‘Death of a Unicorn’ review: Less-than-mythic comic horror

Imbuing everyone’s favorite mythical horned horse with bloodlust is such a ready-to-rock concept that it keeps your grindhouse hopes alive for the horror-comedy “Death of a Unicorn,” even as your wandering attention betrays the reality of a wannabe cult movie that mostly gallops in place.

Writer-director Alex Scharfman, doing his best to channel the playful spirit of “Gremlins”-era Joe Dante (if he could have reworked the Tom Cruise fantasy “Legend”), certainly has the energy of a mischievous kid waiting till the grown-ups are asleep before unleashing a dark adventure on someone’s doll collection. Some of that darkness is admirably adult, with themes of grief, ecological destruction and capitalist greed to go with its gory fantasy kick. What should be a nasty hoot, however, is closer to a ho-hum.

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

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

Ridley is, naturally, disgusted by the animal cruelty, which puts a handful of the Leopolds’ on-call scientists to work in a lab. But she’s also disappointed that her father — a well-intentioned widower still struggling to connect with his daughter — wants in on the financial gain by angling for partner status. When she does some online art-history sleuthing, however, she learns that if indeed these magical beasts are real, then likely so are ancient depictions of them as fully capable of savagely fighting back when threatened. Oops.

Usually, when today’s modern folk-horror movies start explaining themselves to you, it’s the moment to roll your eyes and check out. But Scharfman’s notion is indeed inventive, and while waiting for the inevitable siege can get a bit draggy, it occasionally creates some nervy fun.

Especially because these eat-the-rich targets are choice: Alongside Grant’s monomaniacal Odell Leopold, there’s an amusingly self-serious Téa Leoni as his reputation-laundering philanthropic wife (who can’t remember if their organization is evacuating or vaccinating refugees) and a hilarious Will Poulter as their entitled, bro-ey son, the movie’s funniest evocation of cluelessly malevolent ambition. (A close second in laughs is “Barry” alum Anthony Carrigan as the family’s harried manservant.)

The disappointment stems from how clunky and uninspired the mayhem is once the angry tooth-baring unicorn parents attack. But also how Scharfman’s invented lore and the ultimately rote father-daughter drama (dutifully played out by Rudd and Ortega) ultimately gets in the way of our appetite for true creature-feature catharsis.

It certainly doesn’t help that the visual effects are a sloppy commingling of wildly varying quality. Any monster maven’s hopes for a mix of charmingly gonzo fare à la early Peter Jackson or sophisticated “Jurassic Park”-style awe will be regrettably dashed. In “Death of a Unicorn,” the last-act thrills just can’t match the early-going’s billionaire satire that gleefully prescribes a worthier comeuppance.