Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: House of Wax (1953)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe continue their trio of 3-D films with the first color 3D feature film from a major American studio: 1953’s “House of Wax.” It’s the movie that remade Vincent Price as a horror icon, and it also features performances by Charles Bronson and Carolyn Jones. (orignally published 04/28/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind, it's Monday, so
we have a classic episode of Weird House Cinema here
for you. This one is going to be our episode
on House of Wax from nineteen fifty three. This is
a three D cinema classic starring the fabulous as always,
Vincent Price. It is the movie that made him a

(00:25):
horror icon. It also features performances by Charles Bronson and
Carolyn Jones. It originally published four twenty eight, twenty twenty three.
Let's have It.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
we're back with week two in our series of three
weeks of three D. Last week's movie was the three
D adventure Treasure of the Four Crowns. Today's film is
the nineteen fifty three horror classic House of Wax, starring
Vincent Price. Now, since we're going to inevitably be tempted

(01:13):
to compare and contrast with last week's film, Treasure of
the Four Crowns, I want to write off the bat
and mention some big differences that at least are my opinion.
Maybe your opinion will be different, Rob, But I'm gonna
say House of wax is in almost every way a
much better movie than Treasure of the Four Crowns. Both

(01:33):
are great, can't be fun, but House of Waxes is
actually a really solid horror movie, clever stylish in a
way that that Treasure is not.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Oh absolutely, a House of wax is in a league
all its own compared to Treasure of the Four Crowns.
And we'll get into that. I mean, it's an important
three D film. It is a three D film that
very much holds up to subsequent viewing and subsequent decades,
regardless of whether you're watching it in three D or

(02:05):
two D.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah, that's another thing I was gonna say, So very
different approaches to three D here. As we mentioned last time,
we were watching these three D movies the same way
almost everybody does today, meaning in two D. Most people
do not have the requisite home video playback equipment necessary
to experience high quality three D at home. So and

(02:27):
we even looked into that, it's like, what do you
need to watch most of these movies in three D today?
I mean, with a lot of them, you actually need
the three D Blu ray player, the three D TV,
and the glasses or I don't know. So we didn't
mess around with all that because most people are not
going to see the movies like that today.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Yeah, now we tried. I went to Atlanta's only video store,
Video Drome, and I was talking with Matt there, the
guy runs it, and we were looking at we were
looking at DVD cases and Blu ray cases. He had
a tub of three D glasses he was getting out,
and we basically just came to the realization that you
have most of these that are available on Blu ray

(03:06):
or DVD, you can't even use any kind of like
at home glasses scenario. Your only option for at home
three D viewing with most of the titles is to
get yourself a big, big, fancy three D Blu ray player,
three D television. And even then those are bits of
technology that are going that are kind of out of
fad at the moment. So we're already past that particular

(03:29):
at home three D boom or so it.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
Seems maybe they'll come back. I mean three D, as
we've said, always seems to come in waves. It'll ebb
and flow but for the most part, I think it
makes sense to consider three D movies as pieces of
media that have multiple lives. So they might have an
initial run of three D in the theaters and that

(03:52):
is how people see them in the theaters, but then
after that they have an afterlife. They sort of haunt
our world as a two D shadow of their former selves.
And the essential question to ask about a movie like
this is does it hold up in both forms or
is this something that's really only enjoyable in the three
D format where it was originally intended. Treasure of the

(04:15):
Four Crowns was fun for I don't know if you
have the right ironic spirit, but it is also the
most three D movie ever made. It is so overrun
with three D gags. If you take out the three
D element, you are left with an incredibly strange film experience,
Like half of the runtime is just things poking at

(04:36):
the camera for no reason and not actually coming out
of the screen at you.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah. Absolutely, Four Crowns is basically an amusement park ride
with some resemblance to cinema, whereas this film is an
illegitimate but piece of cinema that also has three D
elements that are not just little extras, but also add
to the immersion factor.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
I agree House of Waxes is not like Treasure. There
are a handful of what I would call utterly gratuitous
three D effects shots, such as the paddleball Man. We'll
get to that later. On the paddle Ball Man, there
are some dancers that I imagine were put in just
so they could fulfill a desire for a sort of

(05:21):
titillating three D sequence. But for the most part, the
movie functions on home video as a normal piece of cinema.
You could forget that it was a three D movie
except for a couple of little moments.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Absolutely yeah, It's also a movie that captured and continues
to capture people's imaginations outside of the three D scenario.
Just one quick example of this, and this was brought
up in an excellent documentary that's on the Blu ray
for a House of Wax that I watched that have

(05:54):
rented from Video drum It. It's titled House of Wax
Unlike anything You've seen before. It was produced in twenty thirteen,
and like one of the people they interviewed there pointed
out that like the magazine Famous Monsters of Film, Land
had this really gorgeous painting illustration of the monstrous Vincent
Price character on the front. You know it was. It

(06:15):
really resonated with with film fans and horror enthusiasts of
the day and subsequent generations to follow you and today
as well. So it created an iconic villain, iconic character. Really,
as we'll discuss, he's not you can you can. He's
a little more complicated than just a pure villain, but yeah,
capture people's imagination. And then the three D added to

(06:38):
the immersion experience when you actually went and saw it
in the initial three D run or one of the
subsequent three D runs, either in theater or on home
the home video.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
To pick up on your villain or not comment, I
would say Vincent Price is a villain in this, but
he's a tragic villain. It's one of those cases where
you can see how he was made villainous by some
by by having been wronged in the first place.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Right. It's one of the things that makes especially Gothic
horror films more impactful. I mean, it's one of the
reasons that so many of the Paul Nashi Spanish horror
films are so great. It's because you know, there are
obviously budget limitations in those films, and plenty of other
limitations as well. But Nashi loved the gothic horror films.

