Death of a Unicorn is funny. Put a bunch of great actors in a fantasy about running into a real live unicorn, give them a ridiculous plot about the perils of capitalism, and let them play. That’s what happens here.

Death of a Unicorn stars Jenna Ortega as Ridley. If you’re a fan of Alien, you may recognize the name Ridley as being a whole lot like Ripley and like the Alien director Ridley Scott. You may also recognize some scenes in Death of a Unicorn as being direct copies of Alien. Ditto for Jurassic Park.

Ridley and her dad Elliot (Paul Rudd) are on their way to a wildlife sanctuary run by dying billionaire Odell (Richard E. Grant), his wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), and his over-privileged, over-drugged, over-entitled son Shepard (Will Poulter).

They crash into a unicorn on the highway.

The unicorn should be dying but it’s not. It’s reviving. When Ridley touches its horn because it’s glowing with energy, she has a cosmic experience with the unicorn and her recently deceased mother. Elliot ends this experience by bashing the unicorn with a tire iron and stashing it in the back of his car.

The unicorn blood that spattered Ridley’s face cured her acne. The unicorn blood that spattered Elliot’s face cured his allergies and his eyesight. When the dying Odell figures out what’s happening he wants him some of that unicorn, STAT.

Odell gets his science team (Sunita Mani and Steve Park) to grind up some unicorn horn. He takes it and he’s good as new. His eyes fill with dollar signs as Odell, Belinda, and Shepard work the phones selling unicorn horn for millions of dollars an ounce. Elliot likes the idea of being rich so he goes along with it.

Ridley researches unicorns and concludes that they better stop messing with this animal. She has several reasons, but a big one is that mama and papa unicorn are out in the woods and they want their baby back. They’re coming for the bad humans. Indeed they are.

The CGI on the unicorns is all over the place. Sometimes they look like big roaring monsters with voices like dinosaurs. Sometimes they are soft and cute as horses. Sometimes they are huge, sometimes not. Sometimes they have big pointed canines and sometimes they don’t. The male unicorn has a horn like a giant serrated steak knife that can drill a big hole in a human belly.

The movie can be scary and gory, but it definitely does not take itself seriously. The actors are having a swell time running with this one. It’s goofy, over the top, and a lot of fun. Alex Scharfman wrote and directed this fantasy.

Watch it on HBO Max.