PopHorror Let's Get Scared
4. Screw You-nicorn (1984)
Directed by George Mihalka
Written by George Mihalka
Starring Stellan Skarsgard, M. Emmett Walsh, Jimmy Peanutbutter
After the success and censorship of My Bloody Valentine (1981), George Mihalka abandoned any attempt at collaboration with this shameless attempt to go double or nothing on that sweet slasher cash.
A group of mercenary hunters led by Sgt. Antler (played like a drugged bulldog by M. Emmett Walsh) are contacted by an eccentric foreigner (a young and vibrant Stellan Skaarsgard in his first American role) convinced there’s an actual unicorn in the Icelandic wilderness and will pay top dollar for its horn. The group then travels to Iceland (if the forest in the film is actually Iceland and is not the woods of tax-incentive covered Canada, I’ll buy a time machine and personally apologize to Mihalka on opening night of this movie) to stalk the unicorn.
However, once the team gets deep into the woods, they begin to get be picked off one by one by a psychopath in a cheap horse outfit armed with what appears to be an actual ivory elephant tusk. It’s bloody, pointless (no pun intended) and wonderfully stupid, but Mihalka, in interviews at the time, swore that the film has a deeper meaning.
Screw You-nicorn is meant to be Mihalka’s screed against animal abuse. His psychopath (*spoiler alert*) ends up being the wealthy foreigner’s son (played the muscular and terrifying Jimmy Peanutbutter) whose childhood pet dog was slain in a freak hunting accident. Mihalka wants us to know that hunting and hurting animals is wrong, and the consequences can be as bad as an ivory horn up the butt (watch the movie – I’m serious!).