(07:23):
He loved the monsters that you also felt sympathy for,
that you related to on some level, that had this
outsider status. And so that's very much in play in
this film.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
And while I don't really even mean this as a criticism,
this is one of those films, like some Batman films
in the past, where the villain is really the most
charismatic character on the screen. The villain is in the
sense who the one you have no choice but to
root for, because the villain is Vincent Price and the heroes,

(07:54):
I don't know, or are you going to be like, Wow,
I'm really rooting for the cop who's trying to catch him.
I'm really rooting for Scott the Sculptor.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, Vincent Price had that special kind of energy that
certainly in a film like this, he ends up attracting
all of your sympathy and attention. But even in later
for films we've discussed in the show before, even if
he has a smaller part versus other noteworthy character actors
and horror icons. There's just something about Price that no
one else can can equal. You know, there's a likability

(08:25):
factor there that is missing in some of the even
some of the other greats of the of the era,
you know, like a Christopher Lee or something. You know,
like there's a charm, there's a set. I mean, Christopher
Lee had his own charm, his own charisma going on.
But Price had something a little special.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Well, even as Prince Prospero in the Mask of the
Red Death or he is an utterly satanic, aristocratic torturer,
he just kind of can't help but like him absolutely.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Now. That documentary House of Wax unlike anything you've seen before,
great job breaking down the picture's place in cinema history
and includes some great interview clips from the likes of
Martin Scorsese, who holds this up as one of the
greatest three D pictures ever made. Rick Baker, of course,
the special effects makeup Wizard, Wes Craven, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen,

(09:17):
and also Victoria Price and surprises Doctor and I think
some of the key facts that they drive home about
three D in this film from the documentary are as follows. So,
first of all, this was produced to this film nineteen
fifty three. House of Wax was produced during a time
in which city audiences were moving out to the suburbs

(09:38):
away from the big theaters, and on top of that,
more people were staying home to watch things on TV.
So three D in this case was the big studio gamble,
in this case from Warner Brothers, to get people back
in the theater, give them a well funded, artistically solid,
technologically groundbreaking, full color gothic horror picture.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
To give them something they could not get on the
TV set at home.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Right, Yeah, and you know, this is something that theaters
would come back to and continue to do and have
done in recent years as well. In this case in
fifty three, it absolutely worked. This film was a big hit.
It ushered in a three D boom that would prove
profitable for according to the documentary, at least a year
and a half. So even then it's still kind of
a flash in the pan, but enough for some films

(10:28):
to come in to make some money, and then it,
you know, three D dies back down again, but comes
back up in the seventies and the eighties, et cetera. Now,
this was also the first three D film with stereophonic
sound to be presented in a regular theater, and in
regular we'll put an asterix by that. And it was
also the first color three D feature film from a
major American studio. The sound on This Baby was supposedly

(10:52):
amazing if you saw it in the right theater. It
even had its own screen track that was projected from
the back of the theater, which I can kind of
imagine what that was like. But the way they were
describing it is that like it made any screams in
the film like throw you off a little bit more
just because of the way the sound was orchestrated.

Speaker 3 (11:12):
It sounds like it's coming from some like the audience
behind you or something. Yeah, Vincent Price is in the theater.
That almost sounds like a William Castle kind of gimmick.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Sometimes Vincent Price was in the theater, According to way
too much, But yeah, a couple of interviews I think
I think this is one from his daughter pointed out
that as this was showing in New York City, he
was in a play in New York and he would
sometimes go to the theater to see how people were reacting,
and something he enjoyed doing was was seating himself behind

(11:45):
some like it, like a pair of young women who
were watching the show and were, you know, freaking out
at all the scares. And then afterwards he would lean
forward and say did you enjoy it? And and freak
them out. So sometimes you got that additional level of
three D.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
Oh that's so good. Oh hey, listeners, were you in
the theater in nineteen fifty three and startled by Vincent
Price in person?

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Right in? If so, certainly I'd love to hear from
anyone who has experiences from watching you know, yeah, anybody
saw any of these three D films back in the fifties,
definitely right in, but also subsequent generations of three D.
They also included a lot of technical information about it
that I found really interesting. So this shoot. The shoot

(12:31):
for this film utilized Julian and Milton Gunsberg's Natural Vision
three D system, the same one that was used for
Buana Devil in fifty two. This is one that we
actually referenced this briefly in the last episode because Ebert
alluded to it as being like a very gimmicky, throw
stuff at the camera sort of three D picture. Anyway,

(12:54):
the rig for this involved two cameras aimed at each
other with mirrors then positioned at around the distance of
human eyes facing forward towards what you're filming. And this
was like a big rig. You can look up images
of it. It's a monster of a like a double camera.
And then in theaters you had to have two projectors

(13:15):
going at once, each projecting one of these two reels
of film the resulting film of course, after editing and
so forth. Scorsese commented on just how complex in the documentary,
commented on just how complex this was for projectionists because
if you had you had an air occur on one projector,
then you had to stop the other, and then you

(13:35):
had to make sure they were syncing up, because, according
to Scorsese, was just absolutely brain breaking to watch if
you got those two reels out of sync. And of
course the audience was wearing glasses for all.

Speaker 3 (13:46):
Of this, watching the movie in double but one is
like a half second behind the other. That's hilarious.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah. Now. House of Wax was later reissued in nineteen
seventy one using Chris Condon's single strips stereo vision three
D format, and the film is very well shot, makes
great use of depth that you can certainly get just
watching the film in two D, but was apparently even
more impressive than three D. And yeah, it gets a

(14:13):
little gimmicky in a few places. They don't completely they're
not too good for three D. They embrace the spectacle
of three D where appropriate, incorporating three D elements where appropriate.
But more than anything, they use the three D as
an immersive element of the cinematic storytelling. All right, Joe,

(14:33):
what's the elevator pitch for this one? What do you got?

