House of Wax /
Mystery of the Wax Museum
Mystery of the Wax Museum
buy it at amazon.com
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House of Wax / Mystery of the Wax Museum |
buy it at amazon.com |
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| House of Wax (1953) |
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Scares/Tension/Fun  |
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| Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) |
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Scares/Tension  |
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House of Wax
Starring: Mystery of the Wax Museum Lionel Atwill .... Ivan Igor This is a Rogue Reviewers "Before They Were Stars" roundtable review. The "before they were stars" part of it is that in 1953, a young Charles Buchinsky, later more commonly known as Charles Bronson, made one of his earliest films with a significant role as Igor the deaf mute in the film House of Wax. And on the original 1933 version titled Mystery of the Wax Museum, Lionel Atwill, known in later years for his roles in Universal's later cycle of classic horror films such as House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, has one of his first starring roles as Ivan Igor, the main character of the film. So you are basically getting two "Before They Were Stars" for the price of one. House of Wax (House) is a remake of the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (Mystery) released 20 years earlier. And while Vincent Price was already a bankable star, this was one of his earliest horror roles and also the one that started his career down the path of film horrordom. The story for both movies starts out with the main characters, Price as Henry Jarrod and Atwill as Ivan Igor, happily and busily working on their creations while the business part of their exhibitions is left to heartless and visionless men who care about nothing more than making a profit. Actually they would not be so bad except that in both films a fire is intentionally started at the museums where all of the wax figures are being exhibited. The fires are started by the evil business partners to collect the insurance money and in both films the heroic sculptors fight the villainous men but are overcome by flames and the scenes fade away. So in both films, good and artistic men are turned into horribly scarred and disfigured murderers by greedy business partners. House picks up two years later and Mystery twelve years later. Both sculptors are now in wheelchairs but on their way to re-opening their vision of what a wax museum should be like. Price has a successful grand opening while Atwill's opening is only moderately attended. But business success aside, both are now only moderately bitter on the fire at their previous establishments that bound them to their wheelchairs and robbed them of useful hands to sculpt with. Price has Igor (Charles Bronson) as a deaf mute who has been taught to sculpt to his exact specifications. Atwill has a couple assistants including his own deaf mute, but this mute only has a minor role. The main sidekick for Atwill is a drug addict, although they never specify what drug he is addicted to. Before and during the openings of both films there are some mysterious disappearances from the morgue. Dead bodies vanish from rooms and the police are baffled. We do see a horribly scarred person involved in the theft of the bodies and in the earlier movie's body stealing scene, accomplices are involved. Both films have Price and Atwill having apprentices in the wax carving field who know nothing of the true nature of some of the better exhibits in the museum. Both films also have the girlfriend of an apprentice becoming an obsession with Price and Atwill and their obsession is to have the girls become a part of the exhibit for a particular piece they are working on. One major difference in the story line of the earlier film is that it has a reporter (Fay Wray) who is convinced that Atwill is up to no good when she notices that one of the exhibits looks just like a girl who recently died under suspicious circumstances and then who's body disappeared from the morgue. It is her roommate who is dating the apprentice sculptor and in danger from Atwill's nefarious plans for her. In the later film, the person doing the investigating is the girlfriend of the apprentice, Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) after she notices one of the exhibits looks just like a murdered girl from her rooming house. Allen had walked in on the girl and saw the horribly scarred man before he fled the scene. With her personal interest in the case and the certainty that hit is too much of a coincidence that the exhibit now has the same earrings as the dead girl she pursues the case despite official and personal requests from the police and her boyfriend to stop her persecuting the pitiful and helpless curator of the museum. In Mystery, Fay Wray helps the rich playboy who is initially accused of murdering the girl who's body has disappeared. He is kind of a goofy guy but seems nice enough. Wray gets to ham it up to the hilt and say all kinds of cliched filled lines as the reporter who will be fired by her editor unless she can come up with a good story. Somehow Fay Wray managed to have a successful career in Hollywood after 1933 in films outside of the horror genre as she appeared in three sauce horror films that year: Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Vampire Bat (again teamed with Lionel Atwill) and of course in her most famous role, that of the screaming Ann Darrow in King Kong. The rest of both films turn into a crime drama with the police more or less baffled while the heroines solve the crimes despite the eminent danger to themselves in doing so. Both films also have the heroines discovering the curator's dirty little secret, that they are actually horribly scarred and also able to walk despite the charade of being bound to wheelchairs. So heroes from both films are not the boyfriends who save the women from being boiled alive in wax, nor the police that are helpful but two steps behind, but the female leads Fay Wray and Phyllis Kirk as Sue Allen in House. Of course both films end up in the studios of the sculptors with large electrical works and the obligatory large vats of wax do lower the victims into. The women are tied down and about to be lowered into the vats of boiling wax, the boyfriends show up to fight the villains sidekicks, and then the police finally arrive to finish off Vincent Price and Lionel Atwill by having them fall into the vats themselves and endure a quick, but painful, death. The transfer on House is nearly blemish free. On Mystery it has a fair amount of blips on it, but that is probably the best anyone has seen it in decades. The sound is adequate in Dolby Digital 2.0 and the soundtrack itself on House is notably stirring and lively. It was scored by motion picture composer David Buttolph, who had a long and distinguished career in Hollywood from the 30's through the 50's. The extras are definitely lacking, but there is an interesting short clip from the premier of House of Wax that shows silent footage of some of the stars that attended including an aging Bela Lugosi in his full Dracula costume. The main film soundtrack score is the only audio during this clip. These films are probably notable enough to have merited a commentary and documentary, but Warner Brothers have seen fit, yet again, to issue classic films with nothing of note accompanying them and to add further to their insult to the public by packaging their dvd's in the cheap "flip cases" instead of the much more standardized (and protective) "keep cases". For more on this rant click here. and read the 12 Dec 02 news item. The only reason I rated this dvd so high is that having Mystery of the Wax Museum as an extra is a huge bonus. House of Wax is the feature I was most interested in having never before seen Mystery of the Wax Museum, but that is a good movie in it's own right and is deserving of a separate release. But I am glad both films came on this disk and I highly recommend this to any collector of classic horror films, classic films in general, and also 3-D movies of the 50's and 60's. I mention the 3-D part because the original release was indeed in 3-D, and some of the effects in the film are obviously geared towards that effect, most notably the barker outside the wax museum with the paddle balls bouncing out towards the camera and also the dancing girls kicking their legs out during a dance hall number. And lastly, it is with regret that I must mention the passing of the late, great Charles Bronson. He died yesterday (30 Aug, 2003) of pneumonia in Los Angeles. |
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31 Aug 03 |
