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In the apartment late in the evening Lauren receives a vision of a girl being
viciously attacked in Griffith Park. With Ethan at work, and unable to contact Dana, only Patrick
and Jalen are able to go and investigate. When they arrive it is too late, the girl is already dead.
The following morning Dana returns to her apartment from an unknown mission.
The dead girl was a film studies student at UCLA named Kimberly Howard. Hoping to
identify what kind of creature killed her, Patrick calls in Dana. On her way out of her apartment
building, Dana runs into Gordon, who has recovered from the injuries he sustained while trying to
protect Dana. The meeting is brief and awkward and ends when the two continue on their separate
ways.
At Ethan's apartment, Dana goes over the details from Lauren's vision and from the
preliminary autopsy to try and narrow down the type of creature that killed the girl. In the end
she shows the rest of the group some web sites that list types of demons the leaves for campus saying
she has more important things to do. When she gets there she begins searching buildings fro something.
That night another student is killed, this time by falling of the roof of a building where he was
apparently trying to escape someone or something. Also that night we see that Dana is once again
away from her apartment.
The next day Patrick heads to UCLA to learn more about the dead girl. He learns of
the death of the other student the night before and discovers that he was also in film studies and
both were in a few of the same classes. While going to speak with one of the teaching assistants for
the courses, Patrick senses something nearby. He spots a person in bike leathers and a full helmet
with the visor down entering a nearby stairwell. Before he can pursue the grad students lounge,
where Patrick was going to look for the t.a., explodes. When he sees that he cannot help anyone in
the room, Patrick takes off in pursuit of the biker. He arrives downstairs in time to see his quarry
vanish on an almost impossibly fast red motorcycle. He contacts Jalen, who heads out to intercept
the bike. Meanwhile, Dana has arrived on the scene and she and Patrick head back into the building
to examine the scene of the explosion. While it looks like a conventional explosion, Dana discovers
what appears to be vanilla frosting splattered on all the walls.
Running along rooftops, Jalen thinks he spots the motorcycle and pursues. He loses
sight of the bike as it turns the corner, and suddenly finds himself face to face with its rider,
on a roof ten stories above the street. Back at Ethan's apartment, Lauren has a vision of Jalen
plummeting to his death.
Lauren contacts Patrick, who rushes out to try and find Jalen before it is too late.
On the roof, Jalen moves in to attack the biker but is struck on the head and knocked over the
roof's edge. As he falls towards the ground he is able to grab onto a window ledge, saving himself.
Patrick arrives and heads into the building. He breaks open a window near Jalen and helps him in.
The two head up to the roof but the biker is long gone. The two do find what appears to be the
object that struck Jalen and knocked him off the roof. It is an anvil. Dana, meanwhile, has gone
to the UCLA special collections library to research something.
Patrick goes back to campus and gets more details about the dead students. He
connects them all to a single film studies course, on the Golden Age of animation. Noticing that
the attacks resemble the actions of a maniacal cartoon character, Patrick begins questioning other
students to get more information. He learns that the class recently watched an underground film
from the 1940s called "Mayhem Madness". The cartoon was an independent film about a sadistic fox
named Benny that consisted mainly of Benny performing a series of disgusting and depraved
actions.
Researching the history of the film, the group learns that it was only shown once
in theaters, and that is had so disgusted the audience that it was never shown again. A while later,
several of the critics who had panned the film were discovered brutally murdered. The police
eventually arrested the film's creator for the killings. He was found insane and was committed,
eventually dying in the asylum but all the time claiming that he had not killed the people but that
Benny had. The film was locked away but a copy started making the rounds of campuses in the 1960s
and it became something of an underground hit.
Checking the dead students' work, Patrick discovers that they had been very critical
of the film in their essays. He gathers together the remaining three students who also panned the
movie in their papers and he and the others collect together any weapon they think might help them
against a cartoon character come to life. Once again, Dana refuses to help, claiming she has more
important things to do.
That night, the others bring the students to an empty gym hoping to protect them
from Benny. The depraved cartoon character does arrive and kills one of the students in a giant
bear trap before the group can react. Jalen tries to attack Benny the Fox but in mid-leap the
cartoon transforms into a baseball player and knocks the ninja across the room with the swing of
a bat. Benny then transforms into a 1930s-style gangster, complete with Tommy Gun. Benny is about
to fire on the students when Lauren lifts her shirt, flashing the depraved toon. Distracted (a mild
way of putting it), Benny doesn't notice when Lauren telekinetically grabs the Tommy Gun and uses
it to blow the toon's head off. Still, Benny is a cartoon and picks up the head and starts to put
it back on. Just them Patrick launches two cans of turpentine at Benny, slicing them open with his
sword in mid-arc spraying the Benny with paint thinner. In a howl of pain and a stream of
profanities Benny dissolves out of existence. The group (still without Dana) retires to the Blue
Plate Diner for some pie to celebrate their victory.
A few days later, another film studies student is doodling in his notebook. One of
his sketches is of Benny, and as the scene ends the sketch of Benny turns towards the camera and
winks...
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