hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a couple of friends one of them brandon allenger
from prop store hello sarah hey good to see you good to see you and my nightmarish friend
one of the what do i call this well i think war monger is maybe the technical idea but
the nazi demons the nazi demons the nazi demons from one of the
all-time great movies american world from london um these are from the dream sequence
as david is slowly turning into a werewolf uh and famously sculpted by rick baker this is
you know i don't have any pieces of ricks in my collection whatsoever he's a good friend and i
i revere his work and holy hell it's amazing to look at this thing up close the great thing about
this is that it's you know it's actually not in the movie that much it's a very short scene
but everyone remembers it everyone recognizes it and it's so associated with rick i mean it's
really like you know when people think of rick baker's work of course american werewolf in london
the first time an oscar was ever given out for makeup effects right so he's a very significant
film in his career and in just makeup effects history the first of his eight oscars right yeah
and um and it's just you know as horror fans this is like an image and an icon in itself
almost as much as the main wolf from american world yeah um there's a great bit in america
spoiler alert in which the dream sequence in which these show up is very intense
and then you think it's over because david naughton wakes up in his hospital bed and
jenny augur the nurse goes over to open the curtains and one of these jumps out of the window
and then stabs her and then it's a secondary dream john landis told me that when he cut the film
he specifically watched people while cutting that sequence and he watched how
it jumped out of the window and reached up to stabber people went like this and he pauses the
action in the film so that you do you wait long enough you look and that's when the knife goes in
he's literally tricking you with editing into seeing something you don't want to see to make
this dream sequence even more horrifying that's a good story yeah the dream within a dream so this
is latex am i right yeah this is regular latex or slip latex like a standard halloween mask so
that's part of why it's in such good shape it's not foam latex foam latex of course is
more stretchy it's what they put on animatronic masks or makeup appliances but it breaks down
much more easily and you can see it in lots of old props it's the cracking yeah it just deteriorates
especially under exposure to uv whereas this this regular latex i mean it's actually still pretty
supple and you know the downside for use in a film is it doesn't have much life it doesn't have much
movement but these guys didn't need it based on the way they were shooting and the heavy action
so it uh it did its thing and i think there were four of them in total and maybe this was
the only one with the helmet i know wow rick made helmets for each of them but for whatever reason
they decided to only use the helmets on one or maybe two of them uh the helmet's the other thing
that i remember about them and i asked you when you first cracked this i was like holy hell did
tom spinner restore this and no it has not been restored it's in original condition it's untouched
yeah that's really nice i mean rick had it on display in his shop for many years um you know
he let it go a number of years ago we had a series of auctions with rick as he downsized his big shop
in glendale um and of course he kept some things but this is is one of the things that uh that he
did part with and probably one of the best things that he did let go of the best rick baker pieces
out there i love on the back to show in b-roll but there's a little stamp here rick baker 1980 so he
had his own little stamp made that he would put in his scopes and um 80. he was a baby
and one of the other great things about that era yeah is that in that era if it
was a rick baker film it was rick baker doing the work like hands-on he probably sculpted
this himself i don't know that for a fact but i'd be shocked if he didn't sculpt it
or at least block it out whereas later he didn't sculpt as much i mean on films like
planet of the apes there's so many different individual mass there's an army of sculptors
working on that whereas this one it was like it is rick works it's his sculpture
i mean and again john landis told me that um about six or seven years before they shot the movie
um rick was part of the screenwriting of the film oh really that yeah they they worked out
the transformation really early on okay um so rick was like ricky just made a gorilla suit
for john for one of his like for schlock that's it he built the schlock suit yeah
um and john had gone to uh john had gone to john chambers could you make me a gorilla suit and
john chambers said yeah you can't afford me but there's this young kid rick baker you should hire
him he'll build it for you for a deal and that started their their lifelong collaboration yeah
amazing i really can't believe how detailed this can we is the helmet removable i think that it
is let's we can test that actually i don't know if it can easily we don't want to come over so
it's definitely a separate piece i mean you can tell that it will move around on the mask but
you'd probably have to very gingerly get that over the chin so maybe we won't attempt it right
now but leave it be but the helmet's kind of a work of art in itself with just all the different
airbrushing texture that's going on and the holes that have been dremeled out and the scarring in
it and when you watch the film you can actually screen match it because of all this distressing
and i think the helmets all came out of the same mold but they were each individually distressed
so you can go frame by frame on the blue right you can match up all this weathering and teching
on the helmet i can see what's clearly like a dremel end of like doing this and also this is
clearly the helmet that inspired george lucas for vader's helmet this is one of the german
you know this if you carry these sides down you're very close to an invader i thought you meant this
actual helmet from america no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no i just several years
after star wars clearly but now but this helmet which is i believe like an original german type of
yeah yeah that that floor or maybe it's slightly modified and rick was quoting vader i don't know
yeah it's a good question actually he right they either cast a real german helmet or they might
have just sculpted it to look like a german helmet but it is fiberglass right oh he's got pointy ears
yeah it does look like fiberglass yes i can see the chop layup they've smoothed it out for the
bottom two and a half inches but then you can see the chop back there you know i looked i worked on
rick baker's book a couple of years ago book called metamorphosis it's a beautiful book and
the publisher cameron company they chose the image of this mask it's actually the image of the clay
sculpture but it is this character that's on the front of the box set so like i say this this is
very much ingrained in horror fans mind as uh sort of the definitive or definitely one of the
definitive images of rick's work which is pretty cool what is this button in the back the button
i think it's i think it's just uh to light up the logo please oh it does oh okay so don't there's
probably no batteries so you could plug it in and oh that's nice so it's anticlimactic but if
there's batteries in there there were batteries in there you get a great illuminating glow on
the logo which we don't need here because your studio is so well left yeah thank you at home we
got these guys yeah in the home cinema you can activate the uh the left maybe not the
best part of it the best part is probably the mask itself but we like to add a little detail with the
displays as well i am so glad that such an amazing piece is out there and has been so well cared for
over the course of its lifetime yeah yeah no it's you know because rick always had it
neatly tucked away on a shelf it's not like it was crumpled up in the bottom of the box you know
sometimes you see real latex masks where they're deformed and they kind of they become rigid
and misshapen but this one it's been nicely stored on a mannequin head its whole life and it's in
really pristine shape because of it i mean this is 41 years old we're deeply lucky that rick is also
a incredibly talented archivist of his own work yes right yeah yeah i think he was into preserving
things and also you know all those guys rick and and all the makeup effects artists they like to
show their work it was part of the process of trying to get the next job it was look at
all the great stuff that we can make yeah amazing yeah we're happy to have it definitely one of the
star [ __ ] lots of this auction man i i tried to show america moral to my kids when they were too
young and they still are a little salty about it okay but i did show it to uh one of my sons
last year so he saw it at 21. and still found it like whoa he was impressed how scary it is
it's still a really intense it's a real horror movie yeah i went to uh drive drive-in screening
of it during the whole quarantine code wow it was it was a lot of fun actually it was
fun to see it that way brandon thank you for bringing this by hey i'm happy to do it peace