Speaker 3 (14:36):
All right? Vincent Price plays Professor Henry Jared, a man
who renders exquisitely beautiful in lifelike sculptures of the human
form in wax. But when his artworks are destroyed in
a fire by a scheming business partner, a disfigured and
devastated Jared emerges from the ashes to turn his genius

(14:58):
to the domains of exploitation and revenge and murder.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
All right, we're going to listen to just a little
tiny bit of this trailer. But this is one of
those trailers that features no voiceover, no dialogue, no sound
from the film, just music, and not even pictures or
images from the film, just some cards that come up
that say you heard about it, and then you take
that in you read about it, and then you take

(15:24):
that in you may even think you've seen it, and
that I think maybe an allusion to the fact that
this is a remake, and we'll get into that in
a bit. But anyway, it goes on and on. Let's
just hear just a little bit of that music, all right,

(16:05):
all right, that's enough. That's enough. That's all you need
to hear.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
What were people reading about this movie in nineteen fifty three?
Were they actually like reading the reviews in the newspapers?

Speaker 1 (16:14):
I guess, I guess you know they're reading the newspapers.
They're getting excited about about this film. I mean, you know,
lord knows Warner Brothers was promoting it, trying to get
people excited coming back to their theaters.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
So yeah, there wasn't like a fangoria blog in nineteen
fifty three.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
All right, where is this playing? If you want to
go out and watch it before listening to the rest
of this episode, Well, it's highly available to rent or
stream digitally, and I think it's streaming on Turner Classic
Movies service. I honestly, I didn't think they even had
a service, but they do apparently based on what I
was looking at the Blu ray for this is great,
but as we'll discuss, the tragedy is that this film

(16:56):
was made to be experienced in three D in the theater,
and it's just not an option for most viewers of
the film today. Luckily, as we've been saying, it's still
very enjoyable and historically important regardless of how you're seeing it,
So it totally holds up into V and it's a
lot of fun. All right, Well, let's get into the

(17:21):
cast and crew behind this picture. First of all, at
the top directing it is Andre de Toff, who lived
nineteen thirteen through two thousand and two.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
Now that name has come up on Weird House Cinema before,
but not as a director from what I recall.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
No, he has a brief cameo in Wes Craven's Spontaneous
Combustion from nineteen ninety starring Brad Doriff that we watched
on the show Wes Craven.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
Wait a minute, Spontaneous Combustion was Toby Hooper?

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Wasn't. Oh I'm sorry, I'm sorry Toby Hooper. I think
I threw me off. Because of course, Wes Craven is
in that documentary. Toby Hooper directed Spontaneous Combustion.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
Yes, the movie about spontaneous combustion, where where Brad Doura
shoots fire out of his eyes and out of his hands.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, but obviously Toby Hooper, I think what we're going
to take from all of this is he would have
been a fan of this movie as well. This was
a movie that cast a long shadow and influenced a
lot of the people that would go on to be
subsequent generations of horror film makers. So Andre de Taff
was a Hungarian American director who was of solid hand

(18:27):
in the Warner Brothers system. He'd been directing since nineteen
thirty nine, and I believe he'd worked mostly on thrillers, dramas,
general action pictures, you know, some Westerns and so forth.
But again solid hand, very technically proficient, and this would,
I believe, be the only horror film he'd ever direct.
He later served as second unit director on seventy eight, Superman,

(18:48):
nineteen sixty five, Thunderball. In nineteen sixty two's Lawrence of Arabia.
It's often pointed out that Detov had only one eye.
He wore an eye patch. Most images you look up
of him are going to be him wearing an eye patch,
so that means that he himself could not see in
three dimensions. He couldn't see in three D, but he
had a great head for optics and cinema, so it

(19:09):
was hardly a limiting factor. Now. Interestingly enough, the studio
Warner Brothers asked the tok not to wear his eye
patch while working on and later promoting the picture because
they didn't want the public to think about their big
three D film that was going to revitalize everything, as
they didn't want them to associate it with a one
eyed man. That's mean. Yeah, and from what they said

(19:32):
in the documentary to tot was in general not the
sort of guy that would normally have put up with
this kind of request. But he apparently agreed. He didn't
wear the eye patch because he just he really wanted
to make the picture and realized that he needed, I
guess to play Paul with Warner Brothers on this one thing.
But he, yeah, he really believed in the picture. He
believed in the three D. They said that later he

(19:55):
would sometimes he would go to screenings of the picture.
You know, I guess you know they're promoting like the
director will be there, and he would threaten to leave.
He'd threatened to get on a flight and go home
immediately if he found out that they weren't showing it
in three dimensions.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
So he's committed. I thought you were going to say
that the studio was afraid if people saw him with
the eyepatch, that they would worry that watching a movie
in three D would make them lose sight in one eye.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Huh, Yeah, I don't know. I've never seen any scare
tactics about three D, certainly from William Castle. It's hew
plenty of scare tactics about just how frightening a movie
could be. It may kill you, but not so much
put an eye on.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
I dare you to see my movie, you will probably
be dead, all right.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
The screenplay for this one was from Crane Wilbur who
lived eighteen eighty six through nineteen seventy three, early twentieth
century actor turned writer. His other films on which he
wrote included nineteen forty eighth Cannon City, fifty nine's The Bat,
thirty six's The Devil on Horseback, nineteen fifties Outside the Wall,
fifty three's Crime Away that was also directed by t
Toaf and nineteen fifty four is The Mad Magician, which

