Rid­ley Scott’s 1986 fan­tasy exper­i­ment Leg­end fea­tures a very young Tom Cruise (before he was “Tom Cruise”), costar­ring oppo­site vats upon vats of glit­ter. Cruise’s per­for­mance is bizarre and high-pitched, com­posed of crouched poses and unfo­cused stares. But to be fair, how else would any actor por­tray an unciv­i­lized wild-child with a weirdly mun­dane name like Jack? Mia Sara is unmem­o­rable as Princess Lily, save for the spec­tac­u­larly plung­ing neck­line she sports in the sec­ond half of the film (dur­ing which many par­ents were no doubt cov­er­ing the eyes of their innocents).

That nice Cruise boy

There is plenty of very pretty cin­e­matog­ra­phy to be enjoyed, but This Dork Reporter regrets to report that Leg­end is awful and almost painful to sit through. I recall lov­ing the roughly con­tem­po­rary fan­tasy film The Dark Crys­tal (1982) as a child, but ruined the pleas­ant mem­ory by watch­ing it again as an adult and dis­cov­er­ing it to be tedious and con­de­scend­ing (with, granted, some incred­i­ble pup­petry and art direc­tion). Per­haps if I had seen Leg­end as a kid I might feel similarly.

The entire plot hinges on the kinds of typ­i­cally arbi­trary rules that char­ac­ter­ize the fan­tasy genre. Pay atten­tion, kids: only a vir­gin can touch a uni­corn, it seems, but alas, they should never do so, lest the sun set for­ever and the world be con­sumed by The Lord of Dark­ness (Tim Curry). What’s a vir­gin, you ask? Shush. Not incon­sid­er­able run­ning time is taken up with awk­ward slap­stick involv­ing midgets, de rigueur in every movie fan­tasy since Terry Gilliam’s Time Ban­dits. Speak­ing of, Gilliam’s dark romp is by far the best of the 1980s hey­day of fan­tasy movies – a genre not to return to promi­nence for almost two decades until the lucra­tive fran­chises Harry Pot­ter, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Mate­ri­als, and The Chron­i­cles of Narnia.

Girls and their uni­corns! This can only end in tears.

Even the old-school opti­cal spe­cial effects are crummy, for which it is no excuse to say the film came before the age of CGI. The uni­corns’ rub­ber horns vis­i­bly wob­ble, and a flut­ter­ing Tinkerbell-like fairy crea­ture is a painfully obvi­ous lit­tle light­bulb mounted on a wire dis­cernible even on a low-resolution TV screen. No inch of skin is left unpainted with glit­ter, and never have bub­ble machines worked so over­time since The Lawrence Welk Show. But per­haps the most puz­zling detail of all is in the sound design: uni­corns sing whalesong, evidently.

All sorts of ques­tions arise as screen­writer William Hjortsbertg’s plot comes to its train­wreck con­clu­sion: What hap­pens to The Prince of Dark­ness’ evilly goad­ing mother? Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman’s bril­liant Beowulf script did not fail to explore the vast Freudian story poten­tial of a monster’s manip­u­la­tive mother. And where did the last sur­viv­ing uni­corn find its mate at the end? Did the uni­corn killed ear­lier in the film revive some­how, and if so, why? Even Disney’s Bambi didn’t chicken out by resus­ci­tat­ing the mur­dered mother.

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report: