Horses gallop uneasily into less-than-mythic filmmaking in 'Death of a Unicorn'

Imbuing everyone’s favourite mythical horned equine with bloodlust is specified a ready-to-rock conception that it keeps your grindhouse hopes live for the horror-comedy “Death of a Unicorn,” adjacent arsenic your wandering attraction betrays the world of a wannabe cult movie that mostly gallops successful place.

Writer-director Alex Scharfman, doing his champion to transmission the playful tone of “Gremlins”-era Joe Dante (if helium could person reworked the Tom Cruise phantasy “Legend”), surely has the vigor of a mischievous kid waiting till the grown-ups are dormant earlier unleashing a acheronian escapade connected someone’s doll collection. Some of that acheronian is admirably adult, with themes of grief, ecological demolition and capitalist greed to spell with its gory phantasy kick. What should beryllium a nasty hoot, however, is person to a ho-hum.

This scenario’s archetypal nightmare is an appealingly grounded one: Principled college-age girl Ridley (Jenna Ortega) is successful brooding revolt against being roped into the concern travel of her lawyer dad, Elliot (Paul Rudd). They’re headed to the wilderness compound of his employer, a rapacious, Sackler-like Big Pharma household called the Leopolds, headed by a dying patriarch (Richard E. Grant). Mid-squabble connected a upland road, their rental car hits and mortally wounds a unicorn foal.

For immoderate reason, they cram it into the trunk. And magically, the pair’s proximity to this curiously self-healing carnal results successful Ridley’s acne disappearing and Elliot’s eyesight improving. But the Leopold clan sees a caller empire of wonder-drug riches by harvesting its curative power, including the unicorn’s purple, iridescent humor and the mysterious properties of its occasionally glowing horn.

Ridley is, naturally, disgusted by the carnal cruelty, which puts a fistful of the Leopolds’ on-call scientists to enactment successful a lab. But she’s besides disappointed that her begetter — a well-intentioned widower inactive struggling to link with his girl — wants successful connected the fiscal summation by angling for spouse status. When she does immoderate online art-history sleuthing, however, she learns that if so these magical beasts are real, past apt truthful are past depictions of them arsenic afloat susceptible of savagely warring backmost erstwhile threatened. Oops.

Usually, erstwhile today’s modern folk-horror movies commencement explaining themselves to you, it’s the infinitesimal to rotation your eyes and cheque out. But Scharfman’s conception is so inventive, and portion waiting for the inevitable siege tin get a spot draggy, it occasionally creates immoderate nervy fun.

Especially due to the fact that these eat-the-rich targets are choice: Alongside Grant’s monomaniacal Odell Leopold, there’s an amusingly self-serious Téa Leoni arsenic his reputation-laundering philanthropic woman (who can’t retrieve if their enactment is evacuating oregon vaccinating refugees) and a hilarious Will Poulter arsenic their entitled, bro-ey son, the movie’s funniest evocation of cluelessly malevolent ambition. (A adjacent 2nd successful laughs is “Barry” alum Anthony Carrigan arsenic the family’s harried manservant.)

The disappointment stems from however clunky and uninspired the mayhem is erstwhile the aggravated tooth-baring unicorn parents attack. But besides however Scharfman’s invented lore and the yet rote father-daughter play (dutifully played retired by Rudd and Ortega) yet gets successful the mode of our appetite for existent creature-feature catharsis.

It surely doesn’t assistance that the ocular effects are a sloppy commingling of wildly varying quality. Any monster maven’s hopes for a premix of charmingly gonzo fare à la aboriginal Peter Jackson oregon blase “Jurassic Park”-style awe volition beryllium regrettably dashed. In “Death of a Unicorn,” the last-act thrills conscionable can’t lucifer the early-going’s billionaire satire that gleefully prescribes a worthier comeuppance.