Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: House of Wax (1953)
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. It's Monday, so we have a classic episode of Weird House Cinema here for you. This one is going to be our episode on House of Wax from 1953. This is a 3D cinema classic starring...

The fabulous, as always, Vincent Price. It is the movie that made him a horror icon. It also features performances by Charles Bronson and Carolyn Jones. It originally published 4-28-2023. Let's have it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And we're back with week two in our series of three weeks of 3D. Last week's movie was the 3D adventure Treasure of the Four Crowns. Today's film is the 1953 horror classic House of Wax starring Vincent Price.

Now, since we're going to inevitably be tempted to compare and contrast with last week's film, Treasure of the Four Crowns, I want to right off the bat mention some big differences that at least are my opinion. Maybe your opinion will be different, Rob, but...

I'm going to say House of Wax is in almost every way a much better movie than Treasure of the Four Crowns. Both are great, campy fun. But House of Wax is actually a really solid horror movie. It's clever, stylish in a way that Treasure is not. Oh, absolutely. House of Wax is an elite all its own compared to Treasure of the Four Crowns.

And we'll get into that. It's an important 3D film. It is a 3D film that very much holds up to subsequent viewing and in subsequent decades, regardless of whether you're watching it in theaters.

3D or 2D. Yeah, that's another thing I was going to say. So very different approaches to 3D here. As we mentioned last time, we are watching these 3D movies the same way almost everybody does today, meaning in 2D. Most people do not have the requisite

uh, home video playback equipment necessary to experience high quality 3d at home. So, uh, and we even looked into that as like, what do you need to watch most of these movies in 3d today? I mean, like with a lot of them, you actually need the 3d Blu-ray player, the 3d TV and the glasses, or I don't know. So we didn't mess around with all that because most people are not going to see the movies like that today. Yeah.

Yeah, now we tried. I went to Atlanta's only video store, Videodrome, and I was talking with Matt there, the guy who runs it, and we were looking at...

We were looking at DVD cases and Blu-ray cases. He had a tub of 3D glasses he was getting out. And we basically just came to the realization that you have most of these that are available on Blu-ray or DVD. You can't even use any kind of like at-home glasses scenario. Your only option for at-home 3D viewing with most of the titles is to get yourself a big

you know, big, fancy 3D Blu-ray player, 3D television. And even then, those are bits of technology that are going, that are kind of out of fad at the moment. So we're already past that particular at-home 3D boom, or so it seems. Maybe they'll come back. I mean, 3D, as we've said, always seems to come in waves. It'll ebb and flow. But for the most part, I think it makes sense to consider 3D movies as,

of media that have multiple lives. So they might...

have an initial run of 3D in the theaters, and that is how people see them in the theaters. But then after that, they have an afterlife. They sort of haunt our world as a 2D shadow of their former selves. And the essential question to ask about a movie like this is, does it hold up in both forms? Or is this something that's really only enjoyable in the 3D format where it was originally intended?

Treasure of the Four Crowns was fun for, I don't know if you have the right ironic spirit, but it is also the most 3D movie ever made. It is so overrun with 3D gags. If you take out the 3D element, you are left with an incredibly strange film experience. Like half of the runtime is just things poking at the camera for no reason and not actually coming out of the screen at you. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Four Crowns is basically an amusement park ride.

with some resemblance to cinema. Whereas this film is a legitimate piece of cinema that also has 3D elements that are not just little extras, but also add to the immersion factor. I agree. House of Waxes is not like Treasure. There are a handful of what I would call utterly gratuitous 3D effects shots, such as the Paddleball Man. We'll get to that later on. The Paddleball Man, there are some

dancers that I imagine were put in just so they could fulfill a desire for a sort of titillating 3D sequence. But for the most part, the movie functions on home video as a normal piece of cinema. You could forget that it was a 3D movie except for a couple of little moments. Absolutely. And it's also a movie that

captured and continues to capture people's imaginations outside of the 3D scenario. Just one quick example of this, and this was brought up in an excellent documentary that's on the the the

Blu-ray for House of Wax that I watched that I rented from Videodrome. It's titled House of Wax, unlike anything you've seen before. It was produced in 2013. And one of the people they interviewed there pointed out that the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland had this really gorgeous painting, illustration of the monstrous Vincent Price character on the front. It really...

resonated with film fans and horror enthusiasts of the day and subsequent generations to follow and today as well. So it created an iconic villain, iconic character, really, as we'll discuss. He's a little more complicated than just a pure villain.

But yeah, it captured people's imagination. And then the 3D added to the immersion experience when you actually went and saw it in the initial 3D run or one of the subsequent 3D runs, either in theater or on home video.

To pick up on your villain or not comment, I would say Vincent Price is a villain in this, but he's a tragic villain. It's one of those cases where you can see how he was made villainous by having been wronged in the first place. Right. It's one of the things that makes especially gothic horror films interesting.

uh, more impactful. I mean, it's, it's one of the reasons that so many of the Paul Nashy Spanish, uh, horror films are so great. It's, it's because, you know, there are obviously budget limitations in those films and, and plenty of other limitations as well, but Nashy loved the Gothic horror films. He loved the monsters that you also felt sympathy for that you related to on some level that had this outsider status. And so that's very much in play in this film.

And while I don't really even mean this as a criticism, this is one of those films like some Batman films in the past where the villain is really the

The most charismatic character on screen. The villain is in a sense who the one you have no choice but to root for because the villain is Vincent Price and the heroes. I don't know. Are you going to be like, wow, I'm really rooting for the cop who's trying to catch him or I'm really rooting for Scott, the sculptor.

Yeah, Vincent Price had that special kind of energy that certainly in a film like this, he ends up attracting all of your sympathy and attention. But even in later films we've discussed in the show before, even if he has a smaller part versus other noteworthy character actors and horror icons, there's just something about Price that no one else can equal. You know, there's a likability factor there that matters.

is missing in some of the, even some of the other greats of the era, you know, like a Christopher Lee or something, you know? Like, there's a charm. I mean, Christopher Lee had his own charm, his own charisma going on, but Pryce had something a little special. Well, even as Prince Prospero in Mask of the Red Death, where he is an utterly satanic, aristocratic torturer, he just kind of can't help but like him. Absolutely. Yeah.

Now, that documentary, House of Wax, unlike anything you've seen before, great job breaking down the picture's place in cinema history. It includes some great interview clips from the likes of Martin Scorsese, who holds this up as one of the greatest 3D pictures ever made. Rick Baker, of course, the special effects makeup wizard. Wes Craven, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen, and also Victoria Price. That's Price's daughter.

And I think some of the key facts that they drive home about 3D in this film from the documentary are as follows. So first of all, this was produced, this film, 1953, House of Wax, was produced during a time in which city audiences were moving out to the suburbs, away from the big theaters. And on top of that, more people were staying home to watch things on TV.

So 3D was the, in this case, was the big studio gamble, in this case from Warner Brothers, to get people back in the theater, give them a well-funded, artistically solid, technologically groundbreaking, full-color gothic horror picture. To give them something they could not get on the TV set at home.

Right. Yeah. And, you know, this is something that theaters would come back to and continue to do and have done in recent years as well. In this case, in 53, it absolutely worked. This film was a big hit. It ushered in a 3D boom that would prove profitable for, according to the documentary, at least a year and a half. So even then, it's still kind of a flash in the pan, but enough for some films to come in, to make some money. And

and then it, you know, 3D dies back down again, but comes back up in the 70s and the 80s, etc. Now, this was also the first 3D film with stereophonic sound to be presented in a regular theater and regular, we'll put an asterisk by that, and it was also the first color 3D feature film from a major American studio. The sound on this baby was supposedly amazing if you saw it in the right theater. It even had its own screen track that was projected from the back

of the theater, which I can only kind of imagine what that was like. But the way they were describing it is that it made any screams in the film throw you off a little bit more just because of the way the sound was orchestrated. It sounds like it's coming from the audience behind you or something. Yeah. Vincent Price is in the theater. That almost sounds like a William Castle kind of gimmick.