(21:01):
was a Vincent Price three D kind of a follow
up to this picture from another studio, but it's in
black and white. It's supposed to be fun as well.
Wilber also wrote nineteen sixty two's Mysterious Island.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
I don't want to be too harsh, because I'd say
this is a pretty good script for nineteen fifty three,
but it has a common, i would say, a problem
that is fairly common too horror movies from the fifties,
which is that the good characters aren't super interesting. So
like Sue and Scott and the police, basically all of
the people you're supposed to be rooting for are you know,

(21:35):
they're fine, but like the real character interest is in
the villains exactly now.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
The story credit for this one goes to Charles Belden,
who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen fifty four. Screenwriter
who is pretty active in the forties and fifties, but
his story credit on this and also on related wax movies,
is what he's best remembered for. His original story was
adapted into nineteen thirty threes Mystery of the Wax Museum.
This was a follow up to a film we watched

(22:04):
on the show for Weird House Cinema a while back,
Doctor X, starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Ray. This also
starred Lionel Atwill and Fey Ray, with Atwill playing the
wax Master, the Vincent Price role, but with a different name.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Oh I'm sorry, I was just looking something up, but
I'm a little confused because I did not recall Lionel
Atwill's character surviving at the end of Doctor X.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
It's not the same character. It's more of a you know,
don't think of it as sequel, but just like a
follow up where they were like, hey, you guys really
made a great kind of modern feeling, two tone technicolor
gothic horror story here, but with again with modern elements
to it. Let's have another slice of that. What can
you dish up for us? And they ended up doing
Mystery of the Wax Museum and it was also directed

(22:51):
by the same director, Michael Curtis.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
Okay, so Doctor X it had a wax theme, but
I from what I recall, it was only as like
the twist at the end that you found out about
this so called synthetic flesh that was more or less
used like the wax, like the wax that Vincent Price
uses in this movie exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah, so there's some similar The synthetic flash is definitely
a common element of both pictures. A Mystery of the
Wax Museum is a gorgeous looking two tone technicol or
gothic horror film has some great horror elements in it.
A number of the best moments in this film are

(23:31):
kind of just direct remakes of what occurred in that movie,
but it also has some really rough dialogue moments and
darker plot elements that absolutely wouldn't have flown in the
nineteen fifties, and some of these elements wouldn't fly to
get today either for good reason. So nineteen fifty three's
House of Wax is a remake and kind of a reminder.
As tired as we get of remakes, sometimes they can

(23:55):
be great. Sometimes they can improve upon and redefine that
previous film. And it's a fairly blow for blow for
blow remake as I remember, though, without the drugs, strong
necrophilia vibes and casual racism of the previous nineteen thirties film. Okay,
both films inspired a whole subgenre of wax movies, and

(24:17):
this film, A House of Wax was very loosely, very
loosely remade in two thousand and five as House of Wax.
Belden retained a story credit on that film, but it
is otherwise, it's a completely different thing, nothing to do
with this picture or the nineteen thirties picture written by
the screenwriters behind the Conjuring franchise man.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
The two thousand and five House of Wax is rough.
I tried to rewatch that a few years ago when
we did our Core episode about Wax, where we talked
very briefly about this movie we're looking at today. You
deserve a prize if you can sit through the two
thousand and five movie. It is rough.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
I think, as I said before, one of the things is,
you've got to have a compelling wax master character. You've
got to have somebody in there playing the Vincent Price role.
And if you don't, what are you doing? What are
you doing doubling down on victim characters in your wax movie.
I don't know how much of it we can really
blame on the screenwriters here, How much of it is
the director for how much of It is just like

(25:19):
that's what people wanted or the studios thought people wanted
in two thousand and five.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, I think two thousand and five is the beginning
of the torture porn era. It's like Saw had come
out and people were into that, and people wanted, like,
I don't know, that vibe of the mid two thousand's
horror movie It was like you wanted a kind of queasy, gross,
fluorescent lit scenes of like slick surfaces gleaming with blood

(25:48):
and bodies just being mutilated and while people scream. It
was a bad time for horror.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, but again, wax what these wax movies highly influential.
We could easily just do wax museum movies for like,
you know, a good couple of months, maybe three months,
if we so desired. All right, let's get to the
star here. Vincent Price, playing Professor Henry Jared Price lived
nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety three Horror Icon. This is

(26:16):
I believe, our fourth Vincent Price film, as we previously
discussed seventy one's The Abominable Doctor Fibes nineteen seventy Scream
and Scream Again in nineteen sixty four is The Mask
of the Red Death. So we're not going to really
retread a lot of what we talked about. There is
basic history, except to say that this film is extremely
pivotal to Vincent Price's career. Prior to House of Wax,

(26:38):
he was not an actor associated with horror films. He
was like an occasional leading man, but mostly he did
secondary roles. He was, you know, he was a very
tall man. He was certainly handsome, so he was often
pushed in the leading man direction. But I think it's
like nothing like completely clicked there.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
Let's see, what have we talked about the Vincent Price
I did before this. We certainly looked at his role
as the narrator of the nineteen forty nine TV adaptation
of Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol, which is twenty five
minutes long. It's called the Christmas Carol, and it was
a half hour television special presented by the Magnavox Corporation.

(27:19):
And it's let's just say that was not using Vincent
Price to the fullest extent of his talents.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, and I think even you think of like nineteen
fifties leading men too, it's like, would you want Price
to play those roles. I think clearly Price had more
to offer because most of those leading man roles in
the nineteen fifties is just not that interesting. With a
few exceptions, I mean, you did have some standout stars,
but generally they're not in the movies we watched for
Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
Yeah, a lot of the like horror and sci fi
movies in the fifties, the quote hero often has very
little personality. He's just there to kind of be like
strong and good and punch the bad guy at the end.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, and to absolutely conform. So yeah. The other really
interesting thing that I wasn't up on this particular history
until I watched that documentary, and a lot of this
came from his daughter, is that prior to this film,
he was on the Hollywood Gray List. So we've talked
about the Blacklist before because it ended up impacting a
number of different filmmakers and actors, often leading them into

(28:21):
being in films that we watched in Weird House Cinema,
or even just completely destroying their career as they were
at the very least accused of being Communist sympathizers the
gray List, which I was not familiar with. This is
a list. You were put on if you were automatically
you were if you opposed the Nazis before World War Two.

