Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 3: we're back with week two in our series of three
Speaker 3: weeks of three D. Last week's movie was the three
Speaker 3: D adventure Treasure of the Four Crowns. Today's film is
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifty three horror classic House of Wax starring
Speaker 3: Vincent Price. Now, since we're going to inevitably be tempted
Speaker 3: to compare and contrast with last week's film, Treasure of
Speaker 3: the Four Crowns, I want to write off the bat
Speaker 3: and mention some big differences that at least are my opinion.
Speaker 3: Maybe your opinion will be different, Rob, but I'm going
Speaker 3: to say House of Wax is in almost every way
Speaker 3: a much better movie than Treasure of the Four Crowns.
Speaker 3: Both are great, camp, be fun, but House of Waxes
Speaker 3: is actually a really solid horror movie, clever stylish in
Speaker 3: a way that that Treasure is not.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, a House of Wax is a is in
Speaker 2: a league all its own compared to Treasure of the
Speaker 2: Four Crowns. And we'll get into that. It's it's I mean,
Speaker 2: it's it's an important three D film. It is a
Speaker 2: three D film that that very much holds up to
Speaker 2: subsequent viewing in subsequent decades, regardless of whether you're watching
Speaker 2: it in three D or two D.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's another thing I was going to say. So
Speaker 3: very different approaches to three D here. As we mentioned
Speaker 3: last time, we were watching these three D movies the
Speaker 3: same way almost everybody does today, meaning in two D.
Speaker 3: Most people do not have the requisite home video playback
Speaker 3: equipment necessary to experience high quality three D at home.
Speaker 3: So and we even looked into that. It's like, what
Speaker 3: do you need to watch most of these movies in
Speaker 3: three D today? I mean with a lot of them,
Speaker 3: you actually need the three D Blu ray player, the
Speaker 3: three D TV and the glasses or I don't know.
Speaker 3: So we didn't mess around with all that because most
Speaker 3: people are not going to see the movies like that today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now we tried. I went to Atlanta's only video store,
Speaker 2: Video Drome, and I was talking with Matt there, the
Speaker 2: guy runs it, and we were looking at we were
Speaker 2: looking at DVD cases and Blu ray cases. He had
Speaker 2: a tub of three D glasses he was getting out,
Speaker 2: and we basically just came to the realization that you
Speaker 2: have most of these that are available on Blu ray
Speaker 2: or DVD, you can't even use any kind of like
Speaker 2: at home glasses scenario. Your only option for at home
Speaker 2: three D viewing with most of the titles is to
Speaker 2: get yourself a big, you know, big fancy three D
Speaker 2: Blu ray player, three D television. And even then those
Speaker 2: are bits of technology that are going that are kind
Speaker 2: of out of fad at the moment. So we're already
Speaker 2: past that particular at home three D boom or so it.
Speaker 3: Seems maybe they'll come back. I mean, three D, as
Speaker 3: we've said to always seems to come in waits, it'll
Speaker 3: ebb and flow. But for the most part, I think
Speaker 3: it makes sense to consider three D movies as pieces
Speaker 3: of media that have multiple lives. So they might have
Speaker 3: an initial run of three D in the theaters and
Speaker 3: that is how people see them in the theaters, but
Speaker 3: then after that they have an afterlife. They sort of
Speaker 3: haunt our world as a two D shadow of their
Speaker 3: former selves. And the essential question to ask about a
Speaker 3: movie like this is does it hold up in both
Speaker 3: forms or is this something that's really only enjoyable in
Speaker 3: the three D format where it was originally intended. Treasure
Speaker 3: of the Four Crowns was fun for I don't know
Speaker 3: if you have the right ironic spirit, but it is
Speaker 3: also the most three D movie ever made. It is
Speaker 3: so overrun with three D gags. If you take out
Speaker 3: the three D element, you are left with an incredibly
Speaker 3: strange film experience, like half of the runtime just things
Speaker 3: poking at the camera for no reason and not actually
Speaker 3: coming out of the screen at you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, Four Grounds is basically an amusement park ride
Speaker 2: with some resemblance to cinema, whereas this film is an
Speaker 2: illegitimate but piece of cinema that also has three D
Speaker 2: elements that are not just a little extras but also
Speaker 2: add to the immersion factor.
Speaker 3: I agree, so House of Waxes is not like Treasure.
Speaker 3: There are a handful of what I would call utterly
Speaker 3: gratuitous three D effects shots, such as the paddleball Man.
Speaker 3: We'll get to that later. On the paddle Ball Man.
Speaker 3: There are some dancers that I imagine were put in
Speaker 3: just so they could fulfill a desire for a sort
Speaker 3: of titillating three D sequence. But for the most part,
Speaker 3: the movie functions on home video as a normal piece
Speaker 3: of cinema, you could forget that it was a three
Speaker 3: D movie except for a couple of little moments.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's also a movie that captured and continues to
Speaker 2: capture people's imaginations outside of the three D scenario. Just
Speaker 2: one quick example of this, and this was brought up
Speaker 2: in an excellent documentary that's on the the the Blu
Speaker 2: ray for a House of Wax that I watched that
Speaker 2: have rented from Video Drum. It's titled House of Wax.
Speaker 2: Unlike anything you've seen before. It was produced in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: and like one of the people they interviewed there pointed
Speaker 2: out that like the magazine Famous Monsters of Film Land
Speaker 2: had this really gorgeous painting illustration of the monstrous Vincent
Speaker 2: Price character on the front. You know it was. It
Speaker 2: really resonated with film fans and horror enthusiasts of the
Speaker 2: day and subsequent generations to follow you and today as well.
Speaker 2: So it created an iconic villain, iconic character. Really, as
Speaker 2: we'll discuss, he's a little more complicated than just a
Speaker 2: pure villain. But yeah, capture people imagination. And then the
Speaker 2: three D added to the immersion experience when you actually
Speaker 2: went and saw it in the initial three D run
Speaker 2: or one of the subsequent three D runs, either in
Speaker 2: theater or on home the home video.
Speaker 3: To pick up on your villain or not comment, I
Speaker 3: would say Vincent Price is a villain in this but
Speaker 3: he's a tragic villain. It's one of those cases where
Speaker 3: you can see how he was made villainous by some
Speaker 3: by by having been wronged in the first place.
Speaker 2: Right. It's one of the things that makes especially gothic
Speaker 2: horror films more impactful. I mean, it's it's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that so many of the Paul Nashi Spanish
Speaker 2: horror films are so great. It's because, you know, there
Speaker 2: are obviously budget limitations in those films, and plenty of
Speaker 2: other limitations as well. But Nashi loved the gothic horror films.
Speaker 2: He loved the monsters that you also felt sympathy for,
Speaker 2: that you related to on some level, that had this
Speaker 2: outsider status. And so that's very much in play in
Speaker 2: this film.
Speaker 3: And while I don't really even mean this as criticism,
Speaker 3: this is one of those films, like like some Batman
Speaker 3: films in the past, where the villain is really the
Speaker 3: most charismatic character on the screen. The villain is in
Speaker 3: a sense, who the one you have no choice but
Speaker 3: to root for because the villain is Vincent Price and
Speaker 3: the heroes, I don't know, or are you going to
Speaker 3: be like, Wow, I'm really rooting for the cop who's
Speaker 3: trying to catch him, or I'm really rooting for Scott
Speaker 3: the Sculptor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Vincent Price had that special kind of energy that
Speaker 2: certainly in a film like this he ends up attracting
Speaker 2: all of your sympathy and attention. But even in later
Speaker 2: for films we've discussed in the show before, even if
Speaker 2: he has a smaller part versus other noteworthy character actors
Speaker 2: and horror icons, there's just something about Price that no
Speaker 2: one else can can equal. You know, there's a likability
Speaker 2: factor there that is missing in some of the even
Speaker 2: some of the other greats of the of the era,
Speaker 2: you know, like a Christopher Lee or something. You know,
Speaker 2: like there's a charm, there's a set I mean, Christopher
Speaker 2: Lee had his own charm, his own charisma going on.
Speaker 2: But Price had something a little special.
Speaker 3: Well, even as Prince Prospero in the Mask of the
Speaker 3: Red Death or he is an utterly satanic, aristocratic torturer.
Speaker 3: He just kind of can't help but like him absolutely.
Speaker 2: Now, that documentary House of Wax unlike anything you've seen before,
Speaker 2: great job breaking down the picture's place in cinema history
Speaker 2: and includes some great interview clips from the likes of
Speaker 2: Martin Scorsese, who holds this up as one of the
Speaker 2: greatest three D pictures ever made. Rick Baker. Of course,
Speaker 2: the special effects makeup Wizard, Wes Craven, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen,
Speaker 2: and also Victoria Price and Price is doctor, and I
Speaker 2: think some of the key facts that they drive home
Speaker 2: about three D in this film from the documentary are
Speaker 2: as follows. So, first of all, this was produced to
Speaker 2: this film nineteen fifty three. House of Wax was produced
Speaker 2: during a time in which the audiences were moving out
Speaker 2: to the suburbs, away from the big theaters, and on
Speaker 2: top of that, more people were staying home to watch
Speaker 2: things on TV. So three D was the in this
Speaker 2: case was the big studio gamble in this case from
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers to get people back in the theater, give
Speaker 2: them a well funded, artistically solid, technologically groundbreaking full color
Speaker 2: gothic horror picture.
Speaker 3: To give them something they could not get on the
Speaker 3: TV set at home.
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, And you know, this is something that theaters
Speaker 2: would come back to and continue to do and have
Speaker 2: done in recent years as well. In this case, in
Speaker 2: fifty three, it absolutely worked. This film was a big hit.
Speaker 2: It ushered in a three D boom that would prove
Speaker 2: profitable for according to the documentary, at least a year
Speaker 2: and a half. So even then it's still kind of
Speaker 2: a flash in the pan, but enough for some films
Speaker 2: to come in to make some money. And then it,
Speaker 2: you know, three D dies back down again, but comes
Speaker 2: back up in the seventies, in the eighties, et cetera. Now,
Speaker 2: this was also the first three D film with stereophonic
Speaker 2: sound to be presented in a regular theater, and in
Speaker 2: regular we'll put an asterisk by that. And it was
Speaker 2: also the first color three D feature film from a
Speaker 2: major American studio. The sound on this baby was supposedly
Speaker 2: amazing if you saw it in the right theater. It
Speaker 2: even had its own screen track that was projected from
Speaker 2: the back of the theater, which I can I can
Speaker 2: only kind of imagine what that was like. But the
Speaker 2: way they were describing it is that like it made
Speaker 2: any screams in the film like throw you off a
Speaker 2: little bit more just because of the way the sound
Speaker 2: was orchestrated.
Speaker 3: It sounds like it's coming from some like the audience
Speaker 3: behind you or something. Yeah, Vincent Price is in the theater.
Speaker 3: That almost sounds like a William Castle kind of gimmick.
Speaker 2: Sometimes Vincent Price was in the theater, according to way
Speaker 2: of the much but yeah, a couple of interviews I
Speaker 2: think I think this is one from his daughter pointed
Speaker 2: out that as this was showing in New York City,
Speaker 2: he was in a play in New York and he
Speaker 2: would sometimes go to the theater to see how people
Speaker 2: were reacting. And something he enjoyed doing was was seating
Speaker 2: himself behind some like it, like a pair of young
Speaker 2: women who were watching the show and were you know,
Speaker 2: freaking out at all the scares. And then afterwards he
Speaker 2: would lean forward and say, did you enjoy it? And
Speaker 2: freak them out? So sometimes you got that additional level.