Oh, sometimes Vincent Price was in the theater, according to the much. Yeah. Uh, uh, a couple of interviews, I think, I think this is one from his daughter pointed out that as this was showing in New York city, um, he was in a play in New York and he would sometimes go to the theater to see how people were reacting. And something he enjoyed doing was, was seating himself behind some like, uh, like, uh, you know,

pair of like young women who are watching the show and were, you know, freaking out at all the scares. And then afterwards he would lean forward and say, did you enjoy it? And freak them out. So sometimes you got that additional level of 3D. Oh, that's so good. Oh, hey, listeners, were you in the theater in 1953 and startled by Vincent Price in person? Write in if so.

Certainly, I'd love to hear from anyone who has experiences from watching. Anybody saw any of these 3D films back in the 50s, definitely write in, but also subsequent generations of 3D. They also included a lot of technical information about it that I found really interesting. So this shoot, the shoot for this film utilized Julian and Milton Gunsberg's natural vision 3D system.

The same one that was used for Buona Devil in 52. This is one that we actually referenced this briefly in the last episode because Ebert alluded to it as being like a very gimmicky throw stuff at the camera sort of 3D picture. Anyway, the rig for this involved two cameras aimed at each other with mirrors then positioned at around the distance of human eyes facing each.

uh, forward towards what you're filming. Uh, and this was like a big rig. You can look up images of it. It's a monster of a, like a double camera. And then in theaters, you had to have two projectors going at once, each projecting one of these two reels of film, uh, the resulting film, of course, after editing and so forth, uh, Scorsese commented on just how complex, uh, in the documentary commented on just how complex this was for projectionists, uh,

Because if you had an error occur on one projector, then you had to stop the other. And then you had to make sure they were syncing up. Because according to Scorsese, it was just absolutely brain-breaking to watch if you got those two reels out of sync. And of course, the audience was wearing glasses for all of this. Watching the movie in double, but one is like a half second behind the other. That's hilarious. Yeah.

Now, House of Wax was later reissued in 1971 using Chris Condon's single-strip stereo vision 3D format. And the film is very well shot, makes great use of depth that you can certainly get just watching the film in 2D, but was apparently even more impressive in 3D. And yeah, it gets a little gimmicky in a few places. They don't completely...

They're not too good for 3D. They embrace the spectacle of 3D where appropriate, incorporating 3D elements where appropriate. But more than anything, they use the 3D as an immersive element of the cinematic storytelling.

All right, Joe, what's the elevator pitch for this one? What do you got? All right. Vincent Price plays Professor Henry Jared, a man who renders exquisitely beautiful and lifelike sculptures of the human form in wax, but...

But when his artworks are destroyed in a fire by a scheming business partner, a disfigured and devastated Jared emerges from the ashes to turn his genius to the domains of exploitation, revenge, and murder. All right, we are going to listen to just a little tiny bit of this trailer, but this is one of those trailers that features no voiceover, no dialogue, no sound from the film, just music and not even pictures or images from the film, just some...

some cards that come up that say, you heard about it. And then you take that in. You read about it. And then you take that in. You may even think you've seen it. And that, I think, may be an allusion to the fact that this is a remake, and we'll get into that in a bit. But anyway, it goes on and on. Let's just hear just a little bit of that music. ♪

All right. All right. That's enough. That's enough. That's all you need to hear. What were people reading about this movie in 1953? Were they actually like reading the reviews in the newspapers, I guess? I guess, you know, they're reading the newspapers. They're getting excited about about this this film. I mean, you know, Lord knows Warner Brothers was promoting it, trying to get people excited and coming back to the theater. So, yeah, there wasn't like a Fangoria blog in 1953. Yeah.

All right. Where is this playing? If you want to go out and watch it before listening to the rest of this episode. Well, it's highly available to rent or stream digitally. And I think it's streaming on Turner Classic Movies service. I honestly, I didn't think they even had a service, but they do apparently based on what I was looking at. The Blu-ray for this is great.

But as we'll discuss, the tragedy is that this film was made to be experienced in 3D in the theater, and it's just not an option for most viewers of the film today. Luckily, as we've been saying, it's still very enjoyable and historically important, regardless of how you're seeing it. So it totally holds up in 2D and it's a lot of fun.

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To shop now, go to NFLshop.com. All right, well, let's get into the cast and crew behind this picture. First of all, at the top, directing it, is André de Toth, who lived 1913 through 2002. Now, that name has come up on Weird House Cinema before, but not as a director, from what I recall.

No, he has a brief cameo in Wes Craven's Spontaneous Combustion from 1990 starring Brad Dourif that we watched on the show. Wes Craven. Wait a minute. Spontaneous Combustion was Tobey Hooper, wasn't it? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Tobey Hooper. I think I got, I threw me off because of course Wes Craven is in that documentary.

Oh, yeah.

a lot of the people that would go on to be subsequent generations of horror filmmakers. So Andrei de Toth was a Hungarian-American director who was of solid hand in the Warner Brothers system. He'd been directing since 1939, and I believe he'd worked mostly on thrillers, dramas, general action pictures, you know, some westerns and so forth. But again, solid hand, very technically proficient. And this would, I believe, be the only horror film he'd ever direct.

He later served as second unit director on 78's Superman, 1965's Thunderball, and 1962's Lawrence of Arabia. It's often pointed out that de Toth had only one eye. He wore an eye patch. Most images you look up of him are going to be him wearing an eye patch. So that means that he himself could not see in three dimensions. He couldn't see in 3D. But he had a great head for optics and cinema, so it was hardly a limiting factor.

Now, interestingly enough, the studio, Warner Brothers, asked de Toth not to wear his eye patch while working on and later promoting the picture because they didn't want the public to think about their big 3D film that was going to revitalize everything. They didn't want them to associate it with a one-eyed man. That's mean. Yeah. And from what they said in the documentary, de Toth was, in general, not the sort of guy that would normally have put up with this kind of request.

but he apparently agreed he didn't wear the eye patch because he just, he really wanted to make the picture and realized that he needed, I guess, to play Paul with Warner Brothers on this, this one thing. Um,

But he, yeah, he really believed in the picture. He believed in the 3D. They said that later he would, sometimes he would go to screenings of the picture, you know, I guess, you know, when they're promoting, like the director will be there and he would threaten to leave. He would threaten to get on a flight and go home immediately if he found out that they weren't showing it in three dimensions. So he's committed. I thought you were going to say that the studio was afraid if people saw him with the eye patch that they would worry that watching a movie in 3D would make them lose sight in one eye.

Huh. Yeah, I don't know. I've never seen any scare tactics about 3D. Certainly, you know, from William Castle, you saw plenty of scare tactics about just how frightening a movie could be. It may kill you, but...

But not so much put an eye out. I dare you to see my movie. You will probably be dead. All right. The screenplay for this one was from Crane Wilbur, who lived 1886 through 1973. Early 20th century actor turned writer. His other films on which he wrote included 1948's Cannon City, 59's The Bat, 36's The Devil on Horseback.

1950 is Outside the Wall. 53 is Crime Away. That was also directed by de Toth. And 1954 is The Mad Magician, which was a Vincent Price 3D, kind of a follow-up to this picture from another studio, but it's in black and white. It's supposed to be fun as well. Wilbur also wrote 1962's Mysterious Island. I don't want to be too harsh because I would say this is a pretty good script for 1953, but it has a common, I would say,

a problem that is fairly common to horror movies from the fifties, which is that the good characters aren't super interesting. So like Sue and Scott and the police, basically all of the, the people you're supposed to be rooting for are, you know, they're fine. Uh, but like the, the real character interest is in the villains. Exactly. Now the story credit for this one goes to Charles Belden who lived 1904 through 1954 and,

who was pretty active in the 40s and 50s, but his story credit on this and also on related wax movies is what he's best remembered for. His original story was adapted into 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum. This was a follow-up to a film we watched on the show for Weird House Cinema a while back, Dr. X, starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. This also starred Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray with...

with Atwill playing the wax master, the Vincent Price role, but with a different name. Oh, I'm sorry. I was just looking something up. I'm a little confused because I did not recall Lionel Atwill's character surviving at the end of Dr. X. It's not the same character. It's more of a, you know, don't think of it as a sequel, but just like a follow-up where they were like, hey, you guys really made a great kind of modern feeling, two-tone technicolor gothic horror story here, but with, again, with modern elements to it. Let's have another slurred

slice of that what can you dish up for us and they ended up doing mystery of the wax museum and it was also directed by the same director michael curtis okay so dr x it had a wax theme but i from what i recall it was only as like the twist at the end that you know that uh you uh found out about this so-called synthetic flesh that was uh that was more or less used like the wax uh like the wax that vincent price uses in this movie

Exactly. Yeah. So there's some similar the synthetic flesh is definitely a common element of both pictures. Mystery of the Wax Museum is a gorgeous looking two tone technicolor gothic horror film has some great horror elements in it. A number of the best moments in this film are kind of just direct remakes of of what occurred in that movie.