(28:41):
They interpreted that as being well, they're possibly a communist,
so let's go ahead and put them on the list.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah. I think the historical term I've heard used to
refer to this as premature anti fascist, like that you
were against the fascists before the US government had essentially
given mission to be against fascism.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yeah. So obviously confusing and illogical in many ways, but
very much a real thing at the time, to the
point that Price was apparently very concerned that his career
was over, that he was never going to work again.
He'd certainly seen plenty of his contemporaries ruined in Hollywood
by this point because of the blacklist. But as it

(29:23):
worked out, he ended up some FBI people came to
his house, he had to sign some documentation, and after
that he ended up having his name cleared, And once
he was cleared, he got offered two projects. One was
a play and one was House of Wax. He ended
up going with House of Wax, and it just revitalized
his career and began his emergence as a new horror Icon.

(29:44):
Without House of Wax, who's to say we'd be talking
about Vincent Price today.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
Well, I'm certainly glad we got all of these wonderful
Vincent Price films because he hit it big with this one.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, all right. Our leading lady here is Sue Alan
or Sue Allen's the character played by Phyllis Kirk, who
lived nineteen twenty seven three two thousand and six. Her
other big film from the same year is nineteen fifty
three's Crime Wave, also directed by de Toaf. She did
a lot of TV, including an episode of the classic
Twilight Zone series, and she starred along Peter Lawford on

(30:18):
TV's The Thin Man. They played Nick and Nora Charles, respectively, investigators.
This show was based, like the nineteen thirty four film
on the work of DASHL. Hammett, and the Nick and
Nora glasses that some of you may have in your
cupboard are named for these characters. I use my Nick
and Nora glass just the other night.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
I have no idea what that is.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
Okay, you're familiar with the coop glass, right, Oh?

Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yes, like for cocktails or champagne.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, so imagine a coop glass that's a little more
narrow and a little less spillable, a little more petite,
and that's a Nick and Nora glass. I'm a big
fan of them because I found that, Yeah, I find
they're less spillable than a Coop glass, but they have
the same feel, and they're great for a like a
non iced cockedil like it's great for something like a Manhattan.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
Okay, I had no idea what that was called, but
I've had drinks and restaurants in these Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, nice little glass I like. All right, So that's Sue.
Sue is our main female character, but then she has
a friend in the movie named Kathy Kathy Gray. Kathy
Gray is played by Carolyn Jones, who lived nineteen thirty
through nineteen eighty three. Her character doesn't stick around long,
but she gives us the real bubbly, fun loving blonde

(31:30):
performance as the doomed Kathy, and she would go on
to play a supporting role in nineteen fifty six is
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he's best well known
for playing more Titia Adams on TVs. The Adams Family
in the mid nineteen sixties.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
You know, I almost wish they had swapped the roles here.
Not that it really would have worked, because I can
tell what they were going for with the character of Sue,
and Phyllis Kirk fits that. But Carolyn Jones is so
much fun and it's sad that her character gets waxed
too early in this film because she's got great screen presence,
and it does a very funny combination of kind of yeah,

(32:08):
like you said, on one hand, this bubbly party girl mentality,
but she also has a very cynical edge that I liked.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, and this movie, at least for the most part,
I don't know to what extent they You know, certainly
in the Night By the nineteen eighties we've talked about
how like the good girl becomes our hero and the
bad girl is punished. I didn't get that as much
from this film that that Sue I did. You did, well,
let's say it wasn't as pronounced, you know, like she was.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
Wait a minute, I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstand you. You mean,
like you don't get the sense that the movie, the
ethic of the movie is that, Wow, Kathy really got
what was coming to her. It's just like it is
tragic that she was killed, right, Like, oh yeah, yeah,
totally Okay, it's not that it's like a film of
vengeful conservative morality like you might perceive in some slash movies.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Right. There may be. I think there's probably some of
that leeching in sort of indirectly from the general culture,
but it's not it's not sharpened in the script to
the degree that it is in later films. So and
I appreciated that.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Yeah, agreed. So.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Joneses also had a small part in the Man Who
Knew Too Much from fifty six. She had a small
part in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat from fifty three,
and she played Marcia, Queen of Diamonds on the nineteen
sixties Batman series. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
Like I said, Carolyn Jones is great in this. I
wish her character had been alive longer, and I you know,
she's almost still kind of funny as a wax figure
later in the movie.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, all right, I'm gonna skip most of the male
good guys here because again, they're not that interesting. Maybe
we'll come back to Frank Lovejoy and Paul Piccorini in
later films, but we'll refer to their characters. But I
just wasn't that interested, especially when we've got Egor to
talk about. Igor was played by Charles Bucchinski, who would

(33:59):
later be known as Charles Bronson, who of nineteen twenty
one through two thousand and three.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
He made a death wish to be in this horror
film and it was granted. And wow, his muscles.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Okay, Yeah, he has a strapping dude in this This
is Bronson pre mustache and also pre Bronson because he
didn't start using that name until nineteen fifty four. And yeah,
he's he's he's very muscular. He doesn't talk, he plays
his character is supposed to be a death mute. He's
also extremely grappily. He keeps getting into scrapes with people,