Speaker 3: Of three, d oh, that's so good. Oh hey, listeners,
Speaker 3: were you in the theater in nineteen fifty three and
Speaker 3: startled by Vincent Price in person?
Speaker 2: Right in? If so, certainly, I'd love to hear from
Speaker 2: anyone who has experiences from watching you know, yeah, anybody
Speaker 2: saw any of these three D films back in the fifties,
Speaker 2: definitely right in but also subsequent generations of three D.
Speaker 2: They also included a lot of technical information about it
Speaker 2: that I found really interesting. So this shoot, the shoot
Speaker 2: for this film utilized Julian and Milton Gunsbird's Natural Vision
Speaker 2: three D system, the same one that was used for
Speaker 2: Buana Devil in fifty two. This is one that we
Speaker 2: actually referenced this briefly in the last episode because Ebert
Speaker 2: alluded to it as being like a very gimmicky throw
Speaker 2: stuff at the camera sort of three D picture. Anyway,
Speaker 2: the rig for this involved two cameras aimed at each
Speaker 2: other with mirrors, then positioned at around the distance of
Speaker 2: human eyes facing forward towards what you're filming. And this
Speaker 2: was like a big rig. You can look up images
Speaker 2: of it. It's a monster of a like a double camera.
Speaker 2: And then in theaters you had to have two projectors
Speaker 2: going at once, each projecting one of these two reels
Speaker 2: of film. The resulting film, of course, after editing and
Speaker 2: so forth. Scorsese commented on just how complex in the documentary,
Speaker 2: commented on just how complex this was for projectionists, because
Speaker 2: if you had you had an error occur on one projector,
Speaker 2: then you had to stop the other, and then you
Speaker 2: had to make make sure they were syncing up, because
Speaker 2: according to Scorsese, it was just absolutely brain breaking to
Speaker 2: watch if you got those two reels out of sync
Speaker 2: and of Courtunately, the audience was wearing glasses for all of.
Speaker 3: This, watching the movie in double but one is like
Speaker 3: a half second behind the other. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, House of Wax was later reissued in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy one using Chris Condon's single strip stereo vision three
Speaker 2: D format, and the film is very well shot, makes
Speaker 2: great use of depth that you can certainly get just
Speaker 2: watching the film in two D, but was apparently even
Speaker 2: more impressive in three D. And yeah, it gets a
Speaker 2: little gimmicky in a few places. They they don't completely
Speaker 2: they're not too good for three D. They embrace the
Speaker 2: spectacle of three D where appropriate, incorporating three D elements
Speaker 2: where appropriate, But more than anything, they use the three
Speaker 2: D as an immersive element of the cinematic storytelling. All right, Joe,
Speaker 2: what's the elevator pitch for this one?
Speaker 3: What are you all right? Vincent Price plays Professor Henry Jared,
Speaker 3: a man who renders exquisitely beautiful in lifelike sculptures of
Speaker 3: the human form in wax. But when his artworks are
Speaker 3: destroyed in a fire by a scheming business partner, a
Speaker 3: disfigured and devastated Jared emerges from the ashes to turn
Speaker 3: his genius to the domains of exploitation, revenge, and murder.
Speaker 2: All right, we're going to listen to just a little
Speaker 2: tiny bit of this trailer. But this is one of
Speaker 2: those trailers that features no voiceover, no dialogue, no sound
Speaker 2: from the film, just music, and not even pictures or
Speaker 2: images from the film, just some some cards that come
Speaker 2: up that say you heard about it, and then you
Speaker 2: take that in, you read about it, and then you
Speaker 2: take that in. You may even think you've seen it.
Speaker 2: And that I think may be an allusion to the
Speaker 2: fact that this is a remake, and we'll get into
Speaker 2: that in a bed. But anyway, it goes on and on.
Speaker 2: Let's just hear just a little bit to that music.
Speaker 2: All right, all right, that's enough, that's enough. That's all
Speaker 2: you need to hear.
Speaker 3: What were people reading about this movie in nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 3: were they actually like reading the reviews in the newspapers?
Speaker 2: I guess, I guess you know they're reading the newspapers.
Speaker 2: They're getting excited about about this film. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: Lord knows Warner Brothers was promoting it, trying to get
Speaker 2: people excited coming back to the theaters. So yeah, if.
Speaker 3: There wasn't like a Fangoria blog in nineteen fifty three, All.
Speaker 2: Right, where is this playing? If you want to go
Speaker 2: out and watch it before listening to the rest of
Speaker 2: this episode, Well, it's highly available to rent or stream digitally,
Speaker 2: and I think it's streaming on Turner Classic Movies service.
Speaker 2: I honestly, I didn't think they even had a service,
Speaker 2: but they do apparently based on what I was looking
Speaker 2: at the Blu ray for This is great, but as
Speaker 2: we'll discuss, the tragedy is that this film was made
Speaker 2: to be experienced in three D in the theater, and
Speaker 2: it's just not an option for most viewers of the
Speaker 2: film today. Luckily, as we've been saying, it's still very
Speaker 2: enjoyable and historically important regardless of how you're seeing it,
Speaker 2: So it totally holds up in two D, and it's
Speaker 2: a lot of fun. All right, Well, let's get into
Speaker 2: the cast and crew behind this picture. First of all,
Speaker 2: at the top directing it is Andre de Toaff, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen thirteen through two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: Now that name has come up on Weird House Cinema before,
Speaker 3: but not as a director from what I recall.
Speaker 2: No, he has a brief cameo in Wes Craven's Spontaneous
Speaker 2: Combustion from nineteen ninety starring Brad Dorif that we watched on.
Speaker 3: The show Wes Craven. Wait a minute, Spontaneous Combustion was
Speaker 3: Toby Hooper wasn't.
Speaker 2: Oh I'm sorry. I'm sorry Toby Hooper. I think I
Speaker 2: threw me off, Because, of course Wes Craven is in
Speaker 2: that documentary Toby Hooper directed Spontaneous Combustion.
Speaker 3: Yes, the movie about spontaneous combustion where Brad Doura shoots
Speaker 3: fire out of his eyes and out of his hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but obviously Toby Hooper, I think what we're going
Speaker 2: to take from all this is he would have been
Speaker 2: a fan of this movie as well. This was a
Speaker 2: movie that cast a long shadow and influenced a lot
Speaker 2: of the people that would go on to be subsequent
Speaker 2: generations of horror filmmakers. So Andre de taf was a
Speaker 2: Hungarian American director who was of solid hand in the
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers system. He'd been directing since nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 2: and I believe he'd worked mostly on thrillers, dramas, general
Speaker 2: action pick you know, some Westerns and so forth. But again,
Speaker 2: solid hand, very technically proficient, and this would, I believe,
Speaker 2: be the only horror film he'd ever direct. He later
Speaker 2: served as second unit director on seventy eight Superman, nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five, Thunderball. In nineteen sixty two's Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 2: It's often pointed out that Detoth had only one eye.
Speaker 2: He wore an eye patch. Most images you look up
Speaker 2: of him are going to be him wearing an eye patch,
Speaker 2: So that means that he himself could not see in
Speaker 2: three dimensions. He couldn't see in three D, but he
Speaker 2: had a great head for optics and cinema, so it
Speaker 2: was hardly a limiting factor. Now. Interestingly enough, the studio
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers asked Detath not to wear his eye patch
Speaker 2: while working on and later promoting the picture, because they
Speaker 2: didn't want the public to think about their big three
Speaker 2: D film that was going to revitalize everything, as they
Speaker 2: didn't want them to associate it with a one eyed man.
Speaker 3: That's mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and from what they said in the documentary, to
Speaker 2: Tot was in general not the so guy that would
Speaker 2: normally have put up with this kind of request. But
Speaker 2: he apparently agreed. He didn't wear the eye patch because
Speaker 2: he just he really wanted to make the picture and
Speaker 2: realized that he needed, I guess to play Paul with
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers on this this one thing. But he yeah,
Speaker 2: he really believed in the picture. He believed in the
Speaker 2: three D. They said that later he would sometimes he
Speaker 2: would go to screenings of the picture, you know, I guess,
Speaker 2: you know they're promoting, like the director will be there,
Speaker 2: and he would threaten to leave. He threatened to get
Speaker 2: on a flight and go home immediately if he found
Speaker 2: out that they weren't showing it in three dimensions.
Speaker 3: So he's committed. I thought you were going to say
Speaker 3: that the studio was afraid if people saw him with
Speaker 3: the eye patch that they would worry that watching a
Speaker 3: movie in three D would make them lose sight in
Speaker 3: one eye.
Speaker 2: Huh, Yeah, I don't know. I've never seen any scare
Speaker 2: tactics about three D. Certainly you know from William Castle,
Speaker 2: It's held plenty of scare tactics about just how frightening
Speaker 2: a movie could be. It may kill you, but not
Speaker 2: so much. Put an eye out.
Speaker 3: I dare you to see my movie. You will probably
Speaker 3: be dead.
Speaker 2: All right. The screenplay for this one was from Crane Wilbur,
Speaker 2: who lived eighteen eighty six through nineteen seventy three, early
Speaker 2: twentieth century actor turned writer. His other films on which
Speaker 2: he wrote included nineteen forty eight s Cannon City, fifty
Speaker 2: nine's The Bat, thirty six is the Devil on Horseback,
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, Outside the Wall, fifty threes Crime Away that
Speaker 2: was also directed by t Toaf, and nineteen fifty four
Speaker 2: is The Mad Magician, which was a Vincent Price three
Speaker 2: D kind of a follow up to this picture from
Speaker 2: another studio, but it's in black and white. It's supposed
Speaker 2: to be fun as well. Wilber also wrote nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: two's Mysterious Island.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be too harsh because I'd say
Speaker 3: this is a pretty good script for nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 3: but it has a common I would say, a problem
Speaker 3: that is fairly common two horror movies from the fifties,
Speaker 3: which is that the good characters aren't super interesting, so
Speaker 3: like Sue and Scott and the police. Basically all of
Speaker 3: the people you're supposed to be rooting for are you know,
Speaker 3: they're fine, but like the real character interest is in
Speaker 3: the villains exactly now.
Speaker 2: The story credit for this one goes to Charles Belden,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen fifty four. Screenwriter
Speaker 2: who was pretty active in the forties and fifties, but
Speaker 2: his story credit on this and also on related wax
Speaker 2: movies is what he's best remembered for. His original story
Speaker 2: was adapted into nineteen thirty threes, A Mystery of the
Speaker 2: Wax Museum. This was a follow up to a film
Speaker 2: we watched on the show for Weird House Cinema a
Speaker 2: while back, Doctor X, starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Ray.
Speaker 2: This also starred Lionel Atwell and Fay Ray, with Atwill
Speaker 2: playing the wax Master the Vincent Price role, but with
Speaker 2: a different name.
Speaker 3: Oh I'm sorry, I was just looking something up. I'm
Speaker 3: a little confused because I did not recall Lionel Atwill's
Speaker 3: character surviving at the end of Doctor X.
Speaker 2: It's not the same character. It's more of a you
Speaker 2: don't think of it as sequel, but just like a
Speaker 2: follow up where they were like, hey, you guys really
Speaker 2: made a great kind of modern feeling two tone technicolor
Speaker 2: gothic horror story here, but with again with modern elements
Speaker 2: to it. Let's have another slice of that. What can
Speaker 2: you dish up for us? And they ended up doing
Speaker 2: Mystery of the Wax Museum and it was also directed
Speaker 2: by the same director, Michael Curtis.
Speaker 3: Okay, so Doctor X it had a wax theme, but
Speaker 3: I from what I recall, it was only as like
Speaker 3: the twist at the end that you know that you
Speaker 3: found out about this so called synthetic flesh that was
Speaker 3: that was more or less used like the wax, like
Speaker 3: the wax that Vincent Price uses in this movie.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, so there's some similar Yeah, the synthetic flash
Speaker 2: is definitely a common element of both pictures. A Mystery
Speaker 2: of the Wax Museum is a gorgeous looking two tone
Speaker 2: technicolor gothic horror film has some great horror elements in it.
Speaker 2: A number of the best moments in this film are
Speaker 2: kind of just direct remakes of what occurred in that movie,
Speaker 2: but it also has some really rough dialogue moments and
Speaker 2: darker plot elements that absolutely wouldn't have flown in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, and some of these elements wouldn't fly to
Speaker 2: get today either for good reason. So nineteen fifty three's
Speaker 2: House of Wax is a remake and kind of a reminder.
Speaker 2: As tired as we get of remakes, sometimes they can
Speaker 2: be great, sometimes they can improve upon and redefine that
Speaker 2: previous film. And it's a fairly blow for blow for
Speaker 2: blow remake as I remember, though without the drugs, strong
Speaker 2: necrophilia vibes and casual racism of the previous nineteen thirties film. Okay,
Speaker 2: both films inspired a whole subgenre of wax movies, and
Speaker 2: this House of Wax was very loosely, very loosely remade
Speaker 2: in two thousand and five as House of Wax. Belden
Speaker 2: retained a story credit on that film, but it is otherwise,
Speaker 2: it's a completely different thing, nothing to do with this
Speaker 2: picture or the nineteen thirties picture written by the screenwriter
Speaker 2: behind the Conjuring franchise.
Speaker 3: Man The two thousand and five House of Wax is rough.
Speaker 3: I tried to rewatch that a few years ago when
Speaker 3: we did our Core episode about Wax where we talked
Speaker 3: very briefly about this movie we're looking at today. You
Speaker 3: deserve a prize if you can sit through the two
Speaker 3: thousand and five movie. It is rough.
Speaker 2: I think, as I said before, one of the big
Speaker 2: things is, you've got to have a compelling wax Master character.
Speaker 2: You've got to have somebody in there playing the Vincent
Speaker 2: Price role. And if you don't, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: What are you doing doubling down on victim characters in
Speaker 2: your Wax movie. I don't know how much of it
Speaker 2: we can really blame on the screenwriters here, How much
Speaker 2: of it is the director for how much of it
Speaker 2: is just like that's what people wanted or the studios
Speaker 2: thought people wanted in two thousand and five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think two thousand and five is the beginning
Speaker 3: of the torture porn era. It's like Saw had come
Speaker 3: out and people were into that, and people wanted, like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, that vibe of the mid two thousand's
Speaker 3: horror movie. It was like you wanted a kind of queasy, gross,
Speaker 3: fluorescent lit scenes of like slick surfaces gleaming with blood
Speaker 3: and bodies just being mutilated and while people scream, it
Speaker 3: was a bad time for horror.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but again, wax, what of these wax movies highly influential.
Speaker 2: We could easily just do wax museum movies for like
Speaker 2: a good couple of months, maybe three months, if we
Speaker 2: so desired. All right, let's get to the star here.
Speaker 2: Vincent Prize playing Professor Henry Jared Price lived nineteen eleven
Speaker 2: through nineteen ninety three, Horror Icon. This is, I believe,
Speaker 2: our fourth Vincent Price film, as we previously discussed. Seventy
Speaker 2: one's The Abominable Doctor Vibes, nineteen seventy Scream and Scream Again,
Speaker 2: and nineteen sixty four is The Mask of the Red Death.
Speaker 2: So we're not going to really retread a lot of
Speaker 2: what we talked about. There is basic history, except to
Speaker 2: say that this film is extremely pivotal to Vincent Price's career.
Speaker 2: Prior to House of Wax, he was not an actor
Speaker 2: associated with horror films. He was like an occasional leading man,
Speaker 2: but mostly he did secondary roles. He was, you know,
Speaker 2: he was a very tall man. He was certainly handsome,
Speaker 2: so he was often pushed in the leading man direction,
Speaker 2: but I think it's like nothing like completely clicked there.
Speaker 3: Let's see what have we talked about the Vincent Price
Speaker 3: did before this. We certainly looked at his role as
Speaker 3: the narrator of the nineteen forty nine TV adaptation of
Speaker 3: Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol, which is twenty five minutes long.
Speaker 3: It's called the Christmas Carol, and it was a half
Speaker 3: hour television special presented by the Magnavox Corporation. And it's
Speaker 3: let's just say that was not using Vincent Price to
Speaker 3: the fullest extent of his talents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think even you think of like nineteen
Speaker 2: fifties leading men too, it's like, would you want Price
Speaker 2: to play those roles? I think clearly Price had more
Speaker 2: to offer because most of those leading man roles in
Speaker 2: the nineteen fifties is just not that interesting. With a
Speaker 2: few exceptions, I mean, you did have some standout stars,
Speaker 2: but generally they're not in the movies we watched for
Speaker 2: weird House cinema.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of the like horror and sci fi
Speaker 3: movies in the fifties, the quote hero often has very
Speaker 3: little personality. He's just there to kind of be like
Speaker 3: strong and good and punch the bad guy at the end.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and to absolutely conform. So yeah. The other really
Speaker 2: interesting thing that I wasn't up on this particular history
Speaker 2: until I watched that documentary, and a lot of this
Speaker 2: came from his daughter, is that prior to this film,
Speaker 2: he was on the Hollywood Gray List. So we've talked
Speaker 2: about the Blacklist before because it ended up impacting a
Speaker 2: number of different filmmakers and actors, often leading them into
Speaker 2: being in films that we watch in weird house cinema,
Speaker 2: or even just completely destroying their career as they were
Speaker 2: at the very least accused of being Communist sympathizers. The
Speaker 2: Gray List, which I was not familiar with, This is
Speaker 2: a list you were put on if you were automatically
Speaker 2: you were if you opposed the Nazis before World War Two.
Speaker 2: They interpreted that as being well, they're possibly a communist,
Speaker 2: so let's go ahead and put him on the list. Uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think the historical term I've heard used to
Speaker 3: refer to this as premature anti fascist, like that you
Speaker 3: were against the fascists before the US government had essentially
Speaker 3: given permission to be against fascism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So obviously confusing and illogical in many ways, but
Speaker 2: very much a real thing at the time, to the
Speaker 2: point that Price was apparently very concerned that his career
Speaker 2: was over, that he was never going to work again.
Speaker 2: He'd certainly seen plenty of his contemporaries ruined in Hollywood
Speaker 2: by this point because of the blacklist. But as it
Speaker 2: worked out, he ended up some FBI people came to
Speaker 2: his house, he had to sign some documentation, and after
Speaker 2: that he ended up having his name cleared. And once
Speaker 2: he was cleared, he got offered two projects. One was
Speaker 2: a play and one was House of Wax. He ended
Speaker 2: up going with House of Wax, and it just revitalized
Speaker 2: his career and began his emergence as a new horror icon.
Speaker 2: Without House of Wax, who's to say we'd be talking
Speaker 2: about Vincent Price today.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm certainly glad we got all of these wonderful
Speaker 3: Vincent Price films because he hit it big with this one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, Our leading lady here is Sue Allan
Speaker 2: or Sue Allen's, the character played by Phyllis Kirk, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen twenty seven three two thousand and six. Her
Speaker 2: other big film from the same year is nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: three's Crime Wave, also directed by detaf She did a
Speaker 2: lot of TV, including an episode of the classic Twilight
Speaker 2: Zone series, and she starred along Peter Lawford on TV's
Speaker 2: The Thin Man. They played Nick and Nora Charles, respectively, investigators.
Speaker 2: This show was based, like the nineteen thirty four film
Speaker 2: on the work of Dashal Hammett, and the Nick and
Speaker 2: Nora glasses that some of you may have in your
Speaker 2: cupboard are named for these characters. I use my Nick
Speaker 2: and Ora glass just the other night.
Speaker 3: I have no idea what that is.
Speaker 2: Okay, you're familiar with the coop glass.
Speaker 3: Right, Oh, yes, like for cocktails or champagne.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So imagine a coop glass that's a little more
Speaker 2: narrow and a little less spillable, a little more petite,
Speaker 2: and that's a Nick and Nora glass. I'm a big
Speaker 2: fan of them because I found that. Yeah, I find
Speaker 2: they're less spillable than a coop glass, but they have
Speaker 2: the same feel, and they're great for a like a
Speaker 2: non iced cocktail, Like it's great for something like a Manhattan.
Speaker 3: Okay, I had no idea what that was called, but
Speaker 3: I've had drinks and restaurants in.
Speaker 2: These Yeah, yeah, nice little glass. I like it all right.
Speaker 2: So that's Sue. Sue is our main female character, but
Speaker 2: then she has a friend in the movie named Kathy
Speaker 2: Kathy Gray. Kathy Gray is played by Carolyn Jones, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen thirty through nineteen eighty three. Her character doesn't
Speaker 2: stick around long, but she gives us the real bubbly, fun,
Speaker 2: loving blonde performance as the doomed Kathy, and she would
Speaker 2: go on to play boarding role in nineteen fifty six
Speaker 2: is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he's best well
Speaker 2: known for playing more Titia Adams on TVs. The Adams
Speaker 2: Family in the mid nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: You know, I almost wish they had swapped the roles here,
Speaker 3: not that it really would have worked, because I can
Speaker 3: tell what they were going for with the character of Sue,
Speaker 3: and Phyllis Kirk fits that. But Carolyn Jones is so
Speaker 3: much fun, and it's it's sad that her character gets
Speaker 3: waxed too early in this film, because she's got great
Speaker 3: screen presence and does a very funny combination of kind
Speaker 3: of yeah, like you said, on one hand, this bubbly
Speaker 3: party girl mentality, but she also has a very cynical
Speaker 3: edge that I liked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this movie, at least for the most part,
Speaker 2: I don't know to what extent they You know, certainly
Speaker 2: in the Night By the nineteen eighties we've talked about
Speaker 2: how like the good girl becomes our hero and the
Speaker 2: bad girl is punished. I didn't get that as much
Speaker 2: from this film that Sue I did. You did. Well,
Speaker 2: let's say it wasn't as announced, you know, like she will.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstand you. You
Speaker 3: mean like you don't get the sense that the ethic
Speaker 3: of the movie is that, wow, Kathy really got what
Speaker 3: was coming to her. It's just like it is tragic
Speaker 3: that she was killed, right like, oh, yeah, yeah, totally, okay.
Speaker 3: It's not that it's like a film of vengeful conservative
Speaker 3: morality like you might perceive in some slasher movies.
