I just finished House of Wax so I’m going to review it while it’s fresh in my mind- while not hammer, Vincent Price being a friend and contemporary of Lee and Cushing I think there’ll be no objection?

House of Wax is a pretty effective horror movie. We begin with an artist, Jarrod (Price) a wax sculptor of great skill who treats his figures as alive, and who’s business partner wants him to go more sensationalist. He proposes an alternative and finds a new potential partner to buy his old one out, though when it turns out there’ll be three months before that deal can go through his old partner goes from zero to ‘arson for the insurance money’ fast.

Jarrod’s believed dead and his partner’s living it up aaaand oops, killed by a scarred figure! A bit of time passes and another murder of the partner’s girlfriend occurs, but then Jarrod appears alive after all- his face unscarred but his hands burned and using a wheelchair most of the time, with assistants helping the physical end of the sculpting as he’s prepared to reopen the wax museum, with more sensationalism after all. The girlfriend’s friend Sue, and her boyfriend an artist, both grow drawn in, with her noticing the similarity of the wax Jeanne d’Arc and her friend, and Jarrod asks her to model due to her similarities to his lost Marie Antoinette figure, his favorite.

There’s a scene here just after the intermission with a pingpong paddle wielding salesman getting people into the show, and bouncing ping pong balls at the screen- for, you see, this movie was shot in Three D! Of which I didn’t see much opportunity to show up except for here. Imagine how many more 3d TVs they’d have sold a few years ago if they had these scenes from House of Wax instead of Avatar on them... anyway, back to the plot.

Our Marie Antoinette goes back and figures out what’s up, that rather than being based on her friend the Jeanne was her friend covered in wax, and similarly so are the other figures, around when the police figure out one of the assistants is a criminal (though it’ll be awhile before they come into the picture, picking him up for interrogation). Being confronted by Jarrod, she strikes him in the face- and we get one of the more-earned faint of the horror movies I’ve seen, as Jarrod’s face revealed is shot so very well.

Everything hits the fan as Jarrod intends to wax-ify Sue, the artist boyfriend fights and is put under the guillotine by the other assistant, and the police finally show up- the climactic struggle is a good one, and it’s also surprising to see that the scarred artist Jarrod is formidable, handling two officers at a time (between this and them walking rather than running once in the museum, I am... not too impressed by them, despite them doing their job). The effects are great, the finale is all it deserves to be, and it wraps up a great movie.

I also like that unlike a lot of the Draculas and similar, rather than ‘villain defeated, movie over,’ there’s a brief scene later where we see everyone ok. It’s not much but a short minute scene at the end really does help the sense of closure.

Christopher Lee stopped doing Dracula after Satanic Rites, not wanting to be typecast in horror like Price and Cushing, but I do wonder how much of that was the specific rolls and their barrenness- because his friend Price here was given far more acting to do than all the Dracula movies combined, with a lot more than ‘confrontation with vampire hunters number 6’ or what have you. It’s much more comfortable to be ‘typecast’ if you get to stretch your acting muscles while doing so.