(34:33):
with the cops, with our heroes, and he goes right
for the grapple.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Even in his non threatening scenes in this movie. He's
one of those people who just has kind of a
threatening posture like his his arms are always kind of
bent in such a way, kind of like a wrestler's stance,
like he might spring out to grab you at any moment.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah, which is it's interesting because it's a total different
physical energy compared to what we I think most people
afy with Charles Bronson from his later career where he's
kind of a you know, kind of a cool, tough guy, a.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Guy who will sit there with an expressionless face until
he suddenly shoots you exactly.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah. So yeah. He went on to be a big
action star in the sixties and seventies, especially thanks to
films like Once Upon a Time in the West, The
Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Mechanic,
and of course the Death Wish franchise. All Right, we
talked about the ping pong Guy earlier, the paddless Man, Yeah,
paddleball Man. In the credits, he's referred to as the

(35:32):
Barker because his job is to be outside of the
wax Museum, getting people excited bringing him in. He's a
carnival barker played by Reggie Rymahl who lived nineteen twenty
one through two thousand and two. He was a stand
up comedian of the day who specialized in ping pong
gags with little paddle balls, you know, on the elastic string.
He performed on The Steve Allen Show, The Eddie Cantor Show,

(35:56):
and you asked for it, But this is what he's
best remembered for, and he gets a lot of screen time.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Yeah, I would say, Reggie Raimol probably has more words
of dialogue in this movie than like Scott the Sculptor,
who is ostensibly like the male hero.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Yeah, so yeah, we'll come back to him in a bit,
all right. The music on this one is from David Buttoff,
who lived nineteen oh two through nineteen eighty three, prolific
composer who also did Hitchcock's Rope in forty eight. The
Beast from twenty thousand Fathoms and fifty three and nineteen
thirty nine is the Gorilla all right now. Gordon Bow,
who lived nineteen oh seven through nineteen seventy five, has

(36:39):
makeup credit on this, but the fantastic makeup the monster
makeup that Price is actually wearing is apparently the work
uncredited of his brother George Bow, who lived nineteen oh
five through nineteen seventy four. George Bow was a materials
innovator who developed a bow foam, which was first used
in nineteen thirty nine s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

(37:00):
Gordon Bal his brother worked on a ton of films
and doing makeup, including It's a Wonderful Life, revel Without
a Cause, the three D picture dial m for Murder,
Dirty Harry Them, and the Omega Man just to name
a few.

Speaker 3 (37:14):
Very solid makeup in this movie.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Absolutely, and I love the Yeah, the coloration. It has
this kind of a purplish effect, so the purples and
pinks that kind of match up with the pink wax
we see later. So it's grotesque but also grotesque in
a way. And I don't know how much of this
was intended, but it like it doesn't feel completely realistic.
I think they were maybe going for realism, but like

(37:39):
it doesn't feel I don't know. Somehow it doesn't feel
as exploitive. I don't know if that makes sense. Like
it's a different energy than say a Freddy Krueger makeup. Yeah, anyway.
Final note, Robert Burks, who lived nineteen oh nine through
nineteen sixty eight, Hitchcock's favorite cinematographer, worked on this picture uncredited,
along with the credited cinemaographers Burke Glennon who lived eighteen

(38:01):
ninety three through nineteen sixty seven, and Jay Peverell Marley
who lived nineteen oh one through nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
All Right, are we ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, let's get into it.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
So I really love the title shot. It really lets
you know what kind of movie it's going to be.
So you have a background that's a damp, dismal street
corner in New York around the turn of the century.
There are rain soaked cobblestones and bricks that are reflecting
the kind of measly light from a pair of street lamps.
The scene is very dark blue and gray. But then

(38:42):
in the foreground here comes the title House of Wax
in huge, shrieking orange block letter. Is like, uh, I
don't know how to describe this. Like the letters have
the their blocks that have these big amount of that
have depth, like their stamps jutting out of the screen,
and the texture on the front of the letters is
that of melting wax. So the title itself is dripping.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah. Yeah, I love these even watching these and two
D they jump out at you.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Also, they put the title in quotation marks, which I
found funny. I'm not sure why, but it's the so
called House of Wax.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, I mean, when you're using House of Wax fat,
you can disregard some of the other rules regarding punctuation, but.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
The title of a movie is usually underlined or italicized anyway,
rather than putting quotation marks.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
This isn't a poem, yeah, I mean, generally you can
just throw the words up there. You don't need to
worry about anything else, especially if you're using gimmicky letters
like this. I mean, come on.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Anyway, As the credits fade in and out, we watch
the silhouette of a lonely man tramping up the sidewalk
in the rain. And by the way, just throughout the movie,
I do love the nighttime shots of the streets here,
the lonely dark, often foggy, often wet with rain, New
York streets around the turn of the century. It's I

(40:03):
guess these were probably all indoor shots inside a studio,
but they're fantastic.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah, and a lot of these shots apparently you really
got a sense of that depth when you were watching
it in three D.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Anyway, we move inside one of the windows into a
brightly lit interior to immediately see a shadow cast upon
a wall, and it is the shadow of a woman
wearing a bonnet with a knife raised in her hand,
ready to strike. So who's she about to stab? Nobody?
Turns out, We pan over to discover this is not
a living woman about to commit a murder, but a

(40:35):
wax sculpture of a woman wearing the bonnet again and
doing the knife delivery pose. The camera reveals the rest
of the room slowly, and it is full of humanoid
wax sculptures. We see a kind of master of ceremonies
dude wearing a top hat in tails. There's a choir
mistress in red and black tartan. There is a policeman

(40:58):
and a bobby helmet. We see clear Apatra and Mark Antony,
a fancy lady that I think is supposed to be
Marie Antoinette. Oh yeah, this is Marie Antoinette. A scene
of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and then Joan of
arc at the stake, and of the historical figures depicted.
I was noticing immediately that it seems like they're all