Speaker 2: Right there may be, I think there's probably some of
Speaker 2: that leeching in sort of indirectly from the general culture,
Speaker 2: but it's not it's not sharpened in the script to
Speaker 2: the degree that it is in later films.
Speaker 3: So and I appreciated that, Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2: So Jones also had a small part in the Man
Speaker 2: who Knew Too Much from fifty six. She had a
Speaker 2: small part in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat from fifty three,
Speaker 2: and she played Marcia, Queen of Diamonds on the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties Batman series.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like I said, Carolyn Jones is great in this.
Speaker 3: I wish her character had been alive longer, and I
Speaker 3: you know, she's almost still kind of funny as a
Speaker 3: wax figure later in the movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I'm gonna skip most of the male
Speaker 2: good guys here because again, they're not that interesting. Maybe
Speaker 2: we'll come back to Frank Lovejoy and Paul Piccorini in
Speaker 2: later films, but we'll refer to their characters. But I
Speaker 2: just wasn't that interested, especially when we've got Igor to
Speaker 2: talk about. Igor was played by Charles Bucchinski, who would
Speaker 2: later on be known as Charles Bronson, who lived nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty one through two thousand and three.
Speaker 3: He made a death wish to be in this horror
Speaker 3: film and it was granted. And wow, his muscles, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he has a strapping dude in this. This is Bronson
Speaker 3: pre mustache and also pre Bronson because he didn't start
Speaker 3: using that name until nineteen fifty four. And yeah, he's
Speaker 3: he's very muscular, he doesn't talk, he's plays his character
Speaker 3: is supposed to be a deaf mute.
Speaker 2: He's also extremely grappily. He keeps getting into scrapes with people,
Speaker 2: with the cops, with our heroes, and he goes right
Speaker 2: for the gravel.
Speaker 3: Even in his non threatening scenes in this movie, he's
Speaker 3: one of those people who just has kind of a
Speaker 3: threatening posture like his his arms are always kind of
Speaker 3: bent in such a way, kind of like a wrestler's stance,
Speaker 3: like he might spring out to grab you at any moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is it's It's interesting because it's a total
Speaker 2: different physical energy compared to what we I think most
Speaker 2: people identify with Charles Bronson from his later career, where
Speaker 2: he's kind of a you know, kind of a cool,
Speaker 2: tough guy, a.
Speaker 3: Guy who will sit there with an expressionless face until
Speaker 3: he suddenly shoots you exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he went on to be a big action
Speaker 2: star in the sixties and seventies, especially thanks to films
Speaker 2: like Once Upon a Time in the West, The Great Escape,
Speaker 2: The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Mechanic, and of
Speaker 2: course the Death Wish franchise. All Right, we talked about
Speaker 2: the Ping pong guy earlier the Paddles, Yeah, pattleball Man.
Speaker 2: In the credits, he's referred to as the Barker because
Speaker 2: his job is to be outside of the Wax Museum
Speaker 2: getting people excited bringing him in. He's a carnival barker
Speaker 2: played by Reggie Rymahl who lived nineteen twenty one through
Speaker 2: two thousand and two. He was a stand up comedian
Speaker 2: of the day who specialized in ping pong gags with
Speaker 2: little paddle balls, you know, on the elastic string. He
Speaker 2: performed on the Steve Allen Show, the Eddie Cantor Show,
Speaker 2: and you asked for it. But this is what he's
Speaker 2: best remembered for, and he gets a lot of screen time.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I would say Reggie rymol probably has more words
Speaker 3: of dialogue in this movie than like Scott the Sculptor,
Speaker 3: who is ostensibly like the male hero.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So yeah, we'll come back to him in a bit,
Speaker 2: all right. The music on this one is from David Buttoff,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen oh two through nineteen eighty three. Prolific
Speaker 2: composer who also did Hitchcock's Rope in forty eight, The
Speaker 2: Beast from twenty Thousand Fathoms and fifty three and nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty nine's The Gorilla All Right Now. Gordon Bow, who
Speaker 2: lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen seventy five, has makeup
Speaker 2: credit on this, but the fantastic makeup, the monster makeup
Speaker 2: that Price is actually wearing is apparently the work uncredited
Speaker 2: of his brother George Bow, who lived nineteen oh five
Speaker 2: through nineteen seventy four. George Bow was a materials innovator
Speaker 2: who developed a bow foam, which was first used in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty nine. Is the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Gordon Bow,
Speaker 2: his brother worked on a ton of films in doing makeup,
Speaker 2: including It's a Wonderful Life, Revel Without a Cause, The
Speaker 2: Three D Picture, dial M for Murder, Dirty Harry Them,
Speaker 2: and The Omega Man, just to name a few.
Speaker 3: Very solid makeup in this movie.
Speaker 2: Absolutely and I love the yeah, the coloration. It has
Speaker 2: this kind of a purplish effect, so the purples and
Speaker 2: pinks that kind of match up with the pink wax
Speaker 2: we see later. So it's grotesque but also grotesque in
Speaker 2: a way. And I don't know how much of this
Speaker 2: was intended, but it like, it doesn't feel completely realistic.
Speaker 2: I think they were maybe going for realism, but like
Speaker 2: it doesn't feel I don't know, somehow it doesn't feel
Speaker 2: as exploitive. I don't know if that makes sense. Like
Speaker 2: it's a different energy than say a Freddy Krueger makeup. Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 2: Final note. Robert Burkes, who lived nineteen oh nine through
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight, Hitchcock's favorite cinematographer, worked on this picture uncredited,
Speaker 2: along with the credited cinematographers Burke Glennon who lived eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety three through nineteen sixty seven, and Jay Peverell Marley,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen oh one through nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 3: All Right, are we ready to talk about the plot?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's get into it.
Speaker 3: So I really love the title shot. It really lets
Speaker 3: you know what kind of movie it's going to be.
Speaker 3: So you have a background that's a damp, dismal street
Speaker 3: corner in New York around the turn of the century.
Speaker 3: There are rain soaked cobblestones and bricks that are reflecting
Speaker 3: the kind of measly light from a pair of street lamps.
Speaker 3: The scene is very dark, blue and gray. But then
Speaker 3: in the foreground here comes the title House of Wax
Speaker 3: in huge, shrieking orange block letters. Like, I don't know
Speaker 3: how to describe this, Like the letters have the their
Speaker 3: blocks that have these big amount of that have depth,
Speaker 3: like their stamps jutting out of the screen, and the
Speaker 3: texture on the front of the letters is that of
Speaker 3: melting wax. So the title itself is dripping.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I love these. Even watching these in two
Speaker 2: D they jump out.
Speaker 3: Also, they put the title in quotation marks, which I
Speaker 3: found funny. I'm not sure why, but it's the so
Speaker 3: called house of wax.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, when you're using House of Wax fawn,
Speaker 2: you can disregard some of the other rules regarding punctuation, but.
Speaker 3: The title of a movie is usually underlined or italicized anyway,
Speaker 3: rather than putting quotation marks. This isn't a poem, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, generally you can just throw the words up there.
Speaker 3: You don't need to worry about anything else, especially if
Speaker 3: you're using gimmicky letters like this. I mean, come on, anyway,
Speaker 3: as the credits fade in and out, we watch the
Speaker 3: silhouette of a lonely man tramping up the sidewalk in
Speaker 3: the rain. And by the way, just throughout the movie,
Speaker 3: I do love the nighttime shots of the streets here
Speaker 3: the lonely, dark, often foggy, often wet with rain, New
Speaker 3: York streets around the turn of the century. It's I
Speaker 3: guess these were probably all indoor shots inside a studio,
Speaker 3: but they're fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a lot of these shots apparently you really
Speaker 2: got a sense of that depth when you were watching
Speaker 2: it in three D.
Speaker 3: Anyway, we move inside one of the windows into a
Speaker 3: brightly lit interior to immediately see a shadow cast upon
Speaker 3: a wall, and it is the shadow of a woman
Speaker 3: wearing a bonnet with a knife raised in her hand,
Speaker 3: ready to strike. So who's she about to stab? Nobody
Speaker 3: turns out. We pan over to discover this is not
Speaker 3: a living woman about to commit a murder, but a
Speaker 3: whack sculpture of a woman wearing the bonnet again and
Speaker 3: doing the knife delivery pose. The camera reveals the rest
Speaker 3: of the room slowly, and it is full of humanoid
Speaker 3: wax sculptures. We see a kind of master of ceremonies
Speaker 3: dude wearing a top hat in tails. There's a choir
Speaker 3: mistress in red and black tartan. There is a policeman
Speaker 3: in a bobby helmet. We see Cleopatra and Mark Antony,
Speaker 3: a fancy lady that I think is supposed to be
Speaker 3: Marie Antoinette. Oh yeah, this is Marie Antoinette. A scene
Speaker 3: of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and then Joan of
Speaker 3: Arc at the stake, and of the historical figures depicted,
Speaker 3: I was noticing immediately that it seems like they're all
Speaker 3: people associated with tragic and untimely deaths. And I think
Speaker 3: this says something about the cultural understanding of the purpose
Speaker 3: of a wax museum, that it is not for effigies
Speaker 3: of just any famous person. There's a particular spirit of
Speaker 3: morbid curiosity that we associate with wax. There's kind of
Speaker 3: a focus on not just in the chamber of horror,
Speaker 3: since though that will become a theme in the movie itself,
Speaker 3: where you know, you have wax figures for scenes of
Speaker 3: torture and execution and all that, but even when you're
Speaker 3: not showing torture and execution, you're showing figures that we
Speaker 3: remember for the fact that they died young and tragically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with their flesh made whole again and lifelike.
Speaker 3: So finally we arrive at the end of the Great Hall,
Speaker 3: and we come to a place that functions as a workshop,
Speaker 3: and here is Vincent Price as the character Professor Henry Jared.
Speaker 3: He's dressed in a long smock, surrounded by half finished
Speaker 3: wax bodies, arms and heads, and he's deep in his work.
Speaker 3: He's using his fingers to shape the contours of a
Speaker 3: sort of wax of venus on a stand before him.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is essentially the same character played by Atwell
Speaker 2: in the original though, so that character and the original
Speaker 2: was named Ivan Igor And there was also just again
Speaker 2: a lot more of a necrophilia vibe to his obsession
Speaker 2: with wax bodies and Vincent prizes. Henry Jared comes off
Speaker 2: more innocent, eccentric, certainly, but more innocent in his connection
Speaker 2: to his work.
Speaker 3: Initially, Yes, yeah, I mean it becomes perverse, yeah, obviously
Speaker 3: in Murder beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, But in the beginning, it's just about a
Speaker 2: man who is pouring all of his being into these
Speaker 2: creations and loves them and has this kind of eccentric
Speaker 2: relationship with them. He sees them as his friends, he
Speaker 2: sees them as his family.
Speaker 3: So somebody comes in from the rain. It is Matthew Burke,
Speaker 3: Jared's business partner, and as soon as he's in the door,
Speaker 3: they're at odds about their business situation, so they run
Speaker 3: a wax museum together, and Matthew Burke is not happy
Speaker 3: with recent ticket return. He says that, hey, you know
Speaker 3: the other wax museums in town. They've got lines around
Speaker 3: the block. What's the difference. They've got a chamber of horrors,
Speaker 3: so all of their sculptures are about murder, torture, and execution,
Speaker 3: and Jared is not interested in that. He says he'd
Speaker 3: rather spend his time depicting beauty and figures of historical significance.
