Wendell & Wild

***Wendell & Wild*** is a stop-motion animated movie by Henry Selick. The movie is about on two scheming demon brothers who are hatching a plan to defeat their arch-nemesis while helping a girl going with tragedy through her life.

## Plot

In the town of Rust Bank at a carnival, Young Kat Elliot is with her parents, Delroy and Wilma, who own a brewery and are refusing to sell to the wealthy Klaxon family. On their way home, a storm starts, giving Wilma enough concern to ask Delroy to pull over, but he keeps driving. Kat bites into an apple and is frightened when a two-headed worm crawls out. She screams, causing Delroy to swerve off a bridge into the river. Wilma helps Kat escape through the window, but she and Delroy tragically perish. Kat carries the guilt of this for the next few years.

Down in the underworld, a gigantic demon called Buffalo Belzer operates an amusement park for souls called the Scream Faire on his belly. His twin sons, Wendell and Wild, work on the top of Belzer’s head to apply hair cream since his hair is always falling out. Wild ingests the cream because of the sensation it gives him, and he shares some with Wendell. They then appear to see a vision of Kat before Belzer orders them to get back to work.

In the present day, Kat has been in and out of juvenile hall. She is being taken by her handler Ms. Hunter (Tantoo Cardinal) to a new school, RBC. On the way there, they drive over the bridge where Kat lost her parents, and she sees that the brewery they ran has burned to the ground, and the arsonists were never caught. Rust Bank overall has fallen on hard times since it was taken over by the Klaxons and their business drove others out of town.

Kat arrives at RBC and meets a trio of cheery girls – Siobhan, Sweetie, and Sloane, who have a pet goat named Gabby. They begin calling Kat “Kay-Kay” to her annoyance (her full name is Katherine Koniqua). From up above, a fellow student, Raul Cocolotl, watches as Kat interacts with the girls. Kat briefly sees a vision of herself pushing Siobhan out of the way from a falling stone, but in reality, she does it to push Siobhan away because she is annoying her. Raul accidentally pushes against the falling stone, and Siobhan thinks Kat saved her life after being pushed.

Kat meets the school’s headmaster, Father Level Bests, who accepted Kat’s entry to help give the school funding. She begrudgingly puts on her school uniform and blasts her boombox in the halls on the way to class. Her teacher, Sister Helley, gives a lesson with a mimic octopus. When she calls Kat to the front, the octopus takes a hideous shape and causes the classroom to start shaking and turn dark. Sister Helley pulls Kat out of the classroom and sees that there is a mark on Kat’s left hand that looks like teeth. Sister Helley tells Kat she can protect her and tells her not to tell anybody else about the mark. Wendell and Wild receive news from an entity called Bearz-a-bub to inform them that Kat has been chosen as their Hell Maiden. The guys realize Kat can summon them to the Land of the Living, where they want to build their own Scream Faire that will be way better than Belzer’s.

Lane and Irmgard Klaxon, who are also Siobhan’s parents, are on a golf course as they bemoan how the city council, led by Raul’s mother Marianna, have blocked their attempts to build prisons in Rust Bank. They are met by Father Bests, who is working with them in the hopes that they may deliver funding to the school. Unfortunately for the Klaxons, the only ones who could help vote for approval are the members of the old guard, who are all dead. When Father Bests brings up how the two were responsible for the brewery fire, they distract him, so Irmgard bludgeons him with a golf club before they throw Father Bests into the icy water.

Kat has a nightmare about her parents’ accident, which gives Wendell and Wild the opportunity to visit her in her dreams. They bring up the mark on her hand. They convince her to help by saying they may be able to bring Kat’s parents back from the dead, but first, she needs to find Bearz-a-bub to perform a ritual. Kat sneaks out of her room and goes to Sister Helley’s classroom, where she finds Bearz-a-bub glowing and thumping around in her desk. She hides when the custodian, Manberg, comes in to write on the board that Sister Helley is a thief. He hears Kat but misses her as she starts running away. Wendell and Wild discover that the hair cream has reviving capabilities since they can revive a tick that Wild had squished repeatedly. They believe they may be able to use enough hair cream to bring a dead person back to life.

After Father Bests’ funeral, Kat is approached by Siobhan and her friends again until she goes back to Raul. He tells her that he used to be part of their friend group when he still identified as a girl and was named Ramona, but they fell out after he transitioned. They walk to the cemetery where Kat finds her parents’ graves and uses Bearz-a-bub, all while Wendell and Wild use their dad’s Soul Jockeys to help fly them to the Land of the Living. Kat performs the ritual, but her parents don’t wake up. Wendell and Wild emerge from the ground and find the grave of Father Bests. They test their cream on him and successfully resurrect him, but they give him a makeover because his head is displaced from his neck. Wendell and Wild pitch their Scream Faire to Father Bests, but he shows them how rundown Rust Bank is and how the theme park wouldn’t work, until he gets the idea for the brothers to help him resurrect the old-guard members, so that the Klaxons will fund both the school and the theme park.

