Mark Reviews Movies: WENDELL & WILD

Wendell & Wild, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 20, 2022

The little details of Wendell & Wild possess an admirable sense of both the demented and morbid. Then again, the whole plot, which revolves around a rebellious teenage girl and a pair of demons who use her to visit the mortal realm, has those same qualities, too, but the haphazard way this story is assembled makes it seem as if the filmmakers were more concerned with those little details than the bigger ones.

Here, for example, we meet the title characters, demonic brothers who have been punished by their hellish master for what seemed to be an act of treason (One would think such dastardly deeds would be rewarded in such an evil place, but that's the pettiness of middle management for you). The two minor demons have been designing an amusement park, one that could take the place of the one currently being run by their boss/father.

Yes, Hell here—or at least this particular section or circle of the place—looks like an everyday carnival, with plenty of rides and an assortment of ghostly visitors. Obviously, the visitors have an extended stay, and those rides are probably only fun to the twisted minds who came up with them and watch them operate for eternity.

There's a Ferris wheel, although the bottom part of it spins incredibly close to a tank full of electric eels, which shock any soul that falls into it when the ride comes to a sudden, shaky stop. Everyone knows the teacup ride, in which passengers spin dizzyingly on a platform, but this one has a giant kettle in the middle. When the ride stops, the pitcher's boiling contents get poured into whichever cup just happened to pause in front of it.

The movie comes from director Henry Selick, a career-long proponent and master of the fading craft of stop-motion animation (You can probably count on one hand the filmmakers/studios that still use the technique for major, feature-length releases). The amount of work that went into creating all of these props and characters, while ensuring that the setpieces look as if they can function and actually do function in order to make the animation process work, is difficult to consider.

The fact that all of that time and effort were exerted for maybe a minute or two of sight gags on screen is even more impressive and admirable. If only half as much thought and work went into developing and focusing this story, surely the end result wouldn't be as disappointing as this finished product is.

In addition to Selick, the other major creator on the project is Jordan Peele, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director (adapting his and Clay McLeod Chapman's unpublished book). Peele, whose mind for horror almost certainly contributed to at least some of the movie's more twisted jokes and plot points, is also re-united with his sketch-comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key here, with the two providing the voices of the title demons Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele). They're both funny, as the ambitious but dunderheaded sons/minions of Buffalo Belzer (voice of Ving Rhames), but screenplay features so many ideas, characters, and paths of plotting that our eponymous demons often feel as if they belong in a completely different story.

They pretty much are in one of their own. The main thread follows Kat (voice of Lyric Ross), whose parents died in a car accident—for which she blames herself—five years prior. Since then, she has gotten into trouble, been moved around from foster home to group home to juvenile detention, and ended up in a Catholic school located in her hometown. Wendell and Wild, sentenced to maintaining Belzer's hair plugs, get high on some hair cream, have a vision of Kat, and come to her in a nightmare, offering—even though they aren't convinced it's possible—to resurrect her parents in exchange for performing a ritual that will bring them to the world of the living, where they can build their amusement park.

That part is pretty straightforward, but then, there's the rest, which starts to overwhelm and overshadow these characters, that plot, and the themes of grief, guilt, and some general notion of how one should handle "personal demons"—literalized but left unexplored within the title characters. Wendell and Wild do discover how to resurrect the dead, leading to the school's priest (voice of James Hong) returning from the dead. He was murdered, by the way, by a couple of villainous corporate types (voiced by David Harewood and Maxine Peake), who want to build a private prison in town and eventually use the demons to bring back dead local politicians who would vote for their plan.

Meanwhile, Sister Helley (voice of Angela Bassett), a "hell maiden" like Kat, helps the teen learn about her powers and how to fight back against the demons. At some point before all of this—as well as Kat's relationship with her classmates and the problem of keeping undead parents from being discovered—comes into play, Wendell & Wild loses track of its plot, as well as the macabre imagination and sense of humor that give the movie's early sections such a warped energy. The movie keeps adding so many ideas and plot threads that, in trying to do and show so much, it makes its ambitions into an unfortunate weakness.

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