The Second Trailer for “Death of a Unicorn 🦄” Doesn’t Look Any Better

 

(This is the poster for Death of a Unicorn 🦄.) 

I can’t believe I may be using my last post for the month of February on this piece of dog crap looking movie. I was supposed to either review The Killer’s Game or Venom: The Last Dance and have that be my last post for February, but those reviews have stalled. They stalled because I don’t have a copy of Venom: The Last Dance on Blu-Ray or 4K 💿 nor can I check to see if I can watch it on Fandango at Home since for some reason, it isn’t working on my PS4. It keeps saying that something is wrong with the network, even though it’s connected to Wi-Fi 🛜 and it’s a pretty good Wi-Fi connection 🛜. 

 

And while I do have The Killer’s Game in my possession, I have it on Blu-Ray 💿, I haven’t been able to watch it because I’ve been wanting to watch it with my grandma and my grandma keeps forgetting to watch it with me. Things keep coming up, things keep getting added to her plate, and we end not watching it. We were supposed to watch it yesterday because she forgot, and she just ended up binge watching that Netflix show about Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, you know, the show that’s full of self-aggrandizing lies that only serve to try to make Prince Harry and Meghan look like victims when they aren’t, and to antagonize the rest of the British royal family 🇬🇧 (except for Prince Harry’s deceased mother Princess Diana) and paint them in the worst light imaginable. So, I don’t know when or if we’re ever going to watch it. I may end up just having to watch it on my own because my grandma isn’t coming through on her end. 

I wasn’t even really planning on watching this trailer, when I saw it in my recommended feed, I was just going to ignore it and watch other videos, but I decided to watch it out of curiosity to see if it made the movie look any better than the first trailer did. Spoiler alert ⚠️! It didn’t 👎. I’m going to be totally honest with you, this movie doesn’t look good at all, in fact, it looks really bad. It just looks like a really stupid movie, and not in good way, it doesn’t look like the fun kind of stupid where you can turn your brain 🧠 off and enjoy, it looks like the frustrating kind of stupid, the kind of stupid where you can’t turn your brain 🧠 off to enjoy it because it’s just so frustrating 😤. 

I mean, it is cool to see Jenna Ortega finally do a role where she isn’t just playing a goth character or a goth adjacent character, you know the kind where she’s dark and moody, and monotone and deadpan, and is super dismissive and rude to everyone around her. A lot of people where saying that she was being typecast to only play Wednesday Addams type characters, especially after she was in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice where she played a very similar character to Wednesday in that movie. And yeah, it was getting kind of frustrating and sad to see Jenna Ortega seemingly be typecast at such a young age. She’s only 22 years old at the time of me writing this (she was born in 2002, September 27, 2002 to be exact), she’s younger than me by 4 years, but I’m glad that she finally landed a role where she could get out of the Wednesday Addams shadow, at least for a little bit. In this movie, Death of a Unicorn 🦄, she kind of just looks like a regular girl ♀︎, not gothic in the slightest. If anything her character in this movie looks like a dumb clueless stoner because we see her smoking weed in the first trailer, getting high. 

 

 

 

(This is a photo of Jenna Ortega, wearing a suit and tie, looking fabulous. I always like it when I see a woman ♀︎ wearing a suit and tie like that.) 

 

 

It’s also cool to see her paired up with Paul Rudd, I like Paul Rudd, I think he’s a good actor and cool guy ♂︎. I just wish that they were in something better than this, this pure schlock that doesn’t even look worthy of being on Adult Swim. That goes for everyone else in the cast, this movie does a decent cast, like Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, like these are all great actors, and they deserve to be in something better than this. A movie about a bunch of people in the woods 🌲 discovering a unicorn 🦄 and killing it to try to gain immortality, and then there’s an evil unicorn 🦄 out there that’s black and has razor sharp teeth or something and it’s trying to kill them, while they’re all fighting over the “good” unicorn 🦄’s remains. That’s probably not something that they should’ve shown in the trailer. Probably shouldn’t have shown the good unicorn 🦄 in this trailer either, but whatever. 

Even the trailer itself is poorly put together, like this wasn’t even a good trailer. The first trailer was a lot better if you could believe that. Like, the part where Paul Rudd’s character says “this forest 🌲 was bought from the Leopolds,” or something to that effect, was very poorly edited, it sounded like it was ADRed in or it was chopped up from other dialogue. And they used, I kid you not, the Jurassic Park T. rex roar for whenever the unicorn 🦄 is around, like the trailer is trying make it seem like it was the unicorn 🦄 producing that roar, or like the evil unicorn 🦄 is. 

 

When Paul Rudd’s character says “what was that sound?” when that roar is used for the first time, I was almost tempted to say “A T. rex?” and I was kind of hoping that Will Poulter’s character would say that or something like that, like “maybe it was a dinosaur,” but no, he just says “it’s probably just a moose 🫎,” as if a moose 🫎 is even capable of making a sound like that. Now if he said it was an elephant 🐘, that would be somewhat acceptable to because they did actually use a baby elephant 🐘 noise to create the T. rex roar in Jurassic Park, they combined the roar of a lion 🦁 with the scream of a baby elephant 🐘 to make that roar. 

