful mood has magically transformed into that of a prison camp guard. The targets of his ire are a couple of long-haired rocker types (in fact a pair of film students hired to crew for lunch money) who were slow to toss dirt at the actress' feet for effect. After they're summarily chewed out, the soil flies to satisfaction.

Throw a dirt clod anywhere on the set of Leprechaun 2 and you're likely to hit some true guerrilla filmmaking in the Roger Corman style. And who better to shepherd this mercenary approach than Flender, a director who learned his chops at that hotbed of exploitation and higher film learning, Corman's Concorde Pictures. "God! The luxury of having a day to shoot a page and a half of script must be tremendous," he says, before getting serious about the appeal of the low-budget rush. "But I do like moving fast like this. I'm very impatient. It's exciting for me to jump in and knock those shots off."

The director's penchant for fast and furious shoots has won him points on the set of Leprechaun2, a 24-day wonder with a budget of under $2 million. "If you don't have much money, you need people who are resourceful," Borchers notes, "and Rodman is definitely that." "He really has the Roger Corman style," Davis adds. "He's very quick and he gets his shots."

Leprechaun 2, written by Turi Meyer and Al Septien, begins the latest round of four-leaf horrors in Ireland in the year 994. The Leprechaun (Davis) has just turned 1,000 and, according to local lore, can now take a bride. But the fearsome elf bungles the legend, which says that any woman who sneezes three times with nobody saying "God bless you" is his for the picking, and so must wait for another 10 centuries to pass. Flash forward to 1994 Hollywood, where the creature has staked out Bridget (Durkin), a descendent of his last attempt at romance, for that walk down the aisle. But fortunately for her, Bridget's main squeeze Cody (Charlie Heath) isn't going to give her up without a fight.

In the mayhem department, the movie, which also boasts cult film veterans Clint Howard, Kimmy (Twin Peaks) Robertson and Sandy (Vamp) Baron, features a man's face meeting the whirling blades of a lawnmower, a finger getting ripped out and the bloody removal of a gold tooth. The hoped-for comic highlights include the pint-sized antihero getting plastered in a bar on St. Patrick's Day.

During a scene in which Bridget, in a clingy, slinky gown, attempts to dissuade the Leprechaun's destructive tendencies with a glimpse of leg, the easygoing Flender, letting Atilla the AD handle his light work, shows why he's a low-budget natural. When the scene isn't working for the cameras, he changes Durkin's entrance with simplicity and ease. And when the actress' leg flashing isn't camera-friendly, he calmly remedies the situation with a simple "Cross your legs a little higher."

"It's wonderful when you find a low-budget solution that really works," remarks Flender, whose most notable "solution" on Leprechaun 2 is a Y-shaped passageway that allows him endless variations of corridors to run through with a mere repositioning of the camera. "To me, that's the fun of filmmaking. Your hands are in it on a film like this. When you do it digitally, your hands don't get dirty."

Despite Flender's enthusiasm for this type of exploitation production, the first impression one gets is that he's more the artsy type, destined to make films that win awards but make no money. He's relatively detached from his admittedly small body of work, and is surprised that his directorial debut, The Unborn,is a bona fide genre fave. He says he has only seen one reel of Dracula Rising (which he co-scripted), "because the projector broke and I just never got around to seeing it again." But ultimately, his quiet determination shines through.

"I basically want to make good movies no matter what the budget is," he says during a break in the filming. "I hope to God that doing low-budget films doesn't doom me. I do consider Leprechaun 2 a step up. The budget is a little bigger and, most importantly, this is the first film where I've gotten my own trailer," he laughs.

Flender landed the sequel assignment on the strength of his work on the equally small-budgeted HBO cable series Tales From The Crypt. "They asked me if I had any ideas," he recalls. "I basically told them that the best thing about the first film was the character of the creature. He wasn't just a killing machine, and any movie I'd make would emphasize the character."

Putting the little monster through his paces has posed certain challenges to the director. "It's been more difficult on a technical level to make this film in an urban environment," he says, referring to the many outdoor locations utilized in the Southern California area. "Every setup has been tough. We've taken a step back, in a sense, with the special effects and are doing them live for the most part. But from what I've seen in dailies, they look really ambitious.

"But it's ultimately the development of the character that's been the greatest challenge," he continues. "You look at the Leprechaun and there are really only two ways to go. You can make him a guy who's scary all the time, and then there's really nothing you can do but mark time until the next kill. Or you can have a creature who is totally charming but can turn on a dime and be the worst kind of monster. We're taking the latter approach, because that's where the real terror and suspense in a film like this come from."