Speaker 3: He's not going to stoop to slopping out wax gore, which, again,
Speaker 3: remembering what we just said, is kind of funny because
Speaker 3: while this the stuff in his museum is not gory,
Speaker 3: it is very focused on people with tragic deaths.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's not pushing it the way his business
Speaker 2: partner thinks he should be pushing it, like the gore
Speaker 2: should be front and center, and he's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: the beauty should be front and center, even if I'm
Speaker 2: focusing on martyred individuals and tragic figures. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I guess Matthew here would say, like, look, I
Speaker 3: want that Joan of arc to be half burned alive.
Speaker 3: You know, I want to see her muscle. I want
Speaker 3: to see the blood. So Matthew is not happy. He says,
Speaker 3: I've got twenty thousand dollars sunk in this historic peep
Speaker 3: show of yours, and I could use that money to
Speaker 3: better advantage. But Vincent Price has an ace up his
Speaker 3: sleeve here. He says, well, there's a wealthy investor named
Speaker 3: Sidney Wallace. He's about to come by, and Jared is
Speaker 3: hoping that mister moneybags here might be willing to buy
Speaker 3: out Matthew's share of the museum, and this would free
Speaker 3: Jared from having to turn the place into hell Raiser
Speaker 3: two to keep Matthew happy. So Wallace and this other
Speaker 3: guy named Bruce show up, and Jared starts giving them
Speaker 3: a tour of his artworks. But in doing so, he
Speaker 3: does start making these eccentric comments, like he calls his
Speaker 3: sculptures his children, and he says, to you they are wax,
Speaker 3: but to me their creator, they live and breathe. He
Speaker 3: explains a bit about how he makes them. He presses
Speaker 3: the hair into the wax heads with a scalpel, one
Speaker 3: hair at a time, he says, and they're like looking
Speaker 3: at the Cleopatra scene, and I think it's Bruce who's
Speaker 3: getting a little too excited about the Cleopatra sculpture. And
Speaker 3: then Jared shows off the Lincoln assassination scene. He says,
Speaker 3: he calls it quote one of my few concessions to
Speaker 3: the macabre. And then Wallace looks at it. He says,
Speaker 3: why is the best John Wilkes booth I've ever seen?
Speaker 3: And it's like, how many is he seen? Are there
Speaker 3: like assassin waxes all over the town? I guess maybe
Speaker 3: all the museums have a booth?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he travel around. You go to a new city,
Speaker 2: you want to see whether John Wilkes booth looks like
Speaker 2: at their local wax museum.
Speaker 3: Oh, but any But then in explaining the scene, Jared
Speaker 3: gets into, oh, the booth sculpture was very stubborn. I
Speaker 3: kept arguing with him while he was being crafted, and
Speaker 3: he didn't want to do what I wanted him to do.
Speaker 3: And they're like, do you mean he talked back to you?
Speaker 3: And he says, of course, what do you expect from
Speaker 3: an actor? And then finally onto Joan of Arc, Jared's well,
Speaker 3: I'd say one of his main one of his two
Speaker 3: favorite subjects, Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc are his favorites.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: He says that he has remade this scene many times now.
Speaker 3: He explains the reason there is no authentic portrait of Joan,
Speaker 3: so he has to work from living models, and he's
Speaker 3: never found the model to give him the perfect face
Speaker 3: of the saint, but he's sure he will one day.
Speaker 3: Oh and also just they also have a conversation about
Speaker 3: the Marie Antoinette figure, and at one point he's saying
Speaker 3: that her eyes are made of glass, and he says
Speaker 3: the exact size and color of the original.
Speaker 2: I guess the same size as the original eyes or
Speaker 2: just sort of human eyes. I don't know, I don't
Speaker 2: strangely comment that was.
Speaker 3: Odd, but anyway, after the tour Wallace Wallace is interested
Speaker 3: in buying out Matthew's stake in the museum, but first
Speaker 3: he has to go do excavations in Egypt for three months,
Speaker 3: so he's going to be off grave robbing, but when
Speaker 3: he returns he will be perhaps willing to invest in
Speaker 3: the museum. So Wallace and Bruce leave and Jared gets
Speaker 3: back to talking to the wax babies. He's you know, oh,
Speaker 3: Marie Antoinette, my beloved. Did you hear them acknowledge your beauty?
Speaker 3: And meanwhile, Matthew, the business partner, has been lurking around
Speaker 3: this whole time, and he comes out of an adjacent
Speaker 3: room and Jared expects him to be happy, but he's like, sorry,
Speaker 3: I can't wait three months. I need money now. So
Speaker 3: his plan is that the wax Museum is insured for
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand dollars. He says, let's burn it down
Speaker 3: and claim the insurance check. Of course, Jared is scandalized.
Speaker 3: He's like, burn my children alive. That's murder. I won't
Speaker 3: do it, and I'll kill you if you try. But
Speaker 3: Matthew does not stop to discuss. He just starts lighting
Speaker 3: matches and setting wax people on fire.
Speaker 2: This is pretty much exactly how it goes down in
Speaker 2: the original film as well. It is not premeditated Arson.
Speaker 2: It's just like, hey, let's do Arson. I think that's
Speaker 2: the way to go. Let's do it.
Speaker 3: I'm doing it now, no time to argue.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they get into a fistfight, but Vincent Price
Speaker 3: is bested and he gets knocked out I think twice
Speaker 3: in this sequence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of punching going on, and I
Speaker 2: believe it was West Craven in the documentary pointed out
Speaker 2: that it looks like Vincent Price is doing a lot
Speaker 2: of his own stunts and also doing them really close
Speaker 2: to open flames. So Craven was kind of like he
Speaker 2: was like flinching a little as like, oh, it's a director,
Speaker 2: you know this is You're kind of like, wow, they
Speaker 2: really they were really going for it here.
Speaker 3: There is another scene later in the movie where where
Speaker 3: the Vincent Price character does like a swing on a
Speaker 3: rope across an alleyway top and it looks like it's
Speaker 3: really him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder how much of that is just sort
Speaker 2: of this is just how you did it at the time,
Speaker 2: and how much of it, too, is just like Price
Speaker 2: coming out of this gray list scare, realizing that this
Speaker 2: is perhaps his big chance to get back on top
Speaker 2: of things and just going just all in on it,
Speaker 2: just doing everything he can.
Speaker 3: Well, he does really go for it. But so in
Speaker 3: this scene, Matthew Knock's Jared unconscious leaves him for dead
Speaker 3: as the Palace of Wax burns, and we here get
Speaker 3: to see this is something that I think is common
Speaker 3: to most Wax horror movies. There is the Palace of
Speaker 3: Wax burns, and we watch all of the wax figures
Speaker 3: burning and melting in a revolting manner, and it really
Speaker 3: does look gross. Presumably. I was thinking about why this is,
Speaker 3: and I think it's because the sort of fat like
Speaker 3: composition of wax somewhat resembles what we imagine it would
Speaker 3: look like for flesh and adipose tissue to burn. But
Speaker 3: we get horrifying shots of wax faces kind of softening
Speaker 3: and then scorching and trickling away down the chin of
Speaker 3: the mold, and it just makes me think about how
Speaker 3: there's a reason wax museums keep occurring as a setting
Speaker 3: for horror movies, and those movies always involve a tragic
Speaker 3: inferno where the wax faces melt. It's just an inherently
Speaker 3: disgusting and disturbing visual texture.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, So the museum burns, we see Price wake up
Speaker 3: and run through an interior doorway, though it's not initially
Speaker 3: clear whether he dies in the fire or escapes, and
Speaker 3: then the fire department arrives, a horse drawn fire engine
Speaker 3: comes clattering up the street to put out the blaze,
Speaker 3: and I thought this was a very cool historical set piece.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really drives home the historic gothic feel of
Speaker 2: the picture.
Speaker 3: So later, I guess this has taken to be weeks later,
Speaker 3: we are at some I don't know. The setting here
Speaker 3: is horrible. It's like this insipid promenade where this repetitive
Speaker 3: music is playing. We see a banner somewhere that says
Speaker 3: Weber's Hoffbrow And Matthew Burke is there, the scheming business
Speaker 3: partner who set fire to the Wax Museum. He is
Speaker 3: there with his fiance talking about his dear departed friend,
Speaker 3: Professor Jared and his fiance. Here is Carolyn Jones playing
Speaker 3: Kathy Gray. Now Matthew is describing his dear departed friend,
Speaker 3: Professor Jared. He says, you know, oh, he was a
Speaker 3: great artist. Only I could understand him. We were like this,
Speaker 3: And his fiance says, did they ever find him after
Speaker 3: the fire? And she's doing I would call it a
Speaker 3: Betty Boop voice, very much a baby voice.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 3: Matthew says, nope, no kind of him. Place went up
Speaker 3: like a volcano. Maybe he was reduced to unrecognizable ash.
Speaker 3: And he says, if only I had been there, I
Speaker 3: might have saved him, and Carolyn Jones says, oh, but Maddie,
Speaker 3: then you might have been burned up too. So at
Speaker 3: very first it seems like this character played by Carolyn
Speaker 3: Jones is supposed to be kind of naive and dumb.
Speaker 3: But then she looks away from Maddie and she kind
Speaker 3: of gets a twinkle in her eye and she says,
Speaker 3: was there any insurance on the place? So I think
Speaker 3: she's actually angling for that sweet cash.
Speaker 2: Just as much as Matthew is, of course worth being.
Speaker 2: She does not know the true horror of what happened there.
Speaker 2: She doesn't know that that he's a murderer, right.
Speaker 3: She doesn't know about that, but she does want the money,
Speaker 3: and Matthew is like, well, there's a problem. The insurance
Speaker 3: was hesitant to pay out because they couldn't verify whether
Speaker 3: Jared was alive or dead, and Cathy says, yeah, they
Speaker 3: always want a corpse giggle. But then it seems like
Speaker 3: the insurance check finally just came through today, So Matthew
Speaker 3: is he has possession of the money, and Kathy is
Speaker 3: positively cooing and twittering about this, and he says, where
Speaker 3: would you like to go? Atlantic City? But she wants
Speaker 3: to go to Niagara Falls to get married. She says,
Speaker 3: you know, make it legitimate, and I laughed out loud
Speaker 3: at Matthew's reaction to this. He gets very kind of
Speaker 3: somber and he's like check please.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But later that night, Matthew returns to his office alone
Speaker 3: and we see him go into this lonely building, this
Speaker 3: empty office at night and retrieve some money from his safe.
Speaker 3: But as he's doing so, a black gloved hand reaches
Speaker 3: up over the back of the sofa in his office
Speaker 3: and a shadowy figure emerges, a man dressed in all
Speaker 3: black with a wide brimmed black hat and a face
Speaker 3: scarred beyond recognition. And I don't know if there's supposed
Speaker 3: to be any mystery about who it is at this point,
Speaker 3: but obviously it's Jared. Who else would it be?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it man again. The makeup is just impressive.
Speaker 2: They do some great stuff with not only you know,
Speaker 2: layering onto Vincent Price's face, but also keeping Vincent Price
Speaker 2: recognizable through the makeup, but also distorting his natural features
Speaker 2: a little bit, like pulling his lip down on one
Speaker 2: side I think he has. Later we see that in
Speaker 2: like one of his ears is kind of pinned back
Speaker 2: as well, great makeup. You can't fault them for showing
Speaker 2: it a lot and early in the picture, right.
