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When Lampton Enochs needs a bong, he knows where to go. But this is no ordinary bong, it’s a movie star bong, one set to play a pivotal role in Harold & Kumar II. That’s this writer’s guess, anyway.

Baton Rouge prop duo Wes Branton and Ken Decker of Composite Effects won’t reveal a thing, but what other device could they have designed and built for Enochs, the line producer for the big-budget sequel?

According to advance rumors on The Internet Movie Database, titular stoners Harold and Kumar are not content with a return trip to White Castle this time around, so they head for the ever-indulgent Amsterdam. Things get complicated when they are mistaken for terrorists after trying to sneak a high-tech, and highly illegal bong onto a commercial flight.

Building props for feature films like this, or a breakaway door Decker built for The Reaping, provide the main source of income at Composite Effects. But most of Branton and Decker’s work is designing creature masks for haunted houses and casting molds for artists to replicate sculpture work. The designers spend most of their waking and sleeping hours in a warehouse off Pecue Lane, sometimes crashing on a futon as they wait for latex, silicone and urethane molds to cook and cool.

It takes 20 painstaking hours to sculpt one rubber mask in clay, and that’s just the canvas on which they build their more intricate work.

Their designs for gruesome monsters and cringe-inducing flesh wounds begin with Branton’s detailed, evocative sketches. Decker is more of a hands-on experimenter with a bent for robotic props and mechanical design. He constructed an animatronic man-eating plant based on Audrey II from the musical-comedy Little Shop of Horrors. Decker can make the robot pivot and attack by wire control.

“There aren’t any books that tell you how to do this stuff,” says Decker, a Chalmette native who studied art at LSU. “It’s just years of hard work,” Branton adds. “It takes trial and error and lots of money to get started.”

compositeeffects.com.