With "Wendell & Wild," visionary director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "Coraline") returns with his first movie in 13 years, a roller-coaster ride inside his dark sensibilities and the place where they collide with those of fellow horrorphile Jordan Peele.
Peele co-wrote the screenplay with Selick, whose stop-motion animation technique brings his haunted sense of humor to life. Here it's a boarding school where demons are brought back from the dead, the devil runs a theme park and corporate greed is scarier than all the other ghoulish elements combined.
Kat Elliot (voiced by Lyric Ross) is sent to a boarding school on a hilltop in the dead-end town of Rust Bank, which daylight seemingly never touches, after her parents died when they veered off a bridge and plunged into the waters below. Kat escaped the crash, which she believes she caused, which only further feeds into her trauma. ("Wendell & Wild" is animated but it's definitely not for children; take that PG-13 rating seriously.)
In the netherworld below, Wendell & Wild (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Peele, respectively) are a pair of underlings to Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames), the head honcho of hell, who long to join the land of the living to start the amusement park of their dreams. They discover the hair cream they use on Belzer is able to bring the dead back to life (and it also tickles their tummies when consumed, a nice treat), and they use it to convince Kat they can bring her parents back, if only she first summons them to life.
Once above ground, their scheming and scamming leads them to the ghastly heads of Klax Korp., who are out to make a buck on the town by building a privatized prison on the grounds where Kat's parents' brewery once stood. The evil get richer, that's the law of the land.
And so we have a rich tapestry of personalities and styles, incuding Raul (Sam Zelaya), Kat's trans classmate, who helps her in her mission to battle corporate greed, the dead, the undead and the crooked authority figures at her school.
It's a busy plot — too busy by about half — but Selick's vision is as fresh and unfettered as ever, and his black and purple color tapestry is a window into a dark and colorful world. Enjoy the ride, we don't get to take it often enough.
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'WENDELL & WILD'
Grade: B
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some thematic material, violence, substance use and brief strong language)
Running time: 1:46
How to watch: Now in theaters and streaming on Netflix Oct. 28
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