This is a film where you can see where the money went and it’s dazzling.
PHYLLIS KIRK HOUSE OF WAX FULL
The new, improved House Of Wax is gloriously vivid, full of graphic real life horrors, realiser in the most dramatic of styles, while the fog-laden cobbled streets and tiled rooftops of 1902 New York feel threatening and oppressive, even without the cloaked killer lurking in them.īest of all is Jarrod’s huge basement lair with its sprawling glass tubes and massive bubbling vat of wax, which feels like a modern updating of Frankenstein’s laboratory. Lovely.įirst off, it looks absolutely stunning at all times. There’s no plucky reporters chasing a story here, just madness, death and revenge.
Instead, he put his focus into delivering a gloriously lurid, colourful and atmospheric film that takes the basic plot from its predecessor, but puts the focus firmly on horror elements. While later films would be throwing anything and everything at the screen, there’s only a few elements thrust into the foreground, like can-can dancers, the brilliantly staged fire set-piece and most glaringly of all, the pitchman outside the museum thwacking two paddleballs at the screen for what seems like an age.įamously, Director Andre DeToth was blind in one eye and unable to experience 3-D effects, so didn’t see what the fuss was about. Suspecting a connection, Cathy soon becomes stalked by the cloaked figure herself, as Jarrod becomes obsessed with her image for his next creation…Ĭonsidering the brand-new gimmick of 3-D was a big selling point of House Of Wax, it’s used surprisingly sparingly here. When Cathy’s roommate Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) visits the wax museum, she is struck by the identical resemblance between the new Joan Of Arc figure and her friend.
Now in a wheelchair and without the use of his hands, Jarrod opens a new House Of Wax, with the aid of deaf-mute sculptor Igor (Charles Bronson) and another assistant, Leon Averill (Nedrick Young) and seems to have accepted the idea of staging horrific waxworks.īurke is soon murdered by a cloaked figure who makes it look like suicide, which Jarrod recreates in his House Of Wax, as is his fiancée, Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), whos body mysteriously disappears from the morgue. Unknown to anyone, he survived the blaze, though was horrifically injured in the process. The sculptor plans to buy his partner out, but before he can, Burke torches the building for the insurance money, leaving Jarrod for dead. Jarrod takes his art seriously and focuses on historical figures, so is appalled when Burke suggests adding more sensational and horrific exhibits to increase revenue. In early 1900s New York, Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) is a sculptor of wax figures for a museum he co-runs with his business partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts). They were still just gimmicks though, what makes House Of Wax still stand up 65 year later is that it’s an absolute classic, with or without the bells and whistles. With the threat of ever more TVs appearing in the homes of their audiences, cinemas had to fight back and offer something you couldn’t get anywhere else and this was it. Belden’s three-act play, The Wax Works) utilising both the new technology of 3D filming and the then-revolutionary Warnerphonic sound system, which used four audio tracks to immerse the audience in sound from the film. The previous year’s Bwana Devil had kicked off the new craze, but Warner Brothers smelled money and rushed a remake of their earlier feature (which itself was based on Charles S. Twenty years later, it would be the inspiration for another innovative idea – 3D.
One of the exceptions was the wonderful two-colour Technicolour Mystery Of The Wax Museum made in 1933.
Starring: Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones, Paul Picerniīy 1953, more and more films had started to be made in colour, but horror was still pretty much a monochrome genre. Following on from his on “31 Days of Hammer” in January, his “31 Days of British Horror” in March and May, and his “31 Days of American Horror” in August and October, Jules is fixing to round out 2018 with 31 more days of classic American Horror movies.
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