But it also has some really rough dialogue moments and darker plot elements that absolutely wouldn't have flown in the 1950s. And some of these elements wouldn't fly today either for good reason. So 1953's House of Wax is a remake and kind of a reminder that...

As tired as we get of remakes, sometimes they can be great. Sometimes they can improve upon and redefine that previous film. And it's a fairly blow for blow, blow for blow remake, as I remember, though, without the drugs, strong necrophilia vibes and casual racism of the previous 1930s film. OK.

Both films inspired a whole subgenre of wax movies. And this film, House of Wax, was very loosely, very loosely remade in 2005 as House of Wax. Belden retained a story credit on that film, but it is otherwise it's a completely different thing. Nothing to do with this picture or the 1930s picture written by the screenwriters behind the Conjuring franchise.

Man, the 2005 House of Wax is rough. I tried to rewatch that a few years ago when we did our core episode about wax, where we talked very briefly about this movie we're looking at today.

You deserve a prize if you can sit through the 2005 movie. It is rough. I think, as I said before, one of the big things is you've got to have a compelling wax master character. You've got to have somebody in there playing the Vincent Price role.

And if you don't, what are you doing? What are you doing doubling down on victim characters in your wax movie? I don't know how much of it we can really blame on the screenwriters here, how much of it is the director's part, how much of it is just like that's what people wanted or the studios thought people wanted in 2005. Yeah, I think 2005 is the beginning of the torture porn era. It's like Saw had come out and people were into that and people wanted like...

I don't know that vibe of the mid 2000s horror movie. It was like you wanted kind of queasy, gross, fluorescent lit scenes of like slick surfaces gleaming with blood and bodies just being mutilated. And while people scream, it was a bad time for horror. Yeah.

But again, wax, uh, these wax movies, highly influential. We could easily just do wax museum movies for like, uh, you know, a good couple of months, maybe three months if we so desired.

All right, let's get to the star here, Vincent Price playing Professor Henry Jared. Price lived 1911 through 1993. Horror icon. This is, I believe, our fourth Vincent Price film, as we previously discussed. 71's The Abominable Dr. Fibes, 1970's Scream and Scream Again, and 1964's The Mask of the Red Death.

So, we're not going to really retread a lot of what we talked about there as basic history, except to say that this film is extremely pivotal to Vincent Price's career.

Prior to House of Wax, he was not an actor associated with horror films. He was an occasional leading man, but mostly he did secondary roles. He was a very tall man. He was certainly handsome. So he was often pushed in the leading man direction. But I think it's like nothing like completely clicked there.

Let's see. What have we talked about that Vincent Price did before this? We certainly looked at his role as the narrator of the 1949 TV adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which is 25 minutes long. It's called The Christmas Carol, and it was a half-hour television special presented by the Magnavox Corporation. And let's just say that was not using Vincent Price to the fullest extent of his talents. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think even if you think of like 1950s leading men, too, it's like, would you want Price to play those roles? I think clearly Price had more to offer because most of those leading man roles in the 1950s is just not that interesting, with a few exceptions. I mean, you did have some standout stars, but generally they're not in the movies we watch for Weird House Cinema.

Yeah, a lot of like horror and sci fi movies in the 50s that the quote hero often has very little personality. He's just there to kind of be like strong and good and punch the bad guy at the end. Yeah, and absolutely conform. So, yeah, the other really interesting thing that I wasn't up on this particular history until I watched that documentary. And a lot of this came from from his daughter is that prior to this film, he was on the Hollywood gray list.

So we've talked about the blacklist before because it ended up impacting a number of different filmmakers and actors, often leading them into being in films that we watch on Weird House Cinema or even just completely destroying their career as they were at the very least accused of being communist sympathizers.

The gray list, which I was not familiar with, this is a list you were put on if you were automatically, if you opposed the Nazis before World War II. They interpret that as being, well, they're partisans.

They're possibly a communist. So let's go ahead and put them on the list. Yeah, I think the historical term I've heard used to refer to this is premature anti-fascist, like that you were against the fascists before the U.S. government had essentially given permission to be against fascism. Yeah. So obviously.

confusing and illogical in many ways, but very much a real thing at the time to the point that Price was apparently very concerned that his career was over, that he was never going to work again. He'd certainly seen plenty of his contemporaries ruined in Hollywood by this point because of the blacklist. But as it worked out, he ended up some FBI people came to his house. He had to sign some documentation. And after that, he ended up having his name cleared.

And once he was cleared, he got offered two projects. One was a play and one was House of Wax. He ended up going with House of Wax and it just revitalized his career and began his emergence as a new horror icon. Without House of Wax, who's to say we'd be talking about Vincent Price today? Well, I'm certainly glad we got all of these wonderful Vincent Price films because he hit it big with this one. Yeah.

All right. Our leading lady here is Sue Allen, or Sue Allen's the character, played by Phyllis Kirk, who lived 1927 through 2006.

Her other big film from the same year is 1953's Crime Wave, also directed by de Toth. She did a lot of TV, including an episode of the classic Twilight Zone series, and she starred along Peter Lawford on TV's The Thin Man. They played Nick and Nora Charles, respectively, investigators. This show was based, like the 1934 film, on the work of Dashiell Hammett, and the Nick and Nora glasses that some of you may have in your cupboard are named for these characters.

I used my Nick and Nora glass just the other night. I have no idea what that is. Okay, you're familiar with a coupe glass, right? Oh, yes. Like for cocktails or champagne. So imagine a coupe glass that's a little more narrow and a little less spillable, a little more petite.

And that's a Nick and Nora glass. I'm a big fan of them because I find they're less spillable than a coupe glass, but they have the same feel and they're great for a non-iced cocktail. It's great for something like a Manhattan. Okay. I had no idea what that was called, but I've had drinks in restaurants in these. Yeah. Nice little glass. I like it.

All right. So that's Sue. Sue is our main female character. But then she has a friend in the movie named Kathy, Kathy Gray. Kathy Gray is played by Carolyn Jones, who lived 1930 through 1983. Her character doesn't stick around long, but she gives us the real bubbly, fun loving blonde performance as the doomed Kathy.

and she would go on to play a supporting role in 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but is best well known for playing Morticia Adams on TV's The Adams Family in the mid-1960s. You know, I almost wish they had swapped the roles here. Not that it

really would have worked because I can tell what they were going for with the character of Sue and, and Phyllis Kirk fits that. Uh, but Carolyn Jones is so much fun and it's, it's sad that, that her character, uh, gets waxed too early in this film because, uh, she's got great screen presence and it does a very funny combination of kind of, yeah, like you said, on one hand, this, uh, bubbly party girl mentality, but she also has a very cynical edge that, that I liked. Yeah.

Yeah. And this movie, at least for the most part, I don't know to what extent they, you know, certainly in the night by the 1980s, we've talked about how like the good girl becomes our hero and the bad girl is punished. I didn't get that as much from this film that that Sue. Oh, I did. You did. Well, let's say it wasn't as pronounced, you know, like she was. Wait a minute.

I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstand you. You mean like you don't get the sense that the the ethic of the movie is that, wow, Kathy really got what was coming to her. It's just like it is tragic that she was killed.

Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. OK. It's not that it's like a film of vengeful conservative morality like you might perceive in some slasher movies. Right. There may be I think there's probably some of that leeching in sort of indirectly from the general culture, but it's not it's not sharpened in the script to the degree that it is in later films. So and I appreciated that. Yeah, agreed.

