HOUSE OF WAX (1953)
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1953) ** (out of four)
You always take a certain amount of risk when deciding to watch really old movies, even ones that are supposed to be classics. HOUSE OF WAX stars one of my favorite actors of the past, the late Vincent Price, who always lends a hilariously macabre feel to anything he appears in, from horror classics like THE TINGLER to token appearances in more recent efforts like EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. (MIKE: I'm not like other guys, but I do _like_ other guys.) Hell, he even cracked me up as Egghead (the heretofore uncredited predecessor of the Coneheads) on the 60's "Batman" show. And he's good in HOUSE OF WAX too.
The problem with this movie is that even though Price's performance is excellent as usual, the movie itself just isn't very entertaining. It's one of those movies that's only 90 minutes long but is still padded with needless and boring material. In HOUSE OF WAX, Price gives two extended tours of his wax museum that serve no better purpose than filling space. Another sequence shows two characters exchanging a brief conversation while watching women dance at a vaudeville show. After their fifteen seconds of dialogue, we see the entire dance number for no reason. And yet another waste of time is a sequence on the opening day of Price's museum, when a barker with two ball-and-paddle toys tries to attract customers. It may be an entertaining scene but it serves no purpose.
Price plays a wax sculptor whose investment partner burns down his museum while he's in it to collect the insurance money. Price is presumed dead but later resurfaces, opening a new wax museum, while a series of murders and subsequent body-stealings from the morgue begins. The weird part is every time a body disappears, a spitting image of the person pops up in Price's wax museum. One woman puts two and two together about the same time Price tells her she would make the perfect Marie Antoinette for a display he's about to make. Uh-oh!
You might think going to all the trouble to kill a person, steal his body from the morgue, drag him back to the museum, dip him in wax and then put him on display is morbid and time-consuming but it's still a hell of a lot easier than carving the statues yourself, believe me. I had been carving a statue of Kurt Cobain for three weeks before I realized I could just steal his corpse. Then again, his head may not be in the best possible condition for display.
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