(41:20):
people associated with tragic and untimely deaths. And I think
this says something about the cultural understanding of the purpose
of a wax museum, that it is not for effigies
of just any famous person, but there's a particular spirit
of morbid curiosity that we associate with wax. There's kind

(41:42):
of a focus on not just in the chamber of
horror since though that will become a theme in the
movie itself, where you know, you have wax figures for
scenes of torture and execution and all that, but even
when you're not showing torture and execution, you're showing figures
that we remember for the fact that they died young
and tragically.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, with their flesh made hole again and lifelike.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
So finally we arrived at the end of the Great Hall,
and we come to a place that functions as a workshop,
and here is Vincent Price as the character Professor Henry Jared.
He's dressed in a long smock, surrounded by half finished
wax bodies, arms and heads, and he's deep in his work.
He's using his fingers to shape the contours of a

(42:28):
sort of wax of venus on a stand before him.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Yeah, this is essentially the same character played by Atwell
in the original, though that character in the original was
named Ivan Igor, and there was also just again a
lot more of a necrophilia vibe to his obsession with
wax bodies and Vincent prizes. Henry Jared comes off more innocent,
eccentric certainly, but more innocent in his connection to his work. Initially, yes, yeah,

(42:57):
I mean it becomes perverse obviously in Murder beginning, yeah yeah.
But in the beginning, it's just about a man who
is pouring all of his being into these creations and
loves them and has this kind of eccentric relationship with them.
He sees them as his friends, he sees them as

(43:17):
his family.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
So somebody comes in from the rain. It is Matthew Burke,
Jared's business partner, and as soon as he's in the door,
they're at odds about their business situation. So they run
a wax museum together, and Matthew Burke is not happy
with recent ticket returns. He says that, hey, you know
the other wax museums in town. They've got lines around

(43:40):
the block. What's the difference. They've got a chamber of horrors,
so all of their sculptures are about murder, torture, and execution,
and Jared is not interested in that. He says he'd
rather spend his time depicting beauty and figures of historical significance.
He's not going to stoop to slopping out wax gore, which, again,

(44:01):
remembering what we just said, it's kind of funny because
while this. The stuff in his museum is not gory.
It is very focused on people with tragic deaths.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, but he's not pushing it the way his business
partner thinks he should be pushing it, like the gore
should be front and center, and he's like, no, no, no,
the beauty should be front and center, even if I'm
focusing on martyred individuals and tragic figures.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
Yeah. So I guess Matthew here would say like, look,
I want that Joan of Arc to be half burned alive,
you know. I want to see her muscle. I want
to see the blood. So Matthew is not happy. He says,
I've got twenty thousand dollars sunk in this historic peep
show of yours, and I could use that money to
better advantage. But Vincent Price has an ace up his
sleeve here. He says, well, there's a wealthy investor named

(44:46):
Sidney Wallace. He's about to come by, and Jared is
hoping that mister moneybags here might be willing to buy
out Matthew's share of the museum, and this would free
Jared from having to turn the place into hell Raiser
two keep Matthew happy. So Wallace and this other guy
named Bruce show up and Jared starts giving them a
tour of his artworks. But in doing so he does

(45:09):
start making these eccentric comments, like he calls his sculptures
his children, and he says, to you they are wax,
but to me their creator, they live and breathe. He
explains a bit about how he makes them. He presses
the hair into the wax heads with a scalpel, one
hair at a time, he says, and they're they're like
looking at the Cleopatra scene and I think it's Bruce

(45:31):
who's getting a little too excited about the Cleopatra sculpture.
And then Jared shows off the Lincoln assassination scene. He says,
he calls it quote one of my few concessions to
the macabre. And then Wallace looks at it. He says,
why is the best John Wilkes booth I've ever seen?
And it's like, what, how many is he seen? Or
there are there like assassin waxes all over the town.

(45:54):
I guess maybe all the museums have a booth.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah, he travel around. You go to New City, you
want to see whether John Wilkes booth looks like at
their local wax museum.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
Oh. But but then in explaining the scene, Jared gets into, oh,
the booth sculpture was very stubborn. I kept arguing with
him while he was being crafted, and he didn't want
to do what I wanted him to do. And they're like,
do you mean he talked back to you? And he says,
of course, what do you expect from an actor? And
then finally onto Joan of Arc, Jared's well, i'd say

(46:27):
one of his two favorite subjects. Marie Antoinette and Joan
of Arc are his favorites.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
I think.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
He says that he has remade the scene many times now,
and he explains the reason there is no authentic portrait
of Joan, so he has to work from living models
and he's never found the model to give him the
perfect face of the saint, but he's sure he will
one day. Oh and also just they also have a
conversation about the Marie Antoinette figure and at one point

(46:53):
he's he's saying that her eyes are made of glass,
and he says, the exact size and color of the original.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
I guess the same size as the original eyes or
just sort of human eyes. I don't know, I don't
know comment that was odd.

