Terror In The Wax Museum
This page was last updated on 03/12/04 09:04 AM
The Last B Movie…
TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM
By Michael Mallory
In 1973—a time when the
Hollywood studio system was uttering its final gasp and the hills
were alive with the sound of backlots being bulldozed—a
modest, entertaining thriller called TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM
slipped into theaters. Most reviewers at the time were
unimpressed by this murder mystery disguised as a horror film,
though many marveled at the cast: Ray Milland, Elsa Lanchester,
Broderick Crawford, John Carradine, Louis Hayward (lured out of
semi-retirement), Patric Knowles, and Maurice Evans. It
disappeared quickly, as did a bookend picture titled ARNOLD, a
comedy thriller made by the same unit featuring some of the same
actors.
Yet there is something very striking about TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM, something the critics then and now seem to have overlooked. With its rich cast of veterans and foggy backlot atmosphere, its hurry-we’re-running-out-of-film direction, and a script that gallops over its plot holes like a runaway horse, the film turned out to be a cinematic coelacanth, a thing thought to be extinct: a good, old-fashioned B movie. It can be argued that the picture, one of the few theatrical releases from Bing Crosby Productions, is the last true honest-to-God B movie ever made. Except for the length (93 minutes—too long for a classic B), use of color, and one brief flash of a nude “wax figure” (with a bikini tan), TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM might have been made in 1944 by Universal—with most of the same cast!
The story is set in Victorian London, shortly after the horrible murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. Saucy Jack is still at large, though his effigy can be seen in the Chamber of Horrors Wax Museum of Claude Dupree (Carradine).
When the slightly batty sculptor turns up murdered, circumstantial evidence seems to point to the wax figure—or the real Ripper himself! But Inspector Daniels of the Yard (Evans) and his assistant, Sgt. Hawks (Mark W. Edwards), have plenty of other suspects with which to contend. Chief among them are Amos Burns (Crawford), a vulgar, boorish New York entrepreneur who was pressing Dupree to sell his collection; Flexner (Milland), Dupree’s associate who was promised the business; Dupree’s niece, Meg (Nicole Shelby), the legal heir; Meg’s money-grubbing guardian, Julia (Lanchester), who takes over the operation, using Dupree’s murder as a publicity angle; Southcott (Knowles), Dupree’s pompous lawyer, who was told about a change in the old man’s will right before the murder; and, last but not least, Karkoff (Steven Marlo), a deformed, half-blind, deaf-mute hunchback who lives in the waxworks cellar, and who, it is rumored, might be Dupree’s illegitimate son.
Whew! With all that work sorting out suspects, the police can’t be blamed for dropping in for a nip at the pub next door to the Wax Museum, run by Tim Fowley (Louis Hayward), who was also Dupree’s landlord. Entertainment at the pub is provided by Laurie Mell (Shani Wallis of OLIVER! Fame), a tart-with-a-heart who can really belt out a song.
The death
of Dupree, who was vacillating about selling out, actually makes
it easier for Amos Burns to buy the wax collection, but his
victory is short-lived. So is he. Just hours after a bitter
public argument with Flexner over ownership of the museum, Burns
is killed in the foggy streets of London by a Ripperesque figure
in a black cloak, and his body dumped in the Chamber of Horrors.
It’s enough to give Meg nightmares. Awakening after one such dream (in which the wax figures come to life and chase her) she hears a voice muttering her name and, to her horror, sees her dead uncle standing in her bedroom!
Meanwhile, solicitor Southcott unexpectedly receives a letter from Dupree (not a missive from the grave, just a letter lost in the mail) indicating that the old man’s estate is far more valuable than anyone thinks. A fortune is hidden somewhere in the Chamber of Horrors. Meg is the sole heir, but fortune or no, she’s had enough and wants to leave the eerie museum. Sgt. Hawks (for personal as well as professional reasons) asks her to stay. He is convinced that the threat against her is all too human.
That night, after the pub closing, Laurie Mell is killed by a figure disguised as a bobby. Inside the wax museum, the sound of a falling guillotine awakens Meg. She creeps downstairs to investigate and finds that the Marie Antoinette exhibit now features a grisly new prop—Laurie’s head. Not thinking very logically, she rushes down to the waxworks where something even worse awaits her—the wax figure of Jack the Ripper, now alive!
Karkoff tries to defend Meg, who is one of the few people who treated the ugly brute with kindness, but during the struggle he is thrown into the vat of bubbling wax. Sgt. Hawks finally appears and chases the cloaked figure up into the exhibit room where, after a terrific fight (shot in good old Republic Studios nail-down-the-camera fashion), the Ripper falls on an axe and is killed. Hawks sees that the murderer is wearing a rubber Ripper mask.
Everything is now clear to London’s finest: the killer—a former actor and master of disguise—donned the Ripper’s garb and snuck into the museum at night, searching the exhibit for Dupree’s hidden treasure. If anyone happened to come along, he simply took the place of the wax figure. Dupree and Burns were killed to prevent the sale of the collection and its conveyance out of the country. The killer then posed as both Saucy Jack and the dead Dupree in hopes of frightening Meg away, the better to continue his search unhindered. As for Laurie Mell, she had seen the killer sneaking into the museum and had to be silenced. Ironically, the killer was closer to the treasure than he ever realized: the surgical tools in Jack the Ripper’s medical bag are made of solid platinum.
It’s a classic B mystery explain-a-thon, done to perfection and wrapped up before the puzzled viewer can even say, “Huh?” But we still don’t know the identity of the killer. Was it Flexner after all? Or Southcott? Only in the very last shot is the true terror haunting the wax museum revealed, as his wax likeness is unveiled (and stop reading right here if you want to see the picture first). It is mild-mannered publican Tim Fowley. A crucial clue was that Fowley is the museum’s landlord, and as such he could get into the building and its every room whenever he wanted. He had the keys.
