The Great Land of Small

If you're looking to see something really, really weird, you can't go wrong with a Canadian movie about a psychedelic leprechaun land. The Great Land of Small is very much the way I remembered it from my youth, although given how poorly the special effects have aged, I must have been less discerning about such things then. Also, I originally saw it in theaters, and the quality of the home video version isn't very good: the movie's not available on DVD or in widescreen, so I had to get it on fullscreen VHS. In some scenes, the pan-and-scan people obviously couldn't get things to work out right. Also, the contrast was a little too much. I certainly hope someone will remaster this movie and get it on a DVD someday.

As for the story, the plot does deliver: Fritz the leprechaun (played by a dwarf, not someone in forced perspective) turns up in our world after five hundred years away to check and see if humanity is ready to use his magic gold dust. Apparently, the last time he tried offering this stuff around, the humans only wanted to use the gold's powers to get control of others. Now he tries giving a bag of it to a poacher who happens to be out hunting in the forest with his men. Also present in the forest is Mimick the native American guy, of whom the hunters know little for whom they care less, since they think he's crazy. In fact, Mimick is the only guy around who can see Fritz, since he truly believes in the Great Land of Small and its fantastic visitors to this world.

Meanwhile, a single mother (apparently widowed or divorced) of two children (a 12-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy) who also happens to be a circus acrobat (of all things), is taking her kids up north to visit with her Irish parents in Quebec. When they get there, the grandfather proceeds to do his paternal duty and fill his grandkids' heads with fantastic nonsense, albeit nonsense that (for this movie, at least) turns out to be true. When the boy finds his way to the end of a very brightly-colored rainbow, there's Fritz the leprechaun, and his sister has to put aside her skepticism of the fantastic before she manages to see him. They take Fritz home, give him a tour of their place, and feed him some modern snack food, including obvious product-placement Pepsi, which causes him to bloat up and levitate until he lets out the gas with several belches.

Meanwhile, Mimick meets the hunter's grown-up daughter in the bar she and her father run. (They live in the upstairs apartment), and gives her a nugget made of Fritz's enchanted gold as a gift before her father drives him away. Her father, of course, has been experimenting with the gold dust, has taken a liking to its magic, and has noticed the gold Mimick gave his daughter as well. Later, while she's out somewhere, he goes through her jewelry drawer and swipes the nugget for himself, leaving the daughter to wonder what happened to it. As she (and we) eventually discover, her father has gotten quite hooked on this magic gold dust, he's determined to find more, and he has his buddies out looking for--they're not exactly sure what, but he claims they'll know it when they see it.

Eventually, he and his hunting buddies start suspecting that Mimick and the children have what they're looking for and their activities culminate in a chase in which Fritz and the children get into a canoe and paddle out on the river to get away from the hunters. Seeing they're headed for disaster (rapids and presumably a waterfall), the kids appeal to Fritz to do something, and he does: he takes them to the Great Land of Small in inner space (something like the "inner space" of the Supergirl movie, apparently) where this cinematic acid trip really gets going.

The Great Land of Small is apparently peopled entirely with floating butterfly-winged people and French acrobats and jugglers in garishly colored skin suits. (Also in this land is--don't blink--a young Warwick Davis among the extras in one of those skin suits.) The King and Queen there are enamored of the children and want to make them their own. For this purpose, they bring out the Slimo, a big floating wrinkled gray-skinned globe of a creature with a differently-sized pair of glowing red eyes and facial features remarkably similar to Jabba the Hutt's. While apparently not very articulate in any language (unless he's speaking Huttese or something), the Slimo has the power to transform anyone the King and Queen send down the chute into his pool to be "Slimoed" and thereby to solve petty disputes and grant certain wishes. The King and Queen plan to transform the children into their own by this method, but the kids get wind of this plot from Fritz, and beg him to take them back home. Although he only has one spell left to him and therefore won't be able to get back to his own beloved fantastic land, Fritz finally yields to their pleading and takes them back home.

There they meet the hunter's daughter, who takes them back to their worried parents. (They've been gone for two days and everyone's looking for them, probably presuming they've drowned.) The hunter and company, meanwhile, have taken Mimick captive and are trying to get him to tell what he knows. The children, the daughter, Fritz, and a couple of other friends they've picked up in the Great Land of Small therefore embark on a rescue mission that culminates with the daughter confronting her power-mad (and dust-addicted) father on a local black slate mountain. After some simplistic and cheesy dialogue and bad special effects, everything turns out well for everyone in the end.

The Great Land of Small is a kids' movie, and that some potential plot threads presented near the beginning (such as possible romantic interests between the mother and a cop she meets on her trip to her parents' place and between Mimick and the hunter's daughter) are not pursued is therefore perhaps excusable. The special effects are roughly of the same quality as those of the original Star Trek series, with the film's makers apparently operating on a very modest budget. Nevertheless, the film really pushes some of the boundaries of what can be done in a "G" movie: the hunters do fire their guns in a few scenes (although they never actually hit anyone) and there's a fair amount of alcohol served up at the bar in the scene involving Mimick and his gold nugget. The scenes involving the hunter and his gold-dust addiction are potentially disturbing to children, considering not only that the magic dust smacks of cocaine and "angel dust" and other powdery narcotics thematically, but that the hunter also gets surrounded with a hellish red glow and laughs diabolically when he's using it. I'm sure this film must have raised an eyebrow or two with more sensitive parents and their children.

Again, the film hasn't aged all that well, and the two decidedly forgettable saccharine songs played in it definitely are not welcome additions to the mix. The editing and pacing are also a bit choppy, with the plot threads taking a while to weave themselves together into a coherent story. Still, for lovers of weird and crazy stuff of the seemingly drug-induced variety, this is a definite must-see. The Canadians have successfully made a movie that will leave you viewers scratching your heads in bewilderment just as much as any of the weirder animes from Japan might. If you ever want an acid trip without actually doing LSD, I definitely recommend this film to you; I swear I could almost hear the Beatles singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" when the kids got to the Great Land of Small.