 

Someone even made a joke in the comments about how this feels similar to Jurassic Park, and how all it’s missing is some ripples in a glass of water 💦 as a heavy footsteps approach. Or I guess, hoofsteps in this case since unicorns 🦄 have hooves, or at least most depictions of unicorns 🦄 do. I don’t know if this movie’s unicorns 🦄 do. Also, when they say “Leopolds,” do they mean the Belgian royal family 🇧🇪, like King Leopold I, King Leopold II, and King Leopold III and their house, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha? Like this forest 🌲 used to belong to King Leopold I or King Leopold II or even King Leopold III? Probably not, but that’s where my mind goes to when I hear the name, Leopold.

So yeah, this movie doesn’t look good at all, it looks like completely garbage 🗑️. One comment said that it looked like a fake movie, like a parody of a dumb stoner comedy with fantasy elements that you would see on YouTube or like a fake movie you would see people watching in the background of another movie. I do agree with that, it does look like a fake movie that for some reason was made for real, but the commenter who said that, said it as a compliment where I see it more as an insult. I do not plan on watching it or reviewing it for this blog. This will probably be my only word on it publicly. 

 

I won’t be surprised at all if it ends up tanking at the box office 😞 and getting panned by critics 👎. I’d be more surprised if it was a box office success 🤑 and was adored by critics 👍, but I suppose it would be because Jenna Ortega is still a bankable name and a movie can still make a lot of money 💵 just by having her name attached to it, and would also mean that people have a worse taste in movies than I thought. If you want a better take on this sort of storyline, “people discovering a unicorn 🦄 to prove the skeptics wrong,” watch the Mighty B! 🐝 episode, “Children of the Unicorn 🦄” (get it? It’s supposed to be a pun or an allusion to the Stephen King horror film series, Children of the Corn 🌽). The unicorn 🦄 in that episode had rainbow farts 🌈 that smelled like apple cinnamon 🍎. In fact, this movie does look like a really bad combination of that Mighty B! 🐝 episode and the movie Surviving the Game, with Ice-T, Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, Charles S. Dutton, John C. McGinley, and F. Murray Abraham, that was a loose adaptation of the Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game. Except in this case, the “most dangerous game” is a unicorn 🦄. 

I no longer have any faith whatsoever in the A24 brand, it has fallen off so much in recent years, like 2023 and 2024 were really the years when A24 really started to lose its luster and it’s carefully cultivated and curated image as being a studio that only puts out quality films and prioritizing unique visions that larger studios wouldn’t otherwise give a chance to. I mean, you can’t exactly say that you only put out quality films when you release garbage like Y2K, a movie that hardly anyone saw and that ones who did hated 😠👎. Some would even lump Civil War 🇺🇸 (2024) into that as well since there were people who didn’t care for Civil War 🇺🇸 (2024) and in fact hated it 😠👎, and not for the reasons you might think. The people who disliked that movie didn’t dislike it so much because it was “too political,” but that it wasn’t political enough, and it was toothless and cowardly for refusing to take any position whatsoever, say anything politically meaningful because of the fear of offending anyone. Civil War 🇺🇸 (2024) was too centrist for some people. 

 

 

 

(This is the logo of A24.) 

 

 

 

There will still be good movies released by A24, at least for the time being, but there will be a lot more bad movies released by them too and some would even say they already released bad movies, and their image of being invincible and being committed to quality and uniqueness has been forever shattered. You can’t recover from that I’m afraid. Their image of being an independent studio that only prioritizes independent movies, supports independent filmmakers, and doesn’t give into commercialism or corporatism has also been shattered since they have a Death Stranding movie in the works that may or may not get made. And yes, Death Stranding does fit them and their perceived sensibilities, but it’s clearly a calculated move to do something much more commercial that will appeal to a much wider audience than the typical people that A24 tends to appeal to. 

 

You don’t get to say that A24 hasn’t given into commercialism anymore when they’re currently making a movie that is very much commercial. Even movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Civil War 🇺🇸 were sort of like them dipping their toes into making movies that were more mainstream and would be more commercial successes 🤑 rather than just receive critical acclaim, or be nominated for awards, or be the subject of pretentious video essayists. 

 

I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way about A24. Martin from Double Toasted was the first one that I saw express this sort of opinion about A24, when he did a quick review of Y2K on the Double Toasted secondary channel Double Toasted Bites. Yeah, there will always be A24 apologists, the A24 cult is still alive and well, but more and more people are waking up to the fact that A24 is not as great as they used to be, if they were ever great to begin with. If that wasn’t just good marketing. If that wasn’t just their PR team making them look good and gaining the affection and devotion of certain groups of cinephiles. 

 

 

 

 

(Here are some comments from the comment section of the trailer that I thought were of note and were worth screenshotting, including the one about this looking a fake movie that was made real for some reason.)

 

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(This is the second trailer for Death of a Unicorn 🦄.)