Uh, so Jones also had a small part in the man who knew too much from 56. She had a small part in Fritz Lang's, the big heat from 53 and she played Marsha queen of diamonds on the 1960s Batman series. Yeah. Like I said, Carolyn Jones is great in this. I wish her character had been alive longer. Uh, and I, you know, she's almost still kind of funny as a wax figure later in the movie. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. I'm going to skip most of the male good guys here because, again, they're not that interesting. Maybe we'll come back to Frank Lovejoy and Paul Piccarini in later films, but and we'll refer to their characters. But I just wasn't that interested, especially when we've got Igor to talk about. Igor was played by Charles Buchinsky.

who would later on be known as Charles Bronson, who lived 1921 through 2003. He made a death wish to be in this horror film, and it was granted. And wow, his muscles, okay?

Yeah, he is a strapping dude in this. This is Bronson pre-mustache and also pre-Bronson because he didn't start using that name until 1954. And yeah, he's very muscular. He doesn't talk. His character is supposed to be a deaf mute. He's also extremely grapply. He keeps getting into scrapes with people, with the cops, with our heroes, and he goes right for the grapple.

Even in his non-threatening scenes in this movie, he's one of those people who just has kind of a threatening posture. Like his arms are always kind of bent in such a way, kind of like a wrestler's stance, like he might spring out to grab you at any moment.

Yeah, which is it's interesting because it's a total different physical energy compared to what we I think most people identify with Charles Bronson from his later career where he's kind of a, you know, kind of a cool, tough guy. A guy who will sit there with an expressionless face until he suddenly shoots you. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. So he went on to be a big action star in the 60s and 70s, especially thanks to films like Once Upon a Time in the West, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Mechanic, and of course, the Death Wish franchise.

All right. We talked about the ping pong guy earlier. The paddle ball man. Yeah, paddle ball man. In the credits, he's referred to as the Barker because his job is to be outside of the wax museum, getting people excited, bringing them in. He's a carnival barker played by Reggie Rimel, who lived 1921 through 2002. He was a stand up comedian of the day who specialized in ping pong gags.

with little paddle balls, you know, on the elastic string. He performed on the Steve Allen show, the Eddie Cantor show, and you asked for it, but this is what he's...

He's best remembered for, um, and he gets a lot of screen time. Yeah. I would say, uh, Reggie Rymel probably has more words of, of dialogue in this movie than, uh, like Scott, the sculptor who is ostensibly like the, the male hero. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, we'll come back to him in a bit. All right. The music on this one is from David Buttoff, who lived 1902 through 1983. Prolific composer who also did Hitchcock's Rope in 48. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 53 and 1939's The Gorilla.

All right. Now, Gordon Bow, who lived 1907 through 1975, has makeup credit on this. But the fantastic makeup, the monster makeup that Price is actually wearing is apparently the work uncredited of his brother, George Bow, who lived 1905 through 1974. George Bow was a materials innovator who developed a bowel foam, which was first used in 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1910's

Gordon Bowe, his brother, worked on a ton of films doing makeup, including It's a Wonderful Life, Rebel Without a Cause, the 3D picture Dial M for Murder, Dirty Harry, Them, and The Omega Man, just to name a few. Very solid makeup in this movie. Absolutely. And I love the coloration.

It has this kind of a purplish effect. So the purples and pinks that kind of match up with the pink wax we see later. So it's grotesque, but also grotesque in a way. And I don't know how much of this was intended, but it's like it doesn't feel completely realistic. I think they were maybe going for realism, but like it doesn't feel realistic.

I don't know, somehow it doesn't feel as exploitive. I don't know if that makes sense. Like it's a different energy than, say, a Freddy Krueger makeup. Yeah. Anyway, final note, Robert Burks, who lived 1909 through 1968, Hitchcock's favorite cinematographer, worked on this picture, Uncredited, along with the credited cinematographers Burke Glennon, who lived 1893 through 1967, and J. Peverell Marley, who lived 1901 through 1964. ♪

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Alright, are we ready to talk about the plot? Yeah, let's get into it. So I really love the title shot. It really lets you know what kind of movie it's going to be. So you have a background that's a damp, dismal street corner in New York around the turn of the century. There are rain-soaked cobblestones and bricks that are reflecting the kind of measly light from a pair of street lamps. The scene is very dark blue and gray. And you have a lot of people who are

But then in the foreground, here comes the title house of wax in huge shrieking orange block letters, like, uh,

I don't know how to describe this. Like the letters have the, their blocks that have these big amount of, that have depth, like they're stamps jutting out of the screen. And the texture on the front of the letters is that of melting wax. So the title itself is dripping. Yeah. Yeah. I love these. Even watching these in 2D, they jump out at you. Also, they put the title in quotation marks, which I found funny. I'm not sure why, but it's the so-called house of wax. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, when you're using House of Wax font, you can disregard some of the other rules regarding punctuation. But the title of a movie is usually underlined or italicized anyway, rather than putting quotation marks. This isn't a poem. Yeah, I mean, generally you can just throw the words up there. You don't need to worry about anything else, especially if you're using gimmicky letters like this. I mean, come on.

Anyway, as the credits fade in and out, we watch the silhouette of a lonely man tramping up the sidewalk in the rain. And by the way, just throughout the movie, I do love the nighttime shots of the streets here. The lonely...

dark, often foggy, often wet with rain, New York streets around the turn of the century. I guess these were probably all indoor shots inside a studio, but they're fantastic. Yeah, and a lot of these shots, apparently, you really got a sense of that depth when you were watching it in 3D. Mm-hmm.

Anyway, we move inside one of the windows into a brightly lit interior to immediately see a shadow cast upon a wall. And it is the shadow of a woman wearing a bonnet with a knife raised in her hand, ready to strike. So who's she about to stab? Nobody. It turns out we pan over to discover this is not a living woman about to commit a murder, but a wax sculpture of a woman wearing the bonnet again and doing the knife delivery pose. Yeah.

The camera reveals the rest of the room slowly, and it is full of humanoid wax sculptures. We see a kind of master of ceremonies dude wearing a top hat and tails. There's a choir mistress in red and black tartan. There is a policeman in a bobby helmet. We see Cleopatra and Mark Antony, a fancy lady that I think is supposed to be Marie Antoinette. Oh, yeah, this is Marie Antoinette.

A scene of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and then Joan of Arc at the stake. And of the historical figures depicted, I was noticing immediately that it seems like they're all people associated with tragic and untimely deaths.

And I think this says something about the cultural understanding of the purpose of a wax museum, that it is not for effigies of just any famous person, but there's a particular spirit of morbid curiosity there.

that we associate with wax. There's kind of a focus on not just in the chamber of horror sense, though that will become a theme in the movie itself where you have wax figures for scenes of torture and execution and all that. But even when you're not showing torture and execution, you're showing figures that we remember for the fact that they died young and tragically. Yeah, with their flesh made whole again and lifelike.

So finally, we arrive at the end of the Great Hall and we come to a place that functions as a workshop. And here is Vincent Price as the character Professor Henry Jared. He's dressed in a long smock, surrounded by half-finished wax bodies, arms and heads. And he's deep in his work. He's using his fingers to shape the contours of a sort of wax of Venus on a stand before him.

Yeah, this is essentially the same character played by Atwell in the original, though that character in the original was named Ivan Igor. And there was also just, again, a lot more of a necrophilia vibe to his obsession with wax bodies. And Vincent Price's Henry Jared comes off more innocent, eccentric, certainly, but more innocent in his connection to his work. Initially, yes.

Yeah. I mean, it becomes perverse. Yeah, obviously. And murderous. At the beginning, yeah. Yeah. But at the beginning, it's just about a man who is pouring all of his being into these creations and loves them and has this kind of eccentric relationship with them. He sees them as his friends. He sees them as his family. So somebody comes in from the rain. It is Matthew Burke, Jared's business partner. And as soon as he's in the door, they're

at odds about their business situation. So they run a wax museum together and Matthew Burke is not happy with recent ticket returns. He says that, Hey, you know, the other wax museums in town, they've got lines around the block. What's the difference. They've got a chamber of horrors. So all of their sculptures are about murder, torture, and execution. Um,

And Jared is not interested in that. He says he'd rather spend his time depicting beauty and figures of historical significance. He's not going to stoop to slopping out wax gore, which, again, remembering what we just said, is kind of funny because while this the stuff in his museum is not gory, it is very focused on people with tragic deaths. Yeah.

