Unwelcome is basically Straw Dogs with leprechauns (or their more unruly cousins: Red Hats). Or it could even be Leprechaun X: Leprechauns In Da Ireland. Or a throwback to ’80s movies like Ghoulies, Critters, The Gate, or even Gremlins. It’s a mash-up… or a mix-up.

The flick is about a London couple who move to Ireland and hire some local handymen to fix up their new house. But those workers are unruly in a stereotypically Irish kind of way. Oh, and they also have to deal with the local Little Folk fairy folk… Red Caps who demand a nightly blood sacrifice (pretty much liver from the grocer, but beggars can’t be choosers).

This film is sometimes remarkably cheap looking. It’s exterior set looks like a bad soundstage design sometimes (and other times, exteriors are fine). Its creature effects are a weird mix of interesting makeup/animatronic heads with sometimes convincing and sometimes unconvincing integration with the live action plates. It’s kind of a mess.

The tone of the film for the first two acts is serious but when the Red Caps show up, the movie goes campy. Not obviously campy, but just kind of weird and out-of-sorts… like they’d set out to make one movie but couldn’t make the little people work so they shrugged and just went gory. And that last act IS amusingly gory. And the final moments are unhinged weird and I have no idea what tone they were trying for.

This is a wild mixed bag of a horror comedy that I’m not sure was meant to be a comedy. But it IS funny and it might be trying to do bonkers and serious at the same time. I don’t get it. But I kind of had fun with it. That’s something.

Score: 74