Meanwhile, Sister Helley finds Kat and Raul, and she brings them back to the school. While she tries to assure Kat that she knows what she is going through, Kat dismisses her and is put in detention with Raul. Sister Helley then uses her own powers to meet Manberg, who knows that she is also a Hell Maiden. Manberg has been using Sister Helley to summon demons and capture them for his personal collection. Kat and Raul then sneak out of the school when the other nuns aren’t looking, but Sister Helley notices they are gone and goes after them.

The Klaxons learn that Father Bests is alive, and they meet him with the intention of killing him for good, but he assures them that he can get their prison votes by having Wendell and Wild revive the old-guard members. Lane and Irmgard are onboard and tell Father Bests that they will honor his requests, but the Klaxons order them not to resurrect anybody other than the old-guard members. Wendell and Wild head off to do their deed but are found by Kat and Raul. Kat angrily confronts them but is tricked into swearing to serve the brothers for eternity, which is bound by the mark on her hand. While Kat goes to get them food, the brothers tie up Raul and revive the old-guard members, who all come back as zombies and are given extreme makeovers. Raul gets himself free and takes the hair cream while Wendell and Wild are tripping out from it. Raul finds Delroy and Wilma’s graves and brings them back to life, then warns them that Kat is in trouble.

Kat walks into town and finds that Delroy and Wilma went to their old abandoned house. Kat tearfully reunites with her parents and tries to show them that she kept her dad’s boom box. When they tell her about Raul, Kat goes back to the cemetery and finds him. She gets some hot sauce and covers her boots with it near the brothers’ pet horse-parasite Sparky, making it seem as though he ate Kat and Raul. They run away but are found by Sister Helley, who angrily confronts Kat about revealing her secret and then reveals her own Hell Maiden mark to her. Sister Helley brings Kat to Manberg so that he may blood-bind them and keep her mark under control.

Marianna and the town council gather for the votes against the Klaxons’ prisons, until the six old-guard members arrive and are legally allowed to vote. They rule against the council so that the Klaxons can go ahead with the prison construction and begin demolishing what’s left of Rust Bank. Siobhan talks to her parents about how wrong the private prisons are, but they ignore her.

Back at the school, Sister Helley helps Kat confront her memories of guilt and self-loathing, which have manifested into a monster that literally makes Kat beat herself up. Kat attempts to control them so that they no longer weigh her down. Kat is then pulled through some portal where she sees the memory manifestation looking like a scared version of herself. After reconciling her feelings and forgiving herself, Kat is freed and realizes she has a gift of seeing the future. Sister Helley passes out and hits her head, so Kat brings her to Manberg to tend to her wound. Father Bests learns that Delroy and Wilma were resurrected, so he makes Wendell and Wild go capture them from their house, which Raul witnesses. At the same time, Belzer finds out that his sons made decoys of themselves and that the Soul Jockeys helped them to the Land of the Living. He makes plans to head there himself.

The demons bring Delroy and Wilma back to their graves to kill them until Kat shows up with Sister Helley. Since the binding to the mark has been removed, Kat no longer serves Wendell and Wild and prevents them from fleeing. They are then all found by Siobhan, who tells Father Bests and the demons that the money her parents gave them is totally worthless. She warns Kat about her parents’ plan, and Kat sees a vision of Rust Bank being bulldozed to the ground. Belzer then bursts out of the ground to go after Wendell and Wild. He nearly pulls them back to the underworld until he sees a large art mural made by Raul of a mother protecting her child. Manberg also has a change of heart, as he realizes the demons he had captured are Belzer’s children, and he sets them free back to him. Before the group heads off to stop the Klaxons, Wendell and Wild see Father Bests die for good, and Belzer tells them that the hair cream doesn’t last.

Lane and Irmgard get ready to unveil their plans, even as people show up to protest. The heroes show up to stop them, but the Klaxons send the old-guard members to kill them will bulldozers. Using their combined efforts, they take down the bulldozers, and the old-guard members return to being dead. Raul uses the last of the hair cream to bring back three brewery workers who can testify that the Klaxons started the fire. Lane and Irmgard are arrested.

The hair cream begins to wear off on Delroy and Wilma, and they begin to die again. Kat uses her final moments with them to share a vision of Rust Bank coming back to life in the future. Wendell and Wild then show off their plans for the Scream Faire and promise Kat that her parents will have VIP passes. Kat’s closing narration states that she has made peace with herself and is embracing new friendships with her schoolmates, as well as with Wendell and Wild.

## Cast and Characters

* Keegan-Michael Key as Wendell
* Jordan Peele as Wild
* Angela Bassett as Sister Helley
* Lyric Ross as Kat Elliot
* Ving Rhames as Buffalo Belzer
* Gabrielle Dennis as Wilma Elliot
* Gary Gatewood as Delroy Elliot
* Tamara Smart as Siobhan Klaxon
* Natalie Martinez as Marianna Cocolotl
* James Hong as Father Bests
* Tantoo Cardinal as Ms. Hunter
* Igal Naor as Manberg
* David Harewood as Lane Klaxon
* Maxine Peake as Irmgard Klaxon
* Sam Zelaya as Raúl Cocolotl
* Seema Virdi as Sloane
* Ramona Young as Sweetie
* Gabby Goat