Yeah, but he's not pushing it the way his business partner thinks he should be pushing it. Like the gore should be front and center. And he's like, no, no, no, the beauty should be front and center, even if I'm focusing on...

martyred individuals and tragic figures. Yeah. So I guess Matthew here would say like, look, I want that Joan of Arc to be half burned alive. You know, I want to see her muscle. I want to see the blood. So Matthew is not happy. He says, I've got $20,000 sunk in this historic peep show of yours, and I could use that money to better advantage.

But Vincent Price has an ace up his sleeve here. He says, well, there's a wealthy investor named Sidney Wallace. He's about to come by. And Jared is hoping that Mr. Moneybags here might be willing to buy out Matthew's share of the museum. And this would free Jared from having to turn the place into Hellraiser 2 to keep Matthew happy.

So Wallace and this other guy named Bruce show up and Jared starts giving them a tour of his artworks. But in doing so, he does start making these eccentric comments. Like he calls his sculptures, his children. And he says to you, they are wax, but to me, their creator, they live and breathe. He explains a bit about how he makes them. He presses the hair into the wax heads with the scalpel one hair at a time. He says, uh,

And they're like looking at the Cleopatra scene. And I think it's Bruce who's getting a little too excited about the Cleopatra sculpture. And then Jared shows off the Lincoln assassination scene. He says he calls it, quote, one of my few concessions to the macabre. And then Wallace looks at it. He says, why is the best John Wilkes booth I've ever seen? And I was like, what? How many has he seen? Are there?

Are there like assassin waxes all over the town? I guess maybe all the museums have a booth.

Yeah. And you travel around, you go to a new city, you want to see what their John Wilkes booth looks like at their local wax museum. Oh, but then in explaining the scene, Jared gets into, oh, the booth sculpture was very stubborn. I kept arguing with him while he was being crafted and he didn't want to do what I wanted him to do. And they're like, do you mean he talked back to you? And he says, of course, what do you expect from an actor? Yeah.

And then finally, on to Joan of Arc, Jared's, well, I'd say one of his two favorite subjects. Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc are his favorites, I think. He says that he has remade the scene many times now, and he explains the reason. There is no authentic portrait of Joan, so he has to work from living models, and he's never found the model to give him the perfect face of the saint. But he's sure he will one day.

Oh, and also just they also have a conversation about the Marie Antoinette figure. And at one point he's he's saying that her eyes are made of glass and he says the exact size and color of the original. Yeah.

I guess the same size as the original eyes or just sort of human eyes. I don't know. I don't know. Strange comment. That was odd. But anyway, after the tour, Wallace, Wallace is interested in buying out Matthew's stake in the museum. But first he has to go do excavations in Egypt for three months. So he's going to be off grave robbing. But when he returns, he will be perhaps willing to invest in the museum.

So Wallace and Bruce leave and Jared gets back to talking to the wax babies. He's, you know, oh, Marie Antoinette, my beloved. Did you hear them acknowledge your beauty?

And meanwhile, Matthew, the business partner, has been lurking around this whole time and he comes out of an adjacent room and Jared expects him to be happy, but he's like, sorry, I can't wait three months. I need money now. So his plan is that the wax museum is insured for twenty five thousand dollars. He says, let's burn it down and claim the insurance check. Of course.

Of course, Jared is scandalized. He's like, burn my children alive. That's murder. I won't do it. And I'll kill you if you try. But Matthew does not stop to discuss. He just starts lighting matches and setting wax people on fire. This is pretty much exactly how it goes down in the original film as well. It is not premeditated arson. It's just like, hey, let's do arson. I think that's the way to go. Let's do it. I'm doing it now.

No time to argue. Yeah. Yeah. So they get into a fist fight, but Vincent Price is bested. And he gets knocked out, I think, twice in this sequence. Yeah. There was a lot of punching going on. And I believe it was Wes Craven in the documentary who pointed out that it looks like Vincent Price is doing a lot of his own stunts and also doing them really close to open flames. So Craven was kind of like, he was like flinching a little. He was like, oh, as a director, you know, this is...

You're kind of like, wow, they really they were really going for it here. There is another scene later in the movie where where the Vincent Price character does like a swing on a rope across an alleyway top and it looks like it's really him. Yeah. I wonder how much of that is just sort of this is just how you did it.

At the time and how much of it, too, is just like price coming out of this gray list scare, realizing that this is perhaps his big chance to get back on top of things and just going just all in on it, just doing everything he can. Well, he does really go for it. But so in this scene, Matthew knocks Jared unconscious, leaves him for dead as the Palace of Wax burns.

And we here get to see, this is something that I think is common to most wax horror movies. There is the Palace of Wax Burns, and we watch all of the wax figures burning and melting in a revolting manner. And it really does look gross. Presumably, I was thinking about why this is, and I think it's because the

sort of fat-like composition of wax somewhat resembles what we imagine it would look like for flesh and adipose tissue to burn. But we get horrifying shots of wax faces kind of softening and then scorching and trickling away down the chin of the mold.

And it just makes me think about how there's a reason wax museums keep occurring as a setting for horror movies. And those movies always involve a tragic inferno where the wax faces melt. It's just an inherently disgusting and disturbing visual texture. Yeah, absolutely.

So the museum burns. We see Price wake up and run through an interior doorway, though it's not initially clear whether he dies in the fire or escapes. And then the fire department arrives. A horse-drawn fire engine comes clattering up the street to put out the blaze. And I thought this was a very cool historical set piece. Yeah, it really drives home the historic Gothic feel of the picture. So later, I guess this is taken to be weeks later, we are at some

I don't know. The setting here is horrible. It's like this insipid promenade where this repetitive music is playing. We see a banner somewhere that says Weber's Hofbrau. And Matthew Burke is there, the scheming business partner who set fire to the Wax Museum. He is there with his fiancée talking about his dear departed friend, Professor Jarrett. And his fiancée here is Carolyn Jones playing Kathy Gray.

Now, Matthew is describing his dear departed friend, Professor Jared. He says, you know, oh, he was a great artist. Only I could understand him. We were like this. And his fiance says, did they ever find him after the fire? And she's doing...

I would call it a Betty Boop voice. Very much a baby voice. I agree. Matthew says, nope, no sign of him. Place went up like a volcano. Maybe he was reduced to unrecognizable ash. And he says, if only I had been there, I might have saved him.

And Carolyn Jones says, oh, but Maddie, then you might have been burned up, too. So at very first, it seems like this character played by Carolyn Jones is supposed to be kind of naive and dumb. But then she looks away from Maddie and she kind of gets a twinkle in her eye and she says, was there any insurance on the place? So I think she's actually angling for that sweet cash just as much as Matthew is. Mm hmm.

Of course, it's worth mentioning, she does not know the true horror of what happened there. She doesn't know that he's a murderer. Right.

Right. She doesn't know about that, but she does want the money. Yeah. And Matthew's like, well, there's a problem. The insurance was hesitant to pay out because they couldn't verify whether Jared was alive or dead. And Kathy says, yeah, they always want a corpse giggle. But it seems like the the insurance check finally just came through today. So Matthew is he has possession of the money. And Kathy is positively cooing and twittering about this.

And he says, where would you like to go? Atlantic City. But she wants to go to Niagara Falls to get married. She says, you know, make it legitimate. And I laughed out loud at Matthew's reaction to this. He gets very kind of somber and he's like, check, please. But later that night, Matthew returns to his office alone. And we see him go into this lonely building, this empty office at night and retrieve some money from his safe.

But, as he's doing so, a black-gloved hand reaches up over the back of the sofa in his office, and a shadowy figure emerges, a man dressed in all black with a wide-brimmed black hat and a face scarred beyond recognition. And

I don't know if there's supposed to be any mystery about who it is at this point, but obviously it's Jared. Who else would it be? Yeah. And, uh, it, man, again, the, the makeup is just impressive. Uh, they do some great stuff with not only, um,

you know, layering on to Vincent Price's face, but also keeping Vincent Price recognizable through the makeup, but also distorting his natural features a little bit, like pulling his lip down on one side. I think he has later we see that like one of his ears is kind of pinned back as well. Great makeup. You can't fault them for showing it a lot and early in the picture. Right. So he creeps up on Matthew. He dims the lamp on the wall and then he pounces and strangles Matthew with the length of rope.