Speaker 3: So he creeps up on Matthew, he dims the lamp
Speaker 3: on the wall, and then he pounces and strangles Matthew
Speaker 3: with a length of rope, and then we see the
Speaker 3: figure creeping away from the scene of the crime. You
Speaker 3: think he's running away, but no, he is staging a
Speaker 3: crime scene. Instead, he secures a rope to an elevator
Speaker 3: shaft and then drops Matthew's body to make it look
Speaker 3: like a suicide. So you would think at this point, okay,
Speaker 3: Vincent Price's revenge checklist complete, Like it seems like this
Speaker 3: revenge plot would have taken the whole movie, But no,
Speaker 3: it is done within twenty minutes. So what is the
Speaker 3: rest of the drama going to consist of?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, Doctor Fibbes would have taken up the
Speaker 2: entire length of the film trying to pull off this
Speaker 2: level of completion with his revenge.
Speaker 3: Well, let's check in with Mattie's fiance Kathy and her
Speaker 3: roommates Sue. So again, it's funny because while Carolyn Jones
Speaker 3: did the Betty Boot voice for Matthew. She comes off
Speaker 3: as savvy and even cynical when talking with Sue, so
Speaker 3: she's no longer playing at naive and she's talking to
Speaker 3: her roommate Sue, and Sue is Phyllis Kirk and she's like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, Mattie was going to marry me, so I
Speaker 3: thought I could get my hands on that insurance money.
Speaker 3: But he's dead. Lol. Anyway, I've got a new date tonight,
Speaker 3: and he's real handsome and he's a free spender. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: Kathy is like bracing against a door frame while Sue
Speaker 3: pulls her course at laces tighter, and Kathy's very excited
Speaker 3: about about her new bow. Again, he's you know, he's
Speaker 3: he's a free spender. He's going to take her to
Speaker 3: a place called the Hoffman House for dinner and then
Speaker 3: to quote Tony Pastors for the vaudeville show, which I
Speaker 3: don't know. That doesn't sound like a cheap day. Does
Speaker 3: sound like he's pay he's paying up to go to
Speaker 3: the nice places.
Speaker 2: But when we do see the vaudeville show, it's another again.
Speaker 2: I think it's a three D showcase. We get that
Speaker 2: three D code approved push pushed at the camera like
Speaker 2: the what do you call the sort of pants that
Speaker 2: they're wearing with all the.
Speaker 3: Ruffles, the ruffel pants underneath the dress, I don't know what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all that, Yeah, so you knows. And pantaloons. Yeah,
Speaker 2: not even remotely riskue by modern modern standards. But I
Speaker 2: guess this is a slightly risky moment in this film.
Speaker 3: Well, we don't see it in this scene. We see
Speaker 3: it later when hilariously Scott takes Sue there to take
Speaker 3: her mind off the fact that she is being chased
Speaker 3: by a melted man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we learn a.
Speaker 3: Bit here about Kathy and Sue's relationship, So the dynamic
Speaker 3: seems to be that Kathy is she has an active
Speaker 3: social life and a nose for money. She's trying to
Speaker 3: marry rich, whereas Sue seems very modest and she's kind
Speaker 3: of a homebody. And if this movie were set one
Speaker 3: hundred years later, I think Sue would be a nerd
Speaker 3: with glasses who doesn't, you know, take her glasses off
Speaker 3: until the scene in the third act where she's modeling
Speaker 3: to be Marie Antoinette or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you definitely get the vibe here that they're
Speaker 2: both doing what they can to straight buy and make
Speaker 2: it in a man's world.
Speaker 3: That's right. And you know what, I liked their relationship.
Speaker 3: They're good friends and they take care of each other.
Speaker 3: Kathy says, you know, we're so different. You've got the brains,
Speaker 3: and what I've got is well what I've got. And
Speaker 3: so Sue has in this at the beginning. Here come
Speaker 3: on hard times. She's out of work and out of money,
Speaker 3: and Kathy's helping her out. She right before she leaves
Speaker 3: for the date, she gives her the last fifty cents
Speaker 3: in her purse to buy some supper and says, I
Speaker 3: don't need any mad money. I never get mad. So
Speaker 3: later that night, Sue comes home after trying to get
Speaker 3: a job as a hat check attendant working under some
Speaker 3: tyrannical theater manager. That doesn't work out. She doesn't get
Speaker 3: the job. We don't see that scene, but we get
Speaker 3: the impression that it's because the theater manager is a
Speaker 3: creep and Sue wouldn't put up with it and just left.
Speaker 3: So Sue's trying to sneak up to her room, but
Speaker 3: the land lady of their building is posted like a sentry.
Speaker 3: She's waiting in the parlor to demand rent. Immediately like,
Speaker 3: you cannot stay here tonight unless you give me the rent.
Speaker 3: And I think Sue was waiting for Kathy to get
Speaker 3: back from her date with some money so she could
Speaker 3: so that could she could borrow it from her, so
Speaker 3: that could be the rent.
Speaker 2: I think, m yeah, I believe that was the arrangement.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So Sue goes up to the room to
Speaker 3: see if she can borrow the money, but instead Kathy
Speaker 3: is dead. She finds Kathy murdered in her room, and
Speaker 3: then she is startled by a terrifying melted man in black,
Speaker 3: the same man we saw killing Matthew Burke, and a
Speaker 3: chase scene follows. I would say, very good tense chase scene.
Speaker 3: Sue escapes out the window and onto the streets below,
Speaker 3: and then the melted man in black runs after her,
Speaker 3: and they're chasing through this maze of alley ways in
Speaker 3: a foggy night, so barely escapes, making it to the
Speaker 3: home of a friend, a sculptor named Scott Andrews who
Speaker 3: lives with his mother. Again thumbs up to the chase scene.
Speaker 3: I love the street sets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the great, great, great streets they create here, dark, gothic, wonderful.
Speaker 3: So police investigators the next day arrive at the scene
Speaker 3: of Kathy's murder, or maybe it's later that night, I
Speaker 3: don't know. I don't know. They show up and they're
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what's going on at the morgue.
Speaker 3: They determine the cause of death with strangulation, and they
Speaker 3: determined that she had been drugged, probably in a drink beforehand.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 3: It makes you wonder who her date was with was
Speaker 3: the date involved in the murder, but we assume also
Speaker 3: that her date was not with the melted Vincent Price,
Speaker 3: because she says the guy she was going out with
Speaker 3: was very handsome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they never really tell us one way or an.
Speaker 2: I guess, if I had to try and put it
Speaker 2: together in my head, I guess maybe one of Vincent
Speaker 2: Price's two underlings that we meet later.
Speaker 3: Or it could be Vincent Price with the with the
Speaker 3: wax face we see him with later.
Speaker 2: I guess you'd think the cops would figure this out, though, like,
Speaker 2: who is she saying? This is not a police procedural,
Speaker 2: So if we don't even go down this direction anyway.
Speaker 3: At the morgue, there is some comic relief with the
Speaker 3: orderlies and there's one point where they're in the room
Speaker 3: with all of the bodies and one of the corpses
Speaker 3: pops up under the sheet, but the orderly is like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: they do that sometimes it's the embalming fluid. But no,
Speaker 3: after they leave, it pops up again and it is
Speaker 3: not the embalming fluid. It is our melted assailant pretending
Speaker 3: to be a corpse.
Speaker 2: This whole sequence plays out pretty much exactly like it
Speaker 2: does in the original picture, and in the original picture
Speaker 2: also just a very haunting scene of the of the morgue.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they recreate it well, I think.
Speaker 3: But he locates the body of Kathy Gray and he
Speaker 3: proceeds to steal it from the morgue. He lowers the
Speaker 3: body out the window to a couple of co conspirators
Speaker 3: waiting below, who are also dressed in dark cloaks and hats.
Speaker 3: And I did laugh here because the fake body prop
Speaker 3: they use for the rope lowering is very stiff and
Speaker 3: obviously very light. Later, Sue and her friend Scott and
Speaker 3: Scott's mother are at the police station being interrogated, and
Speaker 3: the interrogation consists of the police asking things like, quote,
Speaker 3: are you sure you didn't imagine all of it, and
Speaker 3: also they tell her it is impossible for a human
Speaker 3: being to look the way you described. Oh and we
Speaker 3: find out in the scene that the body of Matthew
Speaker 3: Burke was similarly stolen from the morgue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it gradually becomes apparent that bodies are being stolen
Speaker 2: and bodies are disappearing all over town.
Speaker 3: Right, So a new scene later Sidney Wallace remember him,
Speaker 3: He was the investor who had to go to Egypt
Speaker 3: for three weeks, but he was going to invest in
Speaker 3: Henry Jared's museum. Well, he shows up at a door
Speaker 3: in an alleyway and he's greeted by a young jacked
Speaker 3: Charles Bronson, who we will later be informed is named Egor.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, By the way, one thing I pointed out
Speaker 2: in the documentary is that Bronson was already pretty big
Speaker 2: in Italy under his birth name, but he was big
Speaker 2: enough that when they put the poster out for the
Speaker 2: Italian market, his head is prominently featured, like it's almost
Speaker 2: like starring Charles Bronson.
Speaker 3: Well, his head is actually prominent in the movie because
Speaker 3: there are multiple wax casts of it. Because what we
Speaker 3: learn in the scene is that Egor is one of
Speaker 3: the pupils of Professor Jared, now revealed to be still alive,
Speaker 3: and Igor tries to make wax figures of other people,
Speaker 3: but he always ends up making his own face. That
Speaker 3: almost seems like an interesting, rare neurological condition where you
Speaker 3: perceive everybody else's face to be exactly the same, everybody
Speaker 3: else's face to be the same as your own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you might
Speaker 2: build an entire Twilight Zone episode out of, but it's
Speaker 2: not really explored here.
Speaker 3: Well anyway, so Wallace here, He says he got a
Speaker 3: letter telling him to come meet Professor Jared at this address,
Speaker 3: and yet he's confused because Professor Jared is supposed to
Speaker 3: be dead. But nope, here is Vincent Price and not melted.
Speaker 3: He looks like regular unmelted Vincent Price. His hands are
Speaker 3: scarred and he moves with the help of a wheelchair,
Speaker 3: but his face is back to normal, and Jared says, hey, Wallace,
Speaker 3: I'm opening a new wax museum. This one will be
Speaker 3: dedicated to the themes of terror, agony, crime, malice, and execution,
Speaker 3: and we're going to send people into the streets telling
Speaker 3: their friends how wonderful it is. To be scared to death.
Speaker 3: Do you want end? Do you want to invest? Seems
Speaker 3: like Wallace is going to invest, but he shows him
Speaker 3: around for He's like, you know, here's my facility. Here
Speaker 3: is Charles Bronson. This is my student. He makes wax faces.
Speaker 3: Now that my hands are too scarred to do it.
Speaker 3: He's got another student downstairs named Leon. He also does
Speaker 3: the wax for him. Oh and here is my giant
Speaker 3: vat of boiling wax.
Speaker 2: Oh, I love this vat of wax. It's got this
Speaker 2: pink tent to it. Just looks amazing.
