Comedy and horror are like chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes that taste great together.
But you can’t just throw the two together and expect a delicious confection to be the result. Not only do you have to get the ratios right, it’s important to consider what kind of comedy you are throwing into the mix.
Slapstick works best (see “Evil Dead 2” for a top-shelf example) and meta-humor is a close second (see “The Cabin in the Woods” or the “Scream” franchise for horror movies that know they are horror movies).
Social satire, on the other hand, that’s a bit trickier. “Death of a Unicorn” tries its best mixing these complex ingredients and while the result is passable, it winds up biting off more than it can chew.
The heart of the movie focuses on the father/daughter relationship of Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) whose relationship is strained following a family tragedy.
Elliot brings Ridley along on a business trip where they must venture to a remote location to meet with a wealthy family looking to settle some legal affairs.
On the way to the sprawling estate, Elliot and Ridley drive through a scenic nature preserve when they suddenly strike an animal with their car.
When they get out to investigate, they are shocked because the animal in question could only be described as a unicorn. They load the animal’s body into the car and head to the estate where they quickly discover that the carcass has almost magical healing properties.
The obnoxious and craven billionaire family, consisting of patriarch Odell (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and adult son Shepard (Wil Poulter), immediately see dollar signs.
Ignoring Ridley’s protestations about profiting off of the creature’s corpse, Elliot gets caught up in the family’s financial scheming. That is, until it becomes clear that there are other strange things alive and well lurking in the forest.
The cast does a lot of the heavy lifting here as Grant, Leoni and Poulter do their best to add a little dimension to the oblivious selfishness of their characters. Some of the class-warfare jokes hit their mark, but the incisiveness required for the satire to be truly biting are shoved aside for the creature-feature mayhem.
Writer/director Alex Scharfman deserves credit for taking such an ambitious swing in his first feature as he handles the horror aspects of the film admirably in spite of some janky, computer-generated effects.
The real heroes here are Rudd and Ortega, who keep the movie grounded and somehow manage to give it a little heart as they work to patch up their relationship amidst all the ridiculousness.
I admire “Death of a Unicorn” for taking some chances and daring to be different in a movie landscape full of sequels and spinoffs. Originality is, unfortunately, something that is becoming as rare as the film’s titular creature.
“Death of a Unicorn” is rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use.