And then we see the figure creeping away from the scene of the crime. You think he's running away, but no, he is staging a crime scene. Instead, he secures a rope to an elevator shaft and then drops Matthew's body to make it look like a suicide.

So you would think at this point, OK, Vincent Price's revenge checklist complete. Like it seems like this revenge plot would have taken the whole movie, but no, it is done within 20 minutes. So what is the rest of the drama going to consist of? Yeah, that's right. Dr. Five sort of taken up the entire length of the film trying to pull off this level of revenge.

completion with his revenge. Well, let's check in with Maddie's fiance, Kathy and her roommate, Sue. So, uh, again, it's funny because while, uh, Carolyn Jones did the Betty Boop voice for, for Matthew, she comes off as savvy and even cynical when talking with Sue. So she's no longer playing it naive. Uh, and she's talking to her roommate, Sue and Sue is, uh, Phyllis Kirk, uh,

And she's like, well, you know, Maddie was going to marry me, so I thought I could get my hands on that insurance money, but he's dead, LOL. Anyway, I've got a new date tonight, and he's real handsome, and he's a free spender. Meanwhile, Kathy is like bracing against a doorframe while Sue pulls her corset laces tighter.

And, uh, Kathy's very excited about, uh, about her new bow. Again, he's, uh, you know, he's, he's a free spender. He's going to take her to a place called the Hoffman house for dinner. And then to quote Tony pastors for the vaudeville show, which I don't know that that doesn't sound like a cheap date. It does sound like he's paying, he's paying up to go to the nice places.

But when we do see the vaudeville show, it's another, again, I think it's a 3D showcase. We get that 3D code-approved tush pushed at the camera. What do you call the sort of plating

of pants that they're wearing with all the ruffles. The ruffle pants underneath the dress. I don't know what you call that. Yeah. So, you know, certainly not pantaloons. Yeah. Not even remotely risque by modern, uh, uh, modern standards. But, uh, I guess this is the slightly risque moment in this film. Well, we don't see it in this scene. We see it later when hilariously Scott takes Sue there to take her mind off the fact that she is being chased by a melted man. Yeah.

But we learn a bit here about Kathy and Sue's relationship. So the dynamic seems to be that Kathy is she has an active social life and it knows for money. She's trying to marry rich, whereas Sue seems very modest and she's kind of a homebody. And if this movie were set 100 years later, I think Sue would be a nerd with glasses who doesn't take her glasses off until the scene in the third act where she's modeling to be Marie Antoinette or something.

Yeah, but you definitely get the vibe here that they're both doing what they can to scrape by and make it in a man's world. That's right. And you know what? I liked their relationship. They're they're good friends and they take care of each other. Kathy says, you know, we're so different. You've got the brains and what I've got is, well, what I've got.

And so Sue has in this at the beginning here come on hard times. She's out of work and out of money and Kathy's helping her out. She right before she leaves for the date, she gives her the last 50 cents in her purse to buy some supper and says, I don't need any mad money. I never get mad. So later that night, Sue comes home after trying to get a job as a hat check attendant working under some tyrannical theater manager. That doesn't work out. She doesn't get the job.

We don't see that scene, but we get the impression that it's because the theater manager is a creep and Sue wouldn't put up with it and just left. So Sue's trying to sneak up to her room, but the landlady of their building is like posted like a sentry. She's waiting in the parlor to demand rent immediately. She's like, you cannot stay here tonight unless you give me the rent. And I think Sue was waiting for Kathy to get back from her date with some money so she could...

So that could she could borrow it from her. So that could be the rent, I think. Yeah, I believe that was the arrangement. Yeah. So Sue goes up to the room to see if she can borrow the money. But instead, Kathy is dead. She finds Kathy murdered in her room. And then she is startled by a terrifying melted man in black, the same man we saw killing Matthew Burke.

And a chase scene follows. I would say a very good, tense chase scene. Sue escapes out the window and onto the streets below, and then the melted man in black runs after her. And they're chasing through this maze of alleyways in a foggy night. Sue barely escapes, making it to the home of a friend, a sculptor named Scott Andrews, who lives with his mother. Again, thumbs up to the chase scene. I love the street sets.

Yeah. Yeah. The great, great, great streets they create here. Dark, Gothic, wonderful. So police investigators the next day arrive at the scene of Kathy's murder, or maybe it's later that night. I don't know. I don't know. They show up and they're trying to figure out what's going on at the morgue. They determined the cause of death was strangulation and they determined that she had been drugged probably in a drink beforehand. Hmm. That makes you wonder who her date was with. Was the date involved in the murder? Yeah.

But we assume also that her date was not with the melted Vincent Price because she says the guy she was going out with was very handsome. Yeah, they never really tell us one way or another. I guess if I had to try and put it together in my head, I guess maybe one of Vincent Price's two underlings that we meet later. Or it could be Vincent Price with the wax face we see him with later.

I guess you'd think the cops would figure this out, though. Like, who is she saying? This is not a police procedural. So we don't even go down this direction.

Anyway, at the morgue, there is some comic relief with the orderlies. And there's one point where they're in the room with all of the bodies and one of the corpses pops up under the sheet. But the orderlies like, oh, yeah, they do that sometimes. It's the embalming fluid. But no, after they leave, it pops up again and it is not the embalming fluid. It is our melted assailant pretending to be a corpse.

This whole sequence plays out pretty much exactly like it does in the original picture. And in the original picture, also just a very haunting scene of the morgue. So, yeah, they recreate it well, I think. But he locates the body of Kathy Gray and he proceeds to steal it from the morgue. He lowers the body out the window to a couple of co-conspirators waiting below who are also dressed in dark cloaks and hats.

And I did laugh here because the fake body prop they use for the rope lowering is very stiff and obviously very light. Later, Sue and her friend Scott and Scott's mother are at the police station being interrogated. And the interrogation consists of the police asking things like, quote, are you sure you didn't imagine all of it? And also they tell her it is impossible for a human being to look the way you described.

Oh, and we find out in the scene that the body of Matthew Burke was similarly stolen from the morgue. Yeah, it gradually becomes apparent that bodies are being stolen and bodies are disappearing all over town. Right. Congratulations to 3AM Innovations on their first place win for Innovation in Community at this year's Unconventional Awards by T-Mobile for Business.

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So a new scene later, Sidney Wallace, remember him? He was the investor who had to go to Egypt for three weeks, but he was going to invest in Henry Jared's museum. Well, he shows up at a door in an alleyway and he's greeted by a young, jacked Charles Bronson, who we will later be informed is named Igor. Yeah, yeah. By the way, one thing I pointed out in the documentary is that Bronson was already pretty big.

uh, in, in Italy, uh, under his, um, his, his birth name. Uh,

but he was big enough that when they put the poster out for the Italian market, his head is prominently featured. It's almost like starring Charles Bronson. Well, his head is actually prominent in the movie because there are multiple wax casts of it. Because what we learn in this scene is that Igor is one of the pupils of Professor Jared, now revealed to be still alive. And Igor tries to make

wax figures of other people, but he always ends up making his own face. Hmm.

That almost seems like an interesting, rare neurological condition where you perceive everybody else's face to be exactly the same. Everybody else's face to be the same as your own. Yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you might build an entire Twilight Zone episode out of, but it's not really explored here. Anyway, so Wallace here, he says he got a letter telling him to come meet Professor Jared at this address. And yet he's confused because Professor Jared is supposed to be dead. But nope, here is Vincent Price and not melted. He looks like regular, unmelted Vincent Price.

His hands are scarred and he moves with the help of a wheelchair, but his face is back to normal. And Jared says, hey, Wallace, I'm opening a new wax museum. This one will be dedicated to the themes of terror, agony, crime, malice and execution. And we're going to send people into the streets telling their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death. Do you do you want in? Do you want to invest?

Seems like Wallace is going to invest, but he shows him around first. He's like, you know, here's my facility. Here is Charles Bronson. This is my student. He makes wax faces now that my hands are too scarred to do it. He's got another student downstairs named Leon. He also does the wax for him. Oh, and here is my giant vat of boiling wax. Oh, I love this vat of wax. It's got this pink tint to it. Just looks amazing.