Speaker 3: And he shows how he uses the boiling wax to
Speaker 3: make the skin that he pours. He uses a sort
Speaker 3: of sprinkler system to pour the melted wax over the
Speaker 3: mold of a body, which is made of plaster, by
Speaker 3: the way, not flesh. And then he reveals the most
Speaker 3: recent wax effigy he has finished. Igor opens a box
Speaker 3: which just looks like a coffin standing up, and then oh,
Speaker 3: there is Matthew Burke. He looks so lifelike. And he
Speaker 3: falls toward the camera out of the box, and Price
Speaker 3: says he hanged himself in an elevator shaft, and then
Speaker 3: intermission So my version of this movie, the intermission card
Speaker 3: just said intermission. But I found screenshots of the intermission
Speaker 3: card on the internet that said intermission ten minutes. What's
Speaker 3: what's going on there?
Speaker 2: I believe the version I watched said ten minutes as well.
Speaker 2: I didn't go back and double check, but I remember
Speaker 2: when it came up it I was like, oh, I've
Speaker 2: got I've got some time here. But then we don't
Speaker 2: get the actual ten minutes or whatever, so we go
Speaker 2: right back into the picture. But I have to say
Speaker 2: I kind of missed the When I do go to
Speaker 2: a theater these days, I kind of miss the intermission,
Speaker 2: especially when we're dealing with like three hour long pictures
Speaker 2: and you know, you're drinking coffee. You need to get
Speaker 2: up and go to the bathroom after a while, and
Speaker 2: you just have to sort of guess or maybe do
Speaker 2: some research and find out what scenes you need to
Speaker 2: you need to hit, and then it's got to be
Speaker 2: this this rushed affair to use the bathroom and get
Speaker 2: back to the seat. It seems like why not do
Speaker 2: the intermissions, especially in these theaters where you have an
Speaker 2: seats nowadays, like let people stroll out there, use the bathroom,
Speaker 2: buy some more food and what have you?
Speaker 3: Agreed? Intermissions are nice, but yeah, likewise my version of
Speaker 3: the movie, the intermission only lasted a few seconds. So
Speaker 3: after the intermission, the new house of Wax is open
Speaker 3: and it is bustling. It's obviously doing great business. It
Speaker 3: is also deeply morbid and prurient. All it's just wax
Speaker 3: executions and belly dancers, and Vincent Price is going around
Speaker 3: handing out smelling salts to the ladies who are fainting
Speaker 3: in the middle of his museum. And here's the part
Speaker 3: where they have hired a paddle ball barker to get
Speaker 3: people in the door. He is out front, just whipping
Speaker 3: the paddleballs and talking a mile a minute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Reggie rymu here absolutely threatening any and everyone who
Speaker 2: comes within paddleball reach of him. Just ride in their faces,
Speaker 2: then ride in the camera. And he even basically breaks
Speaker 2: the fourth wall and threatens the mo moviego or and
Speaker 2: their popcorn, though not in like a total Grimlins two
Speaker 2: Winky Winky way, but but still it gets dangerously close
Speaker 2: to that level.
Speaker 3: I don't know, I think it is almost Krimlin's two level,
Speaker 3: because he's starting to say he looks directly into the
Speaker 3: camera and he says, I see you. So what he's
Speaker 3: doing already is he's hitting the paddle ball at like
Speaker 3: somebody's hat. He's like, I can knock the feather off
Speaker 3: of your hat, and he's, you know, doing that. But
Speaker 3: then he looks into the camera he says, look, you
Speaker 3: they're holding a box of popcorn. I'm going to hit
Speaker 3: the popcorn.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, But but if you really want to do
Speaker 2: you could think, well, there's a kid with popcorn there
Speaker 2: on the street, and that's what he's aiming at. And
Speaker 2: it's just out of We can't see it because we're
Speaker 2: that's where we're positioned. But yeah, it's it's still very gimmicky.
Speaker 2: It's a very gimmicky moment. This is the moment of
Speaker 2: the film where they're fully embracing the gimmick of three D,
Speaker 2: and not for immersion in the picture, but just for
Speaker 2: the tactical itself.
Speaker 3: So many pretensions Henry Jared had of keeping dignity and
Speaker 3: fine art as the as the the purpose of music
Speaker 3: his museum, this has all been abandoned. So he has
Speaker 3: a gimmicky barker out front get luring people in by
Speaker 3: taunting them, and when he leads the tour. It is
Speaker 3: now all wax gore. He's quoting Shakespeare and making comments like, yes,
Speaker 3: Anne Boleyn, her husband King Henry found a way to
Speaker 3: cut their marriage short. And then he uses at one point,
Speaker 3: he uses a guillotine to decapitate a wax French aristocrat
Speaker 3: and this makes people scream and faint.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's just fully embracing all of the gore that
Speaker 2: he he didn't want to embrace previously. He's like, I'm back,
Speaker 2: I'm changed. Now you want gore, you got it.
Speaker 3: Oh and then here's a familiar exhibit he's he's like
Speaker 3: showing off the scenes of crimes. He's like Matthew Burke,
Speaker 3: the stockbroker. And I'm just thinking, is this a quote
Speaker 3: crime worthy of a museum piece? It doesn't make doesn't
Speaker 3: really fit in with the famous historical executions here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, it's a moment where this is clearly not
Speaker 2: a police procedural, because amid all of these historic and
Speaker 2: famous deaths, here is a less newsworthy death about someone
Speaker 2: personally connected to me and my business pursuits who died
Speaker 2: several weeks ago. Yeah, and everyone's like, oh, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: very impressive.
Speaker 3: So Sue and Scott Scott the sculptor come to visit
Speaker 3: the museum, and they're commenting on everything. They're like, wow, yeah,
Speaker 3: these are really well done. Scott, even as a professional,
Speaker 3: is highly impressed, and he says Sue has been modeling
Speaker 3: for him. She's been posing for I guess his sculptures.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he is a wax sculptor or
Speaker 3: some other kind of sculptor. I don't recall if they
Speaker 3: reveal that. But eventually Sue wanders over to the exhibit
Speaker 3: showing Joan of Arc at the stake ready to be burned.
Speaker 3: And let's zoom in on her face. Why that looks
Speaker 3: an awful lot like Carolyn Jones sue roommate Kathy. Sue
Speaker 3: is greatly disturbed to see her dead friend's face perfectly
Speaker 3: reproduced in wax sculpture, and she's She starts to kind
Speaker 3: of freak out about this, but Vincent Price comes over
Speaker 3: to explain. He says that after she was killed, he
Speaker 3: saw her face in a picture in the newspaper and
Speaker 3: use that as a model for his Joan of Arc
Speaker 3: and Sue accepts this, but still seems troubled by how
Speaker 3: it can can look so real, and of course Vincent
Speaker 3: Price is very creepy about it. He says, that's the
Speaker 3: finest compliment I've ever received. And then Jared starts asking
Speaker 3: old Scott the sculptor what he's He's like, I hear
Speaker 3: you're a sculptor, Scott, show me your hands, and then
Speaker 3: he shows him his hands, and Vincent Price says, yes,
Speaker 3: mine were once like that, and so they make arrangements
Speaker 3: to work together sometime. But while Jared is talking, he
Speaker 3: also just starts hallucinating Sue as Marie Antoinette. She's like
Speaker 3: fading in and out of of her regular costume and
Speaker 3: then into the Marie Antoinette get up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is he sees her as his favorite. Is
Speaker 2: this like he wants to recreate his favorite Marie Antoinette
Speaker 2: and this is clearly the woman whose likeness he needs
Speaker 2: to transform into her.
Speaker 3: Right, He is desperate to wax this woman. So Jared
Speaker 3: asks Sue to to model for him, and she I
Speaker 3: think she kind of agrees, but then they leave, and
Speaker 3: you know they're they're walking out, and we get another
Speaker 3: another shot of the paddleball guy as we leave. It's
Speaker 3: like one was not enough.
Speaker 2: He is really impressive like there at one point. Maybe
Speaker 2: it's the earliest scene he does the bet where he's
Speaker 2: using two paddleballs at once, but then he ends up
Speaker 2: doing three and he catches all the balls in his mouth. Uh,
Speaker 2: it's it's pretty great. You might not think you need
Speaker 2: to see this performance, but after you see it, you're
Speaker 2: like that, that's that's really good. This man was at
Speaker 2: the top of his game.
Speaker 3: Later that night, though, when Sue is in her bedroom,
Speaker 3: we see the melted wax man in the in the
Speaker 3: hat and cloak sneaking up to the window and he
Speaker 3: sort of he like throws throws a grappling hook or
Speaker 3: something and like swings across the alleyway to her window
Speaker 3: and he's sneaking up on her, but Sue wakes up
Speaker 3: before he reaches her. She screams and he runs away.
Speaker 3: And then next we just go straight to the burlesque
Speaker 3: three D spectacle that you talked about earlier. They're at
Speaker 3: the music Hall, Sue and Scott her there together and
Speaker 3: we just get to watch the can Can dancers in
Speaker 3: three D kicking kicking up a storm. Also time to
Speaker 3: stop and appreciate a food and bev scene. You know,
Speaker 3: we we should we should rate the food and beverages
Speaker 3: in movies more often so. In this scene, our heroes
Speaker 3: are delivered a logger for the man, a sasparilla for
Speaker 3: the lady, and two knockwursts on rye. Looks like maybe
Speaker 3: they get a couple of little cornichans with sausage sandwiches.
Speaker 3: I rate this movie meal of three out of ten.
Speaker 2: What. I don't know, if you're in the mood for it,
Speaker 2: it could work out, you know. Like the cornischans, I
Speaker 2: like cornerischans.
Speaker 3: The sandwiches look kind of boring and dry, Like it
Speaker 3: doesn't even look like the bread is toasted.
Speaker 2: It just I don't know. The saaspilla looks good. It's
Speaker 2: in a nice, classy little glass.
Speaker 3: Okay, agree there. So they're sitting there watching this dance
Speaker 3: show and Sue is like it doesn't seem proper, all
Speaker 3: those girls showing their talents, and then Scott explains. He says, look,
Speaker 3: you've been going around with the weight of the world
Speaker 3: on your shoulders. You're obsessed with your dead friend reincarnated
Speaker 3: as a wax mart. You're seeing melted stalkers in your
Speaker 3: bedroom at night. You need to watch a show like this.
Speaker 3: To quote bring you back to normalcy. I'd say this
Speaker 3: is one of the least convincing statements in the film.
Speaker 2: But anyway, it's Bloomers in three D? What can you
Speaker 2: what can you say? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah? And in all honesty, I think this scene
Speaker 3: probably is just like the paddle Ball, like they wanted
Speaker 3: an excuse to have a three D a spectacle can
Speaker 3: can dancers kicking and jamming their butts in your face?
Speaker 3: So they found a way to fit it into the plot.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's it's funny, it works, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But in the middle of this dance show, Sue is
Speaker 3: preoccupied with something about the wax joan of Arc. Not
Speaker 3: only did it look exactly like Kathy, it had an
Speaker 3: irregular piercing in only one ear, just like the real Kathy.
Speaker 3: How could Jared have seen that from a newspaper photo?
Speaker 3: And Scott that. She explains this to Scott and he's like,
Speaker 3: you know what you need? You need to talk to
Speaker 3: a cop. I'm gonna take you to the police station
Speaker 3: tomorrow and they'll tell you there's nothing to worry about.
