Mystery at the Wax Museum / House of Wax

Overview

This was a weekend for wax. I sat through the Mystery at the Wax Museum (1933), it's 1953 remake named House of Wax, and the 2005 movie by the same name. I watched them in 'release' order.

The Mystery of the wax Museum was an old movie, back when Hollywood was still learning the medium for story telling. Some of the parts seemed rather disjointed and the story didn't flow very well. A wax sculptor fights with a business partner who wants to use underhanded techniques to cash out of the business. After a fight, the business partner leaves an unconscious sculptor in the flaming wax museum. He survives, but loses the use of his hands. He 'goes underground' and vanishes. Everyone thinks he is dead. He returns, slightly psychotic. With the loss of his hands he 'hires' a few people to help him out. It turns out that they are just kidnapping dead bodies and then using a process to cover them with wax. This is an effort to recreate his lost 'treasures'. The movie has a lot of interesting plot points, but is lacking with the glue that holds it together.

Thankfully, the 1953 remake fixes a lot of the pacing problems from the first one. It is also one of the first movies every to be shot in 3D and stars Vincent Price as the crazy sculptor. This movie was a pleasure to watch. A few of the scenes were notably 3D, but they were lost in the 2D DVD conversion of the movie. When the wax museum opened for the first time they had a guy with a paddleball. He even spoke w/ 'you' the audience and tried to hawk us popcorn. Another highlight of this movie was Dabbs Greer as one of the cops. Dabs is most famous for Reverend Aldron from Little House. He has an extremely distinctive voice. Since T is forcing me through all seasons of little house (We're half way through season 8), it was cool to see him in an earlier role. He was unrecognizable except for the voice.

That brings us to the 2005 House of Wax. This movie had nothing to do with the previous movies, other than containing the same name. Straying away from the creepy/ mysterious feel of the previous movies, this one was turned into your standard slasher. It had the parade of random pop icons (Such as Paris Hilton) and a cast of unknowns. One cool idea in this movie was that there actually was a wax museum built completely from wax. At the end of the movie this house burns down. I'm not quite sure how. Have you ever tried to burn a candle without a wick? You can't because was doesn't burn. It just melts when it heats up. With everything made of wax, there was nothing to burn. It was cool to see Paris due, I guess. The 'leads' in this movie were a brother sister set of twins. They just didn't pull it off as well as the Jeeper Creeper pair. I was told this remake had a lot of nods to the originals, but even watching them back to back I didn't see any. This is one to forget.

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