Slasher films dominated 80's cinema. 60% of all box office intake during 1983 was for various hack-'em-ups. Masked killers rampaged screens worldwide, spilling blood and severing heads in the name of the glorious slasher film. From this brave time came the franchises of the earliest and most innovative of the knife-wielding herd, with only the best slasher films deemed able to carry on their name, even as the genre began to decay. Then came a glorious second term, and the mid-90s brought slasher films, and their endless franchising options, back to our screens in full force. Old faces returned, literally, for another stab, and renovations to the genre brought new scares to new generations. The greatest names of slasher films at the time kept on churning out movies for better or for worse and many established franchises continued to grow. I could ramble endlessly about some of the worst slasher film franchises and the ones that should have been placed in Jigsaw's bathroom for their crimes, but today I thought it would mark a change to trek across over 70 films worth of the best in hack and slash entertainment. These are the franchises that lasted the longest, shocked the highest and spilled the most blood...
10. Leprechaun
Number of films: 6 (plus 1 in production) The one and only so-bad-it's-good series on this list, Leprechaun treads the fine line between bewilderingly bad and bad enough it's not even funny to watch. But the closer a terrible film gets to the line, the better it gets for entertainment value. Leprechaun stars Warwick Davis as the pint-sized, titular Irish legend who goes from jolly green to jolly mean the moment someone steals his gold. It's purely a cheesy, slapstick, gory romp from start to finish. And that is all it set out to be. Then they made five more romps, each more outrageous than the last. Great credit must go to Davis for sticking with the character as the films got increasingly worse, because without him the series would lose almost all of its worth as the ultimate in boozy night-in entertainment. With latter movies taking up subtitles such as In Space or In Da Hood, Leprechaun is most definitely well aware of its reputation, daring to scrape ever further down into the bottom of the barrel.