Pennyworth Meets Pennywise

Better Pennyworth than Pennywise? 

The Evil Clown & Alfred share some tea & cookies. 

(Was the Clown Prince not invited?)

Yes, it is true, I was required to escort four 14 year olds to a screening of "IT" over the holiday weekend. 

Since the birth of our first son, I have seen a great many movies that I would not have chosen for myself. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. Sometimes not. 

My greatest hope for "IT" was that it would freak out our older son enough to keep him from sneaking out to our darkened living room in the middle of the night to check Instagram. 

The attitude at our local theater seemed to indicate that the movie was genuinely disturbing: there were signs posted on all the entrance doors stating that absolutely no one under 12 would be allowed in even with parental escort. And the ticket seller informed me that I couldn't just buy the adolescents' tickets. I had to be sure to sit right next to them. 

Having survived the screening, I can report that it was not much more scary than say something like the preview for "Lights Out," or "Annabelle."  Nor was it effective at curbing the desire for midnight teenage social media updates. 

Sadly, unlike many other movies that I have seen with my kids, I did not find it possible to doze during it. Maybe that is a compliment. But I'm afraid it had more to do with the "jump scares" liberally distributed throughout. 

I suppose, geriatric that I am, I might prefer horror movies where there is more suggestive build-up and less actual gory mayhem. Once you've gnawed a small child's arm off in the opening scene, where can you go from there?

On this napkin, I am imagining a more civilized visit with evil. Because who is more civilized than Alfred? (I was aiming for the Jeremy Irons "Batman V Superman incarnation of Alfred, if that needs to be said, which it unfortunately does)

And there was that dumb thing about them both having "Penny" in their names.

But did Alfred make the frosted red balloon and batarang sugar cookies? Or maybe Pennywise brought them as a thoughtful hostess gift?

Snake Clowns

Snake Clowns: More frightening even than family.

It was of course inevitable that we would see the Batman LEGO movie. I was surprised that we were able to wait a couple weeks to do so. My younger son and I did have an opportunity to see it earlier, but his older brother forbade us to see it without him. (So the younger brother and I had to go see "The Great Wall" instead. More on that later...if I have the fortitude)

Lego Batman is definitely worth seeing if you have had excessive exposure to all things Batman and Lego. It has a fine sense of humar about the Venn diagram intersection between the two fandoms: Adult Fans of LEGO meets Underage Fans of The Dark Knight. The movie is full of jokes both for people young enough to play with plastic bricks and people old enough to remember that "The Condiment King" was a real DC villain. That said, my kids, DC connoisseurs that they are, were already aware of Condiment King, but they seem to have aged out of actually playing with their collection of 10,000 Legos.

One of their favorite moments in the movie was the scene where Alfred tells Bat/Bruce that he has to overcome his worst fear. Bruce shoots back, "Snakes??!!" Then, "Clowns??!!" And finally, "Snake Clowns!!!" Alfred is talking about the fear of being part of a family again, but Batman retorts, "No, it's Snake clowns! And it's your fault for putting that idea in my mind!"

My rendition of snake clowns was not particularly successful, probably overly influenced by my uncomfortable childhood relationship with Bozo the Clown on TV...but perhaps they are a little bit more frightening than the LEGO version?

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you can watch the video clip where Batman reveals that his greatest fear is snake clowns, and that it is all Alfred's fault

Cast of Characters Who Could be in "Goosebumps" Movie

...take one of those abominable group selfies...

My younger son and I finally saw the "Goosebumps" movie over last weekend. His brother was going to a fun birthday party, so he was feeling terribly under-served and required some compensation. As far as I was concerned the movie was pleasant, but not particularly memorable.  My son thought it was great and immediately wanted me to pledge to take him to the sequel, whenever it might be made and released.

While we own several "Goosebumps" books, and I have tried to convince my horror-loving children to read them on many occasions, the series has just not been very popular in the past at our house.  I must confess that I was unaware what a publishing juggernaut the series has been...350 million copies have sold worldwide, and it is the second most popular children's series of all time, according to Wikipedia.

The movie's specific and rather dopey plot aside, "Goosebumps" the movie's charm is that it is a compendium of funny horror characters and therefore transcends the possible failings of each tale of scary zombies, creepy clowns, malicious lawn gnomes, deadly werewolves, etc., etc.

Being an 8 year old, my son was willing to attribute the original creation of many of these sorts of characters to R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps franchise. I reminded him that certainly the idea of werewolves, zombies, the abominable snowmen and ventriloquist dummies among many others predate Scholastic Publishing, some by tens if not hundreds of years.

And, on a more personal note, several of these characters appeared in my recent sculpture show "Popular Monsters," so perhaps I am particularly not willing to cede all credit to Mr. Stine.

Today's napkin is a reunion of sorts of characters who could appear in a best selling children's book series, in a major motion picture, or in my small, unsaleable sculptures.

Sewer Clown

Why so serious?

This  character was designed by our younger son for our still only hypothetical family webcomic. He recognized that we had a shortage of bad guys in the cast of characters. With a name like "Sewer Clown" and six arms, tentacles for legs and two multi-pronged tails, how could this guy not be creepy?

My son says that he had not heard of or seen the sewer occupying clown Pennywise from Stephen King's 1986 novel and subsequent TV miniseries "It."  I'm not entirely convinced that he wasn't exposed to a stray reference or image of King's sewer clown by his older brother who avidly and repeatedly watches YouTube videos like "The 100 best horror movie characters of all time." But maybe it's just that sewers and clowns go together so perfectly.

As you can see below, my son's original drawing is much better than mine. I was instructed to make the clown look realistic, because as my son told me, "That's your talent Mom, making things look more realistic."

I suspect realism isn't really the point with this guy.

Gunslinger Confronts The Clown Samurai Panda

A napkin inspired by our reading of Axe Cop's "Bad Guy Earth."

Ansel thought the napkin should look more like a comic, and star his latest hero and avatar- "The Gunslinger."

He specified that the Slinger should be funny as well as heroic- always falling off of his horse for comic effect. And he should be fighting a ridiculous bad guy.  

I'm afraid the Clown Samurai Panda is not as amusing as Axe Cop's President Zombie Bear Cop... or even Booterang, my personal Axe Cop favorite.  He seems to be overwhelmed by his outfit.