bad/awesome flixxx review: Legend (1985)

"May be innocent, may be sweet... ain't half as nice as rotting meat."- Blix

"Oh, Mother Night! Fold your dark arms about me. Protect me in your black embrace. I sit alone, an impotent exile, whilst this form, this presence, returns to torment me!"- Lord of Darkness

"I hear a throat begging to be cut!"- Princess Lily

Ridley Scott directed Alien in 1979, Blade Runner in 82 (I think) and then this in 85. Pretty heavy pressure to follow up two massive blockbuster sci fi epics and try to crush a fantasy film, but he does a great job. Its a good vs. Evil story straight out of the fairytale books starring Tom Cruise as animal loving backwoods orphan boy, Ferris Bueller's girlfriend Sloan Peterson as a princess and Tim Curry as Satan. All of them battle it out in LEGEND!!!





So, ( I've been paused on that comma for a few minutes, sorry I'm being distracted by this Macho Man Randy Savage Retrospective DVD blaring in the background, RIP) - Satan the lord and master of darkness decides that he wants to defeat all of his enemies. Who is his greatest enemy? The light, the opposite of his existence. So he gets his lowliest of goblins Blix to go and capture the last of the unicorns so that he can force the world into darkness forever. Meanwhile Sloan Peterson is a princess frolicking through her homeland stealing pie from old maids, and hanging out with the lower class. She sneaks off into the woods to flirt with this bumpkin boy who is nice to animals. The boy is Jack from all the fairy tales. You know Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack and Jill, Jack jumped over the candlestick; that guy. The Princess Lily (sloan) wants to see his pets. She's seducing this poor kid and he brings her to a special place in the woods that he waited a long time to show her.



He takes her out to show her the magic spot where one day a year the last of the unicorns hangs on earth with his girlfriend on a unicorn date. Sloan Peterson sneaks out to steal a touch of the magic creature at the exact moment that Blix and his buddies shoot a dart into the unicorn's throat. The unicorns freak and take off, and Jack is super pissed because he told her not to touch it, and now he knows that not only does she never listen, but she also freaked the unicorns out and now he'll probably never see them again. She tricks him into not being mad by throwing her ring in the lake & claiming that she'll marry him if he can find the ring. So he fucking plunges in head first. Blix and the goblins go after the unicorn and the one passes out and they chop his horn off. Right at that moment, The world plunges into a cold snowy winter darkness. But the sun hasn't set though...somehow?



Princess Lily runs back to town and freaks out when she sees her friends are frozen. She hides from the goblins but learns that it wasn't her fault that the shit went down. But she goes to warn everyone they are coming for the other unicorn. Jack burst from the ice lake and found he was in big trouble with a fairy, an elf, and 2 dwarves. They are all pissed he brought a chick around until he tells them he did it for love. So they go try to figure what has happened. They find the wounded unicorn and decide that they have to find his horn so everything will be cool again. The elf takes him to get some weapons. When Sloan comes back she gets kidnapped along with the other unicorn and taken back to Satan. A dress dances around and the princess puts it on and then Satan comes out of a mirror and says gimme YOU. And she says no and tricks him into thinking he's gonna bang him later.



So the party goes off on an adventure trying to make their way to Satan's castle to rescue the princess and save the unicorn. They figure out that the fairy can go from looking like a firefly to the size of a real girl. Eventually Jack devises a scheme using a bunch of mirrored shields to shine some of the light that is left up on the surface world down into Hell or wherever they are. If the light hits Satan then they'll knock him into space and save everything, after they put the horn back on the the 'corn. "nahm sayn?" As with most of these stories, alls well that ends well. This is a beautiful looking flick especially if you dig fantasy stuff. The sets are great, the characters are definitely based on Disney motifs which were also stolen from many different stories of old. But the colors and design is reminiscent of Disney for sure. By now a classic, check it if you never have.