And he shows how he uses the boiling wax to make the skin that he pours. He like uses a sort of a sprinkler system to pour the melted wax over the mold of a body, which is made of plaster, by the way, not flesh. And then he reveals the most recent wax effigy he has finished. Igor opens a box, which just looks like a coffin standing up. And then, Oh,

there is Matthew Burke. He looks so lifelike. And he falls toward the camera out of the box, and Price says he hanged himself in an elevator shaft. And then, intermission!

So my version of this movie, the intermission card just said intermission, but I found screenshots of the intermission card on the internet that said intermission 10 minutes. What's going on there? I believe the version I watched said 10 minutes as well. I didn't go back and double check, but I remember when it came up, it said,

And I was like, oh, I've got I've got some time here. But then we don't get the actual 10 minutes or whatever. So we go right back into the picture. But I have to say, I kind of miss the when I do go to a theater these days, I kind of miss the intermission, especially when we're dealing with like three hour long pictures and, you know, you're drinking coffee, you know.

You need to get up and go to the bathroom after a while and you just have to sort of guess or maybe do some research and find out what scenes you need to you need to hit. And then it's got to be this this rushed affair to use the bathroom and get back to the seat. It seems like why not do the intermissions, especially in these theaters where you have assigned seats nowadays, like let people stroll out there, use the bathroom, buy some more food and what have you.

Agreed. Intermissions are nice. But yeah, likewise, my version of the movie, the intermission only lasted a few seconds. So after the intermission, the new House of Wax is open and it is bustling. It's obviously doing great business. It is also deeply morbid and prurient. It's just wax executions and belly dancers. Yeah.

And Vincent Price is going around handing out smelling salts to the ladies who are fainting in the middle of his museum. And here's the part where they have hired a paddleball barker to get people in the door. He is out front just whipping the paddleballs and talking a mile a minute.

Yeah, Reggie Rimel here absolutely threatening any and everyone who comes within paddleball reach of him, just right in their faces, then right in the camera. And he even...

basically breaks the fourth wall and threatens a moviegoer and their popcorn. Though not in like a total Gremlins 2 winky-winky way, but still, it gets dangerously close to that level. I don't know. I think it is almost Gremlins 2 level because he's starting to say, he looks directly into the camera and he says, I see you sitting. So what he's doing already is he's hitting the paddle ball at like,

Somebody's hat. He's like, I can knock the feather off of your hat. And he's, you know, doing that. But then he looks into the camera. He says, look, you there holding a box of popcorn. I'm going to hit the popcorn. Yeah. Yeah. But, but if you really want to do, you could think, well, there's a kid with popcorn there on the street and that's what he's aiming at. And it's just out of, uh, we can't see it because we're, that's where we're positioned. But, uh, yeah.

Yeah, it's still very gimmicky. It's a very gimmicky moment. This is the moment of the film where they're fully embracing the gimmick of 3D. And not for immersion in the picture, but just for the spectacle itself. So many pretensions Henry Jarrett had of keeping dignity and fine art as the...

as the purpose of his museum. This has all been abandoned. So he has a gimmicky barker out front, get luring people in by, by taunting them. And when he leads the tour, it is now all wax gore. He's quoting Shakespeare and making comments like, yes, Anne Boleyn, her husband, King Henry found a way to cut their marriage short. Um,

And then he uses at one point he uses a guillotine to decapitate a wax French aristocrat. And this makes people scream and faint. Yeah, he's just fully embracing all of the gore that he he didn't want to embrace previously. He's like, I'm back. I'm changed now. You want gore. You got it. Oh, and then here's a familiar exhibit. He's he's like showing off the scenes of crimes. He's like Matthew Burke, the stockbroker. And I'm just thinking, is this a quote?

crime worthy of a museum piece it doesn't make doesn't really fit in with the like famous historical executions here yeah again it's a moment where this is clearly not a police procedural because amid all of these historic and famous deaths here is a less newsworthy death about someone personally connected to me and my business pursuits who died several weeks ago yeah

And everyone's like, oh, wow, yeah, very impressive. So Sue and Scott, Scott the sculptor, come to visit the museum and

And they're commenting on everything. They're like, wow, yeah, these are really well done. Scott, even as a professional, is highly impressed. And he says Sue has been modeling for him. She's been posing for, I guess, his sculptures. I don't know if he is a wax sculptor or some other kind of sculptor. I don't recall if they reveal that. But eventually Sue wanders over to the exhibit showing Joan of Arc at the stake ready to be burned.

And let's zoom in on her face. Why, that looks an awful lot like Carolyn Jones, Sue's roommate, Kathy. Sue is greatly disturbed to see her dead friend's face perfectly reproduced in wax sculpture. She starts to kind of freak out about this, but Vincent Price comes over to explain. He says that after she was killed, he saw her face in a picture in the newspaper and used that as a model for his Joan of Arc.

And Sue accepts this, but still seems troubled by how it can can look so real. And of course, Vincent Price is very creepy about it. He says, that's the finest compliment I've ever received. And then Jared starts asking old Scott, the sculptor, what he's like. I hear you're a sculptor, Scott. Show me your hands. And then he shows him his hands. And Vincent Price says, yes, mine were once like that.

And so they make arrangements to work together sometime. But while Jared is talking, he also just starts hallucinating Sue as Marie Antoinette. She's like fading in and out of her regular costume and then into the Marie Antoinette get up.

Yeah, this is he sees her as his favorite. Is this like he wants to recreate his favorite Marie Antoinette? And this is clearly the woman whose likeness he needs to transform into her. Right. He is desperate to wax this woman. So.

Jared asks Sue to model for him. And I think she kind of agrees, but then they leave and, you know, they're walking out and we get another shot of the paddle ball guy as we leave. It's like one was not enough. He is really impressive. Like at one point, maybe it's the earlier scene, he does the bit where

He's using two paddle balls at once, but then he ends up doing three and he catches all the balls in his mouth. It's pretty great. You might not think you need to see this performance, but after you see it, you're like, that's really good. This man was at the top of his game. Later that night, though, when Sue is in her bedroom, we see the melted wax man in the hat and cloak sneaking up to the window. And he sort of, he like...

throws a throws a grappling hook or something and like swings across the alleyway to her window and he's sneaking up on her but sue wakes up before he reaches her she screams and he runs away and then next we just go straight to the burlesque 3d spectacle that you talked about earlier they're at the music hall sue and scott are there together and we just get to watch the can-can dancers in 3d kicking kicking up a storm

Also, time to stop and appreciate a food and bev scene. You know, we should rate the food and beverages in movies more often. So in this scene, our heroes are delivered a lager for the man, a sarsaparilla for the lady, and two knockwursts on rye. Looks like maybe they get a couple little cornichons with sausage sandwiches. I rate this movie meal a three out of ten. What? I don't know. If you're in the mood for it, it could work. I mean, I like the cornichons.

I like cornichons. The sandwiches look kind of boring and dry. It doesn't even look like the bread is toasted. I don't know. The sarsaparilla looks good. It's in a nice, classy little glass. Okay, I agree there. So they're sitting there watching this

dance show and Sue is like it doesn't seem proper all those girls showing their their talents and then Scott explains he says look you've been going around with the weight of the world on your shoulders you're obsessed with your dead friend reincarnated as a wax martyr you're seeing melted stalkers in your bedroom at night you need to watch a show like this to quote bring you back to normalcy this is one of the least convincing statements in the film and

But at any rate, it's bloomers in 3D. What can you say? Oh, yeah, yeah. And in all honesty, I think this scene probably is just like the paddle ball. Like they wanted an excuse to have a 3D spectacle, can-can dancers kicking and jamming their butts in your face. So they found a way to fit it into the plot. But, you know, it's funny. It works. It's pretty good. Yeah.

But in the middle of this dance show, Sue is preoccupied with something about the wax Joan of Arc. Not only did it look exactly like Kathy, it had an irregular piercing in only one ear, just like the real Kathy. How could Jared have seen that from a newspaper photo? And Scott, she explains this to Scott and he's like, you know what you need? You need to talk to a cop. I'm going to take you to the police station tomorrow and they'll tell you there's nothing to worry about.

