Movie buffs who dig “good bad flicks” should check out Slate.com’s podcast SlateV and look for host and movie writer Mark Jordan Legan’s Your Guide to the Worst Cinematic Crap Ever Made. The hilarious new episode, “Bad Movies: Leprechaun Flicks,” is an “all Irish” edition focusing on terrible Irish accents, ridiculous plots, implausible storylines, and laughable dialog (Legan calls them “so twisted and weird, they’re more disturbing tan the potato famine.”).
Mark Jordan Legan is the man behind the weekly “Summary Judgment” segment for Slate and NPR’s Day to Day.
Featured flicks include 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow, starring Fed Astaire (it was Francis Ford Coppola’s first movie, right out of UCLA film school!); a 1959 Disney movie called Darby O’Gill and the Little People (starring a singing Sean Connery, just a few years before his first Bond role); and various installments of Trimark Pictures’ hokey Leprechaun slasher/horror series (the fifth was 2000’s Leprechaun in the Hood, co-starring Ice T!).
From my own blurry memory of decent-to-great Irish-tinged films and scenes (mostly during some movie-reviewing years in th 1990s), these fairly authentic characters are among my personal favorites:
• Colm Meaney as “Larry” in director Stephen Frear’s 1996 film The Van (based on Irish author Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy).
• Tina Kellegher as the pregnant “Sharon Curley” in director Stephen Frear’s 1993 comedy The Snapper (Meaney plays her da’!). 
• Emer McCourt as the young Dublin pub singer “Susan” in director Ken Loach’s very dry 1990 romantic comedy Riff Raff — with accents so thick there were subtitles (an early film for Scottish actor Robert Carlysle).
• Northern Irish actor Kenneth Branagh as not-so-Irish lawyer “Rick Magruder” in Robert Altman’s 1998 legal thriller The Gingerbread Man.
• Gabrielle Byrne as the straight-faced “Tom Reagan” in the Coen Brothers’ 1990 Prohibition-era crime/thriller Miller’s Crossing.
• Northern Ireland actor Liam Neeson in the titled role of director Neil Jordan’s 1996 drama/thriller Michael Collins.
• The three leads in writer/director Kirk Jones’s amusing 1998 village comedy Waking Ned Devine: Ian Bannen as “Jackie O’Shea,” Fionnula Flanagan (pictured) as his wife, “Annie O’Shea,” and the thin and wiry David Kelly as the O’Shea sidekick, “Michael O’Sullivan.”