This surprising twist brings to an end the Last B Movie, and belatedly, a whole style of moviemaking.
Given the sheer number of big names crammed into a 90-minute movie, it’s not surprising that some of the actors get short shrift. Maurice Evans in particular seems wasted as the Scotland Yard Inspector, and the ubiquitous John Carradine has little to do but stir the vat and intone his love for his wax “children” before he’s dispatched by the Ripper’s blade.
Still, the filmmakers were smart enough to team up some of the old pros, creating some very amusing moments. Former Universal B star Patric Knowles is great as the haughty, humorless solicitor, the perfect foil for the venemous dithering of Elsa Lanchester as Julia. Broderick Crawford, presenting what one fears is the image all Britons hold of rich Americans, contrasts very nicely with the dour urbanity of Ray Milland. And thirties star Louis Hayward, in his last film appearance, is the very picture of paternal kindness towards Shani Wallis’ tarty songbird. Hayward offers such a warm and genial presence that the denouement comes as a real shock.
Top-billed Ray Milland as the temperamental Flexner gives a churlishly effective performance, biting the heads off his lines then chewing them up with relish. His sardonic lecture tour through the Chamber of Horrors, delivered with dripping, Vincent Pricean glee, is marvelous. The real scene thief of the picture, though, is Lanchester, who manages to make the callous, greedy Julia somehow likeable and very funny. An actress who could convey more character by taking a breath than most performers can with a soliloquy, Lanchester works to keep everyone around her on their toes.
The “youngsters” are also effective, though Steven Marlo as Karkoff is perhaps too grotesque to be taken seriously. (His dubbed-in grunts sound like a drunken Fozzie Bear.) Mark W. Edwards and Nicole Shelby hold their own quite well against the veterans, and special mention should be given to Peggy Stewart, who livens up a bit part as a shrill charwoman with a performance that comes across as a wonderful homage to Una O’Connor.
There is something indescribably eerie about wax figures, which translates well to film. The most unsettling scenes of HOUSE OF WAX (1953) are contained in the fire sequence, in which the historical figures placidly accept their fate while their hair, clothes, and faces blacken and melt. TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM forfeits that unsettling element by using real actors as the wax figures, something that was necessitated by the script, which required the effigies to come alive, give chase, and, in one dream sequence, even speak. (Though let’s not kid ourselves: real people are also cheaper to acquire and hold up better under hot studio lights.)
Naturally, that calls for performers who could stand as motionless as statues in a convincing manner—a skill not found on every actor’s resume. Producer Andrew J. Fenady ingeniously solved this casting problem by hiring 12 members of the Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts, a Southern California event that includes a pageant in which performers pose as the subjects of famous paintings and artworks. For the most part, the illusion is successful, with the actors adopting stiff, angular, unnatural poses—but sharp eyes can catch the occasional wobble among the stiffs, particularly from Rosa Huerta’s Lucretia Borgia.
One potentially great clue, though, is ruined by the casting of a real actor as one of the horrors. While interrogating Flexner after the murder of Amos Burns, eagle-eyed Sgt. Hawks notices that the wax figure of Jack the Ripper resembles the suspect. Flexner admits to it, calling it a touch of artistic vanity, as no one really knows what the Ripper looks like. The audience is left to draw all sorts of inferences about the ease with which Flexner could disguise himself as the figure. The only problem is that Ray Milland and Don Herbert, who plays the Ripper, look nothing alike, not even remotely, so this neat bit of misdirection (on paper) becomes a strange and puzzling moment on film. Nevertheless, in good old B-movie style, the filmmakers just charge on ahead and hope that we didn’t notice.
Aside from it’s cast, TERROR’s biggest asset is William Jurgenson’s atmospheric, underlit photography, which makes the most of Stan Jolley’s small but finely crafted sets. (Jolley used Madame Tussad’s in London as the inspiration for his Chamber of Horrors). Director Georg Fenady, chiefly an episodic TV director, manages to capture this eerie atmosphere, but can’t quite finesse it. Still, when it works—such as in the sequence of the Ripper’s stalking of Amos Burns, in which we glimpse the fog-shrouded killer almost subliminally—it really works. Fenady’s chief accomplishment, though, is that he keeps things moving: Damn the inconsistencies, full speed ahead!
Jameson Brewer’s script (based on Andrew Fenady’s story) is quite complex (more so than can be synopsized here) and offers enough red herrings to open a fish market. It is not always logical, exactly, but it continues to tease and never lags.
Though really a mystery, TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM was sold as outright horror. Featured prominently in the film’s advertising was the slogan: “Karkoff is here in the Wax Museum,” along with a picture of monstrous Steven Marlo. And if some eager movie buff were to mistakenly read “Karloff” instead of “Karkoff”…well, no real harm done. (This bit of marketing duplicity becomes even more amusing when one notices that the name in the closing credits reads “Karkov.”)
TERROR is hardly on a par with some of that year’s competition—THE EXORCIST, THE WICKER MAN, or THEATRE OF BLOOD—but it remains a satisfying little puzzler with a once-in-a-lifetime cast who, if not exactly at their peaks, still knew how to strut.
Forget all the textbook definitions of a B movie relating to booking practices. We know what Bs were: fast, frugal, frequently fantastic, but most of all fun. TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM is all of that and more. It is also a fond reminder that, for one brief moment in 1973, they actually made ‘em like they used to….
Copyright © 1999 by Scarlet Street, Inc. All rights reserved.
Used here with permission
