Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)

What is the attraction of waxwork movies?  I only ask because I recently sat through Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), a relatively late entry in the genre.  With its cast of b-movie favourites of yesteryear and 'Hollywood Victorian England' setting, it felt as if it had been made at least twenty years earlier.  While not a direct remake of 1932's Mystery at the Wax Museum (or its direct remake, House of Wax (1953), Terror in the Wax Museum makes many nods to those films - the creepy mute assistant to the wax museum's sculptor, the museum's emphasis upon its chamber of horrors and recreating grisly murder scenes and a mysterious cloaked murderer skulking around.  Plot wise, though, it has more in common with an Edgar Wallace thriller, as it resolves itself into a treasure hunt as various parties seek a fortune hidden in the museum.  The horror aspects - the speculation that Jack the Ripper has returned or that perhaps his waxwork has come to life, are merely trimmings to add a little frisson to an otherwise pretty standard mystery.  The constant parade of old time movie stars - Broderick Crawford, John Carradine Elsa Lanchester, Ray Milland, Louis Heyward and Patric Knowles to name but a few - gives the whole affair the air of a celebrity waxwork exhibition, the audience marveling at how much the still, (or no longer) look like they did at the peak of their fame.

But like most of these films - going all the way back to Leni's Waxwork (1924) - Terror in the Wax Museum plays on the fear that these wax effigies are somehow imbued with characters of their models, just waiting to spring into life and create mayhem.  A fear often compounded by the fact that they turn out to be real bodies covered in wax - a situation not just in Mystery at the Wax Museum/House of Wax, but also in low-budget pot-boilers like Nightmare in Wax, where they turn out to still be living and eventually come to life to kill their creator.  While nothing so macabre occurs in Terror in the Wax Museum, we instead have the murderer disguising himself as the Jack the Ripper waxwork to carry out his murders, occasionally even replacing the waxwork in the  museum, so as to evade detection.  This variation on the fear of waxworks coming to life - that they are actually living people pretending to be wax figures (a fear also played upon in the 1970 Doctor Who story Spearhead From Space - is heightened by the film's use of actual actors to portray its waxwork figures.  (As a consequence, one can, every so often, see the actor either move slightly or breath shallowly which can be seen as either slightly ridiculous or creepy, reinforcing the idea that they are waiting to pounce, at any time).  I have to say that Terror in the Wax Museum is a fairly weak example of the waxwork genre, creaky, over long and under resourced, although, while it is on, it is reasonably entertaining.  If nothing else, it is fun spotting all the ageing stars in various supporting roles.