Legend (PG/not rated)
Break Room of Geeks; IMDb; Regency; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Universal; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 1985 in the UK and 1986 in the US. I don't remember being aware of it at the time, but I do know that I wanted to see it for many years before I finally did in 2022. Unfortunately, I ended up not liking it. The visuals are all okay, especially for the time the movie was made. But I didn't really care for the writing, which made it impossible for me to think very highly of the acting. The whole story just felt to me like a narrative mess. I suppose I should mention that I watched the director's cut on DVD, which is somewhat longer than the theatrical version. It's also unrated, but I'm pretty sure if it were rated, it would be PG, just like the theatrical version. For the streaming services linked above, I could only find the theatrical version. Anyway, despite having been pretty disappointed by the movie, I'm glad to have finally seen it, so I can stop wanting to.

The Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry, who is unrecognizable under a ton of prosthetics later in the film, and whose voice I never recognized) wants to put an end to daylight, and to do so he sends a group of goblins led by Blix to kill the last two unicorns and cut off their horns. Meanwhile, there's a princess named Lili (Mia Sara) who likes to visit the forest, where she has a friend named Jack (Tom Cruise), who I guess is a creature of the forest (though he just looks like Tom Cruise). Wikipedia calls him a "green man". I get the general impression that Lili and Jack are in love, but it doesn't seem to me like a conventional sort of love. Anyway, Jack takes Lili to see the unicorns. She touches one of them, which is against the rules, and it gives Blix a chance to shoot it with a blow dart. The two unicorns run away, but eventually the stallion dies, when Blix cuts off its horn. After that, the weather turns to winter. However, the next day the sun still rises, because the mare is still alive. So the Lord of Darkness once again sends the goblins to capture it.

At one point, Jack was separated from Lili. He meets an elf named Gump (who looks like a young boy with pointy ears), as well as some fairies (who look like little people in prosthetics); at least I think they were referred to as fairies. They might have been dwarves or something. Jack, Gump, and the fairies (or whatever they are) plan to protect the remaining unicorn, but she gets captured by the goblins and taken to Darkness's lair. Lili is also captured, and Darkness wants to marry her, much to her disgust. Up until this point we'd only seen Darkness as... I dunno, just a figure of literal darkness, but now he appears in the form of a devil. (I gather he's considered an iconic image, by fans of the movie.) Jack and his friends sneak into the lair to rescue the unicorn and Lili, and to retrieve the horn of the dead unicorn, which could bring it back to life. They are accompanied by another fairy named Oona, who usually looks like a tiny ball of light, but can turn herself into a woman. (I assume she's a different kind of fairy from the others, since in her human form she actually looks like a fairy. And the others were surprised she could look like that.) She has a crush on Jack. But of course he's devoted to Lili, which upsets Oona. But she still helps Jack and his friends. And I don't know what else to say, except that of course the good guys win in the end.