Years ago I saw a quite clever B movie called Killer Klowns From Outer Space. It followed the tropes and cliches of bog-standard zombie or alien invasion movies; but the flying saucer was a Big Top and the aliens were clowns. The sounds of car hooters became threatening; popcorn creeping under your door was as scary as fog or blood. I forget if there was any rationale to the aliens' appearance.
Death of a Unicorn is, I think, doing the same kind of thing on a higher budget. A group of characters are holed up in a big house in the middle of nowhere, being picked off, one by one, by Scary Monsters. It is very, very gory; but I find over the top gore rather un-affecting. Someone having their finger broken by a gangster can make me look away from the screen; but someone being ripped in two so all their intestines spill out is merely a quite good special effect.
But, spoiler alert, the scary monsters are not aliens or vampires but unicorns.
You would think that characters in horror films would have learned by now not to stand in front of doors. The trope in which a character seems to be safe, only to impaled by a sudden Horn happens more than once. The horn is clearly standing in for aliens with razor claws.
There are sort of kind of some ideas. It is true that in some versions of the legend, unicorns are fierce creatures; that's why it is significant that they will lay their heads in the lap of a pure in heart virgin.
Eliot (Paul "Antman" Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) are driving to a very important meeting with Eliot's boss Odell Leopald (Richard E Grant) on a remote estate. On the way, their car collides with an animal which turns out to be a unicorn foal, and they conceal the remains in their car. The unicorn's blood seems to cure Ridley's acne and Eliot's allergies: after some experimentation, its horn even cures Odell's cancer. All the other local unicorns converge on the house, but the nasty Leopald family are hatching schemes to sell unicorn horn and unicorn blood as a miracle pharmaceutical. Richard E Grant is as funny as he always is, and in roughly the same way; and Rudd and Ortega have an amiable father/daughter rapport. But three quarters of the movie boils down to an exercise in establishing what order the characters are going to be killed in, and in what unpleasant ways.
There is currently in pop culture a rather weird cute-ification of the unicorn trope; I suppose indirectly derived from My Little Pony via Daisy Meadows and a race-memory of some New Age album covers. The idea that unicorns literally shit rainbows is mainstream enough to turn up in children's books. So a movie which repositions the wee timorous beasties as something scary and dangerous is perhaps to be welcomed. But it can't quite escape from the New Age imagery: at the beginning of the film Ridley looks into the dying unicorn's eyes and has a weird psychedelic experience, being pulled through swirly star scapes and tunnels of light. One briefly wonders if she is going to end up in a pristine white hotel room and be reborn as a space embryo. It is implied that the unicorn was somehow dragging her through space to a literal afterlife where she could have been reunited with her dead mother. And the film seems to end with their car joyfully crashing off the road, Thelma and Louise style, so they can go to Unicorn Heaven. This seems to me to be intrinsically unhealthy and a rather weird fit to the rest of the story.
Some people like splattery shlock horror; some are a bit disgusted or disapproving of it; and some merely find it dull. I think this was a pretty entertaining, wilfully twisted, but ultimately pointless take on the genre.
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