Speaker 3: And so she's looking kind of like sad and dejected,
Speaker 3: while Scott's like, now, relax, honey and enjoy the show,
Speaker 3: and he's all jazzed up about it. The dancing resumes
Speaker 3: and then anyway, there is a scene the next day,
Speaker 3: I think where they get They do go and talk
Speaker 3: to the police, and unexpectedly the police start investigating this.
Speaker 3: They go and check on the museum and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't completely laugh off. I mean they do
Speaker 2: laugh at her, but they still follow up.
Speaker 3: Now, there's a few other scenes in here leading up
Speaker 3: to the climax. There's one part where they're at the
Speaker 3: museum and she's investigating the Kathy sculpture, and then Vincent
Speaker 3: Price shows up with a box and opens it and
Speaker 3: it's a wax sculpture of Sue's own head, and he
Speaker 3: shows it to Sue. He's like, do you like it?
Speaker 3: But he still wants her to model sometime. And then meanwhile,
Speaker 3: also the police are poking around in the museum and
Speaker 3: they start noticing that a bunch of the wax figures
Speaker 3: in the room look exactly like the faces of bodies
Speaker 3: that have recently gone missing from the morgue. But they're
Speaker 3: just like, huh, that's odd, and just kind of whiffs
Speaker 3: over their heads. So there's more of a police investigation plot.
Speaker 3: They interrogate Wallace, they hunt down Leon, one of the
Speaker 3: two pupils, and arrest him, figure out his real identity
Speaker 3: and stuff. But it's all building up to this final
Speaker 3: confrontation where one Night's goes to the wax Museum to
Speaker 3: meet Scott but she can't find him. And there's a
Speaker 3: wonderful creepy scene where she's walking around in the darkened
Speaker 3: museum amongst the exhibits and all these scenes of murder
Speaker 3: and stuff, and she's calling out Scott Scott, and meanwhile
Speaker 3: Charles Bronson is creeping around. There's one point where you
Speaker 3: see a wax head that you think or you see
Speaker 3: what you think is a wax head, but it's really
Speaker 3: Charles Bronson's actual head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great fake out.
Speaker 3: And there's a Kathy hair reveal. She like goes up
Speaker 3: to the sculpture of Joan of Arc and she pulls
Speaker 3: the wig off and it's Kathy's real blonde hair underneath.
Speaker 3: All has come delight, that's right, And of course she's
Speaker 3: confronted here by Charles Bronson and by Vincent Price.
Speaker 2: Now we get one of the great scenes in this
Speaker 2: sequence that is also pretty much blow for blow exactly
Speaker 2: what happens in the nineteen thirties picture as well, where
Speaker 2: Vincent Price is there. First of all, he gets up
Speaker 2: out of his wheelchair. So Vincent Price's character here is
Speaker 2: is actually guilty of what the dude accuses the Big
Speaker 2: Lebowski off in The Big Lebowski. Oh, he can clearly walk.
Speaker 2: He's just using the wheelchair as part of this disguise.
Speaker 3: He's faking it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's faking it. But then she tries to struggle
Speaker 2: against him, and she hits him in the face a
Speaker 2: couple of times. And when she does it, like smashes
Speaker 2: open his waxen false face, this wax face that he's
Speaker 2: wearing that makes him look like Vincent Price, and reveals
Speaker 2: this heavily scarred visage beneath. It's a wonderful moment. It
Speaker 2: was a great moment in the original film, but this
Speaker 2: movie actually improves upon it with even better makeup, with
Speaker 2: this amazing full color makeup.
Speaker 3: Agree excellent reveal. It's not much of a surprise because
Speaker 3: I mean, again, who else would this melted guy be? Like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's got to be Vincent Price. But yeah,
Speaker 3: a wonderful scene. And then this leads up to the
Speaker 3: ending where now Sue is you know, she's basically she
Speaker 3: has been tied to the train tracks by snidely whiplash.
Speaker 3: In this case, she is laying down on the table
Speaker 3: in the basement of the Wax Museum under the big
Speaker 3: vat of boiling wax. So because the plan is that
Speaker 3: Jared is going to waxify Sue and turn her into
Speaker 3: his new Marie Antoinette while she's still alive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, despite this being very much like
Speaker 2: a code approved film, we have implied nudity here. She's
Speaker 2: supposed to be nude in there, and of course you
Speaker 2: know we'd never see any of the nudity, but it's
Speaker 2: heavily implied. And later, like when she's rescued, somebody has
Speaker 2: to throw a coat.
Speaker 3: Over her, implied nudity being a hilarious content warning that
Speaker 3: we once saw on the IMDb parental Guide. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 3: isn't the presence of any human body technically a case
Speaker 3: of implied nudity?
Speaker 2: It's like there somewhere. Yeah, So the is the film wine,
Speaker 2: So it's close here. They do a great job building
Speaker 2: the tension. We have these these dual scenes going on
Speaker 2: where there's the battle against Igor on one hand, and
Speaker 2: then there's Jared's wax preparations for Sue in the basement.
Speaker 2: I thought both sequences were really skillfully composed and cut
Speaker 2: together here.
Speaker 3: Yes, I agree, very tense sequence. Sue is in the
Speaker 3: basement about to be waxed alive Scott. Meanwhile, he gets
Speaker 3: in the fight with Charles Bronson, and then Charles Bronson
Speaker 3: wins and then puts him in the guillotine to guillotine him,
Speaker 3: and then at the last moment they are saved by
Speaker 3: the arrival of the police. Which you know, that's a classic.
Speaker 3: It's a very fifties movie kind of ending, one that
Speaker 3: I always find incredibly unsatisfying. The hero and the heroin
Speaker 3: do not find a way to best the villain of
Speaker 3: their own accord. They have to be rescued by the authorities.
Speaker 3: I don't know why. I wonder if audiences in the
Speaker 3: fifties found that as unsatisfying as I think most people
Speaker 3: probably would today or for the time it's just like,
Speaker 3: oh okay, yeah, good, you know, the police saved the day.
Speaker 3: It like it robs us of a certain kind of
Speaker 3: resolution to the dynamic between the characters. If you don't
Speaker 3: see a way for the good characters to save themselves.
Speaker 3: They just you know, diosx macin it basically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's basically like Tarantula, where
Speaker 2: all right, Collin Clint Eastwood in a jet fighter, a
Speaker 2: character that we haven't seen before is going to save
Speaker 2: the day by blowing up the giant spider.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess it's not quite a day sex Macinet,
Speaker 3: to be fair, because we have seen the police investigating
Speaker 3: up to this point, so like there's a plot line
Speaker 3: of them figuring out what's going on and getting there
Speaker 3: to that moment so that they don't show up from
Speaker 3: out of nowhere. But we're not really invested in the
Speaker 3: police characters, so I don't know, it's just it's just
Speaker 3: not quite the same as it would be if Sue
Speaker 3: or Scott themselves figured out a way.
Speaker 2: Out of this. I guess it's ultimately in the grander
Speaker 2: cinematic tradition. It's it's great to have that trope though,
Speaker 2: because when that trop is later subverted in films, it
Speaker 2: can be especially delightful and mean, with one of the
Speaker 2: prime examples, of course, being like Hitchcock's Psycho, where the
Speaker 2: picture lets you know clearly that the you know, whatever
Speaker 2: rescue you thought was gonna come is is maybe not
Speaker 2: going to work after all. So when when police intervention
Speaker 2: fails in later pictures, it maybe it hits a little harder.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: There's a really good twist that inverts that in Silence
Speaker 3: of the Lambs. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, like where you
Speaker 3: think the cops are showing up to conclude the plot,
Speaker 3: but in fact the heroine is on her own.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they're they're hitting the wrong house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but anyway, authority saving the day aside. It is
Speaker 3: a really tense ending and I think it works great
Speaker 3: for the most part, and.
Speaker 2: There's a lot more grappler like when they when they
Speaker 2: when they arrest Igor, he's about to suplex a cop.
Speaker 2: And then I don't know if you noticed, but when
Speaker 2: Vincent Price's character is fighting off the authorities, at one
Speaker 2: point he like picks a dude up like he's gonna
Speaker 2: throw him into the wax. And of course we know
Speaker 2: who's going in that.
Speaker 3: Wax, right, I mean, it's the end you know is coming.
Speaker 3: It's it's kind of like it's Chekhov's gun. If there's
Speaker 3: gun on the mantlepiece, it will probably be fired. If
Speaker 3: there is a what would you call it, an open topped,
Speaker 3: large container of some kind of deadly liquid, whether that's
Speaker 3: a pool with piranhas in it or boiling acid or
Speaker 3: boiling wax, the villain has got to fall in.
Speaker 2: It, exactly. I mean, that's what it's there for. We
Speaker 2: want that spectacle even if there's and in this case,
Speaker 2: there's nothing really gory afterwards, Like you don't see a
Speaker 2: skeleton rising to the surface or anything like that. We
Speaker 2: don't see a wax cocooned vincent price, you know, falling
Speaker 2: onto the floor or anything. But just the spectacle of him,
Speaker 2: of somebody landing in that stuff is enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not the stinger at the end. Instead, the
Speaker 3: epilogue is just them at the police station with Sue
Speaker 3: being like, thank you for putting your coat over my
Speaker 3: naked body.
Speaker 2: The end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a strange comment to end on, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: But they got to send the folks home happy. You know,
Speaker 2: the whole family came out about the whole family. But
Speaker 2: at least people made the effort to come to the
Speaker 2: big theater, to get the big theater experience with all
Speaker 2: this wonderful sound, three D effects. They need to go
Speaker 2: home happy, so they'll come back next time and watch
Speaker 2: more three D Warner Brothers pictures.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if they ever re released this again in three D,
Speaker 3: I would absolutely go to a theater to watch it
Speaker 3: in three D. I think that would be a blast.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I really left this movie and the
Speaker 2: research wanting to have the really for the first time
Speaker 2: perhaps ever, really wanting to have a proper three D
Speaker 2: cinema experience with whatever technol I can get them get
Speaker 2: my hands on, so that the next time there's like
Speaker 2: a strong I would I mean, obviously I would love
Speaker 2: to see like this picture re released in modern three
Speaker 2: D or or some form of three D in the theater.
Speaker 2: But I'll settle for anything at this point, almost anything.
Speaker 3: All Right, Does that do it for House of Wax?
Speaker 2: I believe that will. We'll go ahead and seal off
Speaker 2: the wax canister on this one, but we'll be back
Speaker 2: next week with one more three D picture. What'll it be?
Speaker 2: I don't know. We're still looking around at things. I've
Speaker 2: got another disc to check out here, so tune in
Speaker 2: and find out. In the meantime, if you want to
Speaker 2: hear more weird house cinema, well, we put this out
Speaker 2: every Friday and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.
Speaker 2: We're primarily a science podcast, but on Fridays we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film.
Speaker 2: If you want to see a complete list of the
Speaker 2: films that we've covered on the show, we can go
Speaker 2: to letterbox dot com as L E T T E
Speaker 2: R B O x D. We have a user account
Speaker 2: there called weird House, and on that account you'll find
Speaker 2: a list in order all the films we've covered. It's
Speaker 2: pretty fun to check.
Speaker 3: Out huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If
Speaker 3: you would like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 3: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 3: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com.
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