Flender acknowledges that although he's playing the sequel pretty straight, the moments of humor will be equally valid. "There are some small moments between the Leprechaun and Bridget, like the one we're shooting now, that contain some subtle laughs. Think about this beautiful young woman coming on to this tiny creature. It is pretty funny. And the sequence where the Leprechaun gets into a drinking match in the bar and gets drunk is hilarious.

"And I know I'm going to disappoint some FANGORIA readers with this, but while there is violence, things won't get particularly gory," he adds. "I'm not seeing how realistic I can make a man's face being pushed into moving lawnmower blades. So what you'll see is the horror on his face, the spinning blades and then we'll pan off into the darkness."

Flender's career has been, if nothing else, a small miracle in the classic Hollywood sense. "Yes, I guess it has," he chuckles. "I'm just this poor boy from the ghetto who beat the odds." Well, hardly the ghetto: Flender was a pampered undergrad at Harvard when he made a student film called The Bloody Mutilators, a gory mix of animation and live action that took a satirical pickax to the use of sex in advertising. Flender's fellow students were selling their high-minded documentaries to venues like HBO for pocket change. But where could he go with a Bloody Mutilators?

"Sending the film to Roger Corman seemed like the natural thing to do," Flender recalls, "and the next thing I knew, I was meeting with him. I had planned to get my foot in the door in any way possible and hang in there, and eventually I would get my chance. During the meeting, Roger asked me if I had any marketing experience, and I was honest and told him no. His response was that he had an opening in marketing and he wanted to know if I'd take it. I said 'Absolutely,' and two weeks later I was the vice president of marketing at Concorde Pictures."

It was a great title, but a dirty job. Flender wrote ad lines, handled the press and once, in a typical Concorde cost-cutting measure, was the eye model for a poster he had also written the copy for. Flender finally fled the realm of flackery for a production gig, overseeing such titles as The Terror Within, Future Kick and Dance With Death before convincing Corman to let him get into the directing act with the Henry Dominic-scripted Unborn.

"In the story development stage of The Unborn, there was some disagreement between Roger and I as to what kind of film we were making," reveals Flender, who co-produced the film with Mike Elliot and guided actress Brooke Adams to what the Los Angeles Times called "[her] best performance since Days Of Heaven." "I wanted to make it more of a psychological horror film, and what Roger wanted was less psychological and more of the actual horror. I think we both got what we wanted in the end."

The film's success led Flender to his first writer/producer/director hat trick on the Sally Kirkland erotic thriller In The Heat Of Passion, a film that, like The Unborn, garnered more press than is usually afforded a Corman quickie. "I was really surprised at the feedback my films for Roger received," he says. "Most of his films don't get any notices, either good or bad."

Flender then donned his writer's cap for his last Corman assignment to date, fashioning the script for Dracula Rising. "Roger called me up and said he wanted the Gone With The Wind of vampire movies," recalled Flender in a 1992 interview. He looked to Bram Stoker's Dracula for inspiration. "Of course, on a Roger Corman schedule you don't have time to read the whole book, so I read the Cliffs Notes." Flender ultimately shared the scripting credit with Daniella Purcell, and critiques director Fred Gallo's work - based on seeing that one reel - by saying simply, "It looked very stylish."

But it remained for The Unborn to be Flender's calling card to future work. Joe Bob Briggs liked it, fans of mutant killer baby movies went crazy for it and it landed Flender his job directing the Tales From The Crypt episode "Food for Thought." The carnival-bound segment features Joan Chen and Ernie Hudson in a love triangle story involving two men, a woman and a gorilla. "We shot that in five days," he says. "It was literally a blur because we were working so fast. But it turned out really well."

Flender has equally high hopes for Leprechaun 2. He realizes that this is a franchise in the making (a third film, possibly Leprechaun 3-D, is already being talked about), and while he balks at taking the reins of another entry, he sees the potential in taking the evil creature further in the future. "The problem with most series characters is that everybody knows they're going to die and then come back in the next film," he says. "But by not making Leprechaun 2 a direct sequel, we've set up the idea of new stories, not necessarily tied to the previous film. People like this character, and when they know they're not going to get more of the same each time storywise, it opens things up considerably."

And the director, who claims he would work with Corman (with whom he still talks regularly) again, refuses to be cynical about Leprechaun 2. "Exciting? Sure, it's exciting. I love this. Thank God for getting these opportunities. It scares me to think of what it might be like for me if these chances weren't around. If Leprechaun 2 wasn't here, I might have to go back to doing publicity."