And so she's looking kind of like sad and dejected while Scott's like, now relax, honey, and enjoy the show. And he's all jazzed up about it. The dancing resumes. And then anyway, there is a scene the next day, I think, where they do go and talk to the police. And unexpectedly, the police start investigating this. They go and check on the museum and stuff. Yeah, they don't completely laugh her off. I mean, they do laugh at her, but they still follow up.

Now, there's a few other scenes in here leading up to the the climax. There's one part where they're at the museum and she's investigating the Cathy sculpture. And then Vincent Price shows up with a box and opens it. And it's a wax sculpture of Sue's own head. And he shows it to Sue. He's like, do you like it? Yeah.

but he still wants her to model sometime. And then meanwhile, also the police are poking around in the museum and they start noticing that a bunch of the wax figures in the room look exactly like the faces of bodies that have recently gone missing from the morgue. But they're just like, huh, that's odd. And just kind of riffs over their heads. Uh,

So there's more of a police investigation plot. They interrogate Wallace. They hunt down Leon, one of the two pupils, and arrest him, figure out his real identity and stuff. But it's all building up to this final confrontation where one night Sue goes to the wax museum to meet Scott, but she can't find him. And there's a wonderful creepy scene where she's

walking around in the darkened museum amongst the exhibits and all these scenes of murder and stuff. And she's calling out Scott, Scott. And meanwhile, Charles Bronson is creeping around. There's one point where you see a wax head that you think, or you see what you think is a wax head, but it's really Charles Bronson's actual head. Yeah. Great fake out. Uh,

And there's there's a Kathy hair reveal. She like goes up to the sculpture of Joan of Arc and she pulls the wig off and it's Kathy's real blonde hair underneath. All has come to light. That's right.

And of course, she's confronted here by Charles Bronson and by Vincent Price. Now we get one of the great scenes in this sequence that is also pretty much blow for blow exactly what happens in the 1930s picture as well, where Vincent Price is there. First of all, he gets up out of his wheelchair. So Vincent Price's character here is actually guilty of what happens.

The dude accuses the big Lebowski of in the big Lebowski. Oh, yeah. He can clearly walk. He's just using the wheelchair as part of this disguise. He's faking it. Yeah, he's faking it.

But then she tries to struggle against him and she she hits him in the face a couple of times. And when she does, it like smashes open his wax and false face at this this wax face that he's wearing that makes him look like Vincent Price and reveals this heavily scarred visage beneath him.

It's a wonderful moment. It was a great moment in the original film, but this movie actually improves upon it with even better makeup, with this amazing full-color makeup. Agreed. Excellent reveal. It's not much of a surprise because, I mean, again, who else would this melted guy be? Like, you know it's got to be Vincent Price. But, yeah, wonderful scene.

And then this leads up to the ending where now Sue is, you know, she's basically she has been tied to the train tracks by Snidely Whiplash. In this case, she is

laying down on the table in the basement of the wax museum under the big vat of boiling wax. So because the plan is that Jared is going to waxify Sue and turn her into his new Marie Antoinette while she's still alive. Yeah. And, you know, despite this being very much like a code approved film, we have implied nudity here. She's supposed to be nude in there. And of course, you know, we never...

see any of the nudity, but it's heavily implied. And later, like when she's rescued, somebody has to throw a coat over her. Implied nudity being a hilarious content warning that we once saw on the IMDb parental guide. Yes. I mean, isn't the presence of any human body technically a case of implied nudity? It's like you assume that they're there somewhere. Yeah. Yeah.

So, as the film winds, so it's close here, they do a great job building the tension. We have these dual scenes going on where there's the battle against Igor on one hand, and then there's Jared's wax preparations for Sue in the basement. I thought both sequences were really skillfully composed and cut together here.

Yes, I agree. Very tense sequence. Sue is in the basement about to be waxed alive. Scott, meanwhile, he gets in the fight with Charles Bronson and then Charles Bronson wins and then puts him in the guillotine to guillotine him. And then at the last moment, they are saved by the arrival of the police, which, you know, that's a classic. It's a very...

a fifties movie kind of ending one that I always find incredibly unsatisfying. The hero and the heroine do not find a way to, to best the villain of their own accord. They have to be rescued by the authorities and,

I don't know why. I wonder if audiences in the 50s found that as unsatisfying as I think most people probably would today. Or if at the time it was just like, oh, okay, yeah, good. You know, the police saved the day. It robs us of a certain kind of resolution to the dynamic between the characters. If you don't see a way for the good characters to save themselves, they just deus ex machina, basically. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's basically like Tarantula, where, all right, call in Clint Eastwood in a jet fighter. A character that we haven't seen before is going to save the day by blowing up the giant spider. I mean, I guess it's not quite a deus ex machina, to be fair, because we have seen the police investigating up to this point. So, like, there's a plot line of them figuring out what's going on and getting there to that moment. So they don't show up from out of nowhere, but we're not really invested in the police character's

So I don't know. It's just it's just not not quite the same as it would be if Sue or Scott themselves figured out a way out of this. I guess it's ultimately in the in the grander cinematic tradition. It's it's great to have that trope, though, because when that trope is later subverted in films, it can be especially delightful and mean with one of the prime examples, of course, being like Hitchcock's Psycho.

where the picture lets you know clearly that whatever rescue you thought was going to come is maybe not going to work after all. So when police intervention fails in later pictures, maybe it hits a little harder. I don't know. There's a really good twist that inverts that in Silence of the Lambs. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Like where you think the cops are showing up to conclude the plot, but in fact, the heroine is on her own. Right. Yeah, they're hitting the wrong house. Yeah. But anyway, authority saving the day aside, it is a really tense ending, and I think it works great for the most part. And there's a lot more grapple, like when they've...

when they arrest Igor, he's about to suplex a cop. And then I don't know if you noticed, but when Vincent Price's character is, is fighting off the authorities at one point, he like picks a dude up. Like he's going to throw him into the wax. But of course we know who's going in that wax.

Right. I mean, it's the end you know is coming. It's kind of like it's Chekhov's gun. If there's a gun on the mantelpiece, it will probably be fired. If there is a, what would you call it, an open-topped large container of some kind of deadly liquid, whether that's a pool with piranhas in it or boiling acid, whatever.

or boiling wax, the villain has got to fall in it. Exactly. I mean, that's what it's there for. We want that spectacle. Even if there's, and in this case, there's nothing really gory afterwards. Like you don't see a skeleton rising to the surface or anything like that. We don't see a wax cocooned body.

Vincent Price, you know, falling onto the floor or anything. But just the spectacle of him, of somebody landing in that stuff is enough. Yeah, that's not the stinger at the end. Instead, the epilogue is just them at the police station with Sue being like, thank you for putting your coat over my naked body. The end. Yeah.

That was a strange comment to end on, but yeah. Yeah, but you got to send the folks home happy. You know, the whole family came out. I don't even know about the whole family, but at least people made the effort to come to the big theater to get the big theater experience with all this wonderful sound, 3D effects. They need to go home happy. So they'll come back next time and watch more 3D Warner Brothers pictures.

Yeah. If they ever re-release this again in 3D, I would absolutely go to a theater to watch it in 3D. I think that would be a blast. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I really left this movie and the research wanting to have the really for the first time.

Perhaps ever really wanting to have a proper 3D cinema experience with whatever technology I can get my hands on. So the next time there's like a strong I would I mean, obviously, I would love to see like this picture re-released in modern 3D or or some form of 3D in the theater. But I'll settle for anything at this point. Almost anything. All right. Does that do it for House of Wax?

I believe that will, we'll go ahead and seal off the, the, the wax canister on this one, but we'll be back next week with one more 3d picture. What will it be? I don't know. We're still looking around at things. I've got another disc to check out here. Uh, so, uh,

Tune in and find out. In the meantime, if you want to hear more Weird House Cinema, well, we put this out every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast, but on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film. If you want to see a complete list of the films that we've covered on the show, we can go to Letterboxd.com. That's L-E-T-T-E-R-B-O-X-D. We have a user account there called Weird House.com.

And on that account, you'll find a list in order, all the films we've covered. It's pretty fun to check out. Huge thanks to our audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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