Speaker 3 (47:09):
But anyway, after the tour, Walla Wallace is interested in
buying out Matthew's stake in the museum, but first he
has to go do excavations in Egypt for three months,
so he's going to be off grave robbing. But when
he returns he will be perhaps willing to invest in
the museum. So Wallace and Bruce leave and Jared gets
back to talking to the wax babies. He's you know,

(47:31):
oh Marie Antoinette, my beloved, did you hear them acknowledge
your beauty? And meanwhile, Matthew, the business partner, has been
lurking around this whole time, and he comes out of
an adjacent room and Jared expects him to be happy,
but he's like, sorry, I can't wait three months. I
need money now. So his plan is that the Wax

(47:52):
Museum is insured for twenty five thousand dollars. He says,
let's burn it down and claim the insurance check. Of course,
Jared is scandalized. He's like, burn my children alive. That's murder.
I won't do it, and I'll kill you if you try.
But Matthew does not stop to discuss. He just starts
lighting matches and setting wax people on fire.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
This is pretty much exactly how it goes down in
the original film as well. It is not premeditated Arson.
It's just like, hey, let's do Arson. I think that's
the way to go. Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
I'm doing it now, no time to argue. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
So they get into a fistfight, but Vincent Price is
bested and he gets knocked out I think twice in
this sequence.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, there's a lot of punching going on. And I
believe it was Wes Craven in the documentary who pointed
out that it looks like Vincent Price is doing a
lot of his own stunts and also doing them really
close to open flames. So Craven was kind of like
he was like flinching a little. It's like, Oh, it's
a director, you know this is You're kind of like, wow,
they really they were really going for it here.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
There is another scene later in the movie where where
the Vincent Price character does like a swing on a
rope across an alleyway top and it looks like it's
really him.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Yeah, I wonder how much of that is just sort
of this is just how you did it at the time,
and how much of it too is just like Price
coming out of this grayless scare, realizing that this is
perhaps his big chance to get back on top of
things and just going just all in on it, just
doing everything he can.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Well, he does really go for it. But so in
this scene, Matthew Knock's Jared unconscious leaves him for dead
as the Palace of Wax burns, and we here get
to see this is something that I think is common
to most wax horror movies. There is the Palace of
Wax burns, and we watch all of the wax figures
burning and melting in a revolting manner, and it really

(49:40):
does look gross. Presumably I was thinking about why this is,
and I think it's because the sort of fat like
composition of wax somewhat resembles what we imagine it would
look like for flesh and adipose tissue to burn. But
we get horrifying shots of wax faces kind of softening
and then scorching and trickling away down the chin of

(50:01):
the mold, and it just makes me think about how
there's a reason wax museums keep occurring as a setting
for horror movies, and those movies always involve a tragic
inferno where the wax faces milt. It's just an inherently
disgusting and disturbing visual texture.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Absolutely, So the museum burns. We see Price wake up
and run through an interior doorway, though it's not initially
clear whether he dies in the fire or escapes. And
then the fire department arrives. A horse drawn fire engine
comes clattering up the street to put out the blaze.
And I thought this was a very cool historical set piece.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
Yeah, it really drives home the historic gothic feel of
the picture.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
So later I guess this is taken to be weeks later,
we are at some I don't know. The setting here
is horrible. It's like this insipid promenade where this repetitive
music is playing. We see a banner somewhere that says
Weber's Hoffbrow And Matthew Burke is there, the scheming business
partner who set fire to the wax museum. He is

(51:04):
there with his fiance talking about his dear departed friend,
Professor Jared and his fiance. Here is Carolyn Jones playing
Kathy Gray. Now Matthew is describing his dear departed friend,
Professor Jared. He says, you know, oh, he was a
great artist. Only I could understand him. We were like this,
And his fiance says, did they ever find him after

(51:26):
the fire? And she's doing I would call it a
Betty Boop voice, very much a baby voice.

Speaker 1 (51:33):
I agree.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Matthew says, nope, no sign of him. Place went up
like a volcano. Maybe he was reduced to unrecognizable ash.
And he says, if only I had been there, I
might have saved him. And Carolyn Jones says, oh, but Maddie,
then you might have been burned up too. So at
very first, it seems like this character played by Carolyn
Jones is supposed to be kind of naive and dumb.

(51:56):
But then she looks away from Maddie and she kind
of gets a twinkle in her eye, and she says,
was there any insurance on the place? So I think
she's actually angling for that sweet cash, just as much
as Matthew is.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Of course, it worth mentioning she does not know the
true horror of what happened there. She doesn't know that
that he's a murderer, right.

Speaker 3 (52:18):
She doesn't know about that, But she does want the money,
and Matthew's like, well, there's a problem. The insurance was
hesitant to pay out because they couldn't verify whether Jared
was alive or dead, and Cathy says, yeah, they always
want a corpse giggle. But then it seems like the
insurance check finally just came through today. So Matthew is

(52:40):
he has possession of the money, and Kathy is positively
cooing and twittering about this, and he says, where would
you like to go? Atlantic City? But she wants to
go to Niagara Falls to get married. She says, you know,
make it legitimate, and I laughed out loud at Matthew's
reaction to this. He gets very kind of somber and
he's like, check please. Yeah. But later that night, Matthew

(53:03):
returns to his office alone and we see him go
into this lonely building, this empty office at night, and
retrieve some money from his safe. But as he's doing so,
a black gloved hand reaches up over the back of
the sofa in his office, and a shadowy figure emerges,
a man dressed in all black with a wide brimmed

(53:26):
black hat and a face scarred beyond recognition and I
don't know if there's supposed to be any mystery about
who it is at this point, but obviously it's Jared.
Who else would it be?

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Yeah, and it man Again. The makeup is just impressive.
They do some great stuff with not only you know,
layering on too Vincent Price's face, but also keeping Vincent
Price recognizable through the makeup, but also distorting his natural
features a little bit, like pulling his lip down on
one side I think he has later we see that

(53:58):
in like one of his ears, this kind of pin
back as well. Great makeup. You can't fault them for
showing it a lot. And early in the picture, right.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
So he creeps up on Matthew, he dims the lamp
on the wall, and then he pounces and strangles Matthew
with the length of rope, and then we see the
figure creeping away from the scene of the crime. You
think he's running away, but no, he is staging a
crime scene. Instead, he secures a rope to an elevator
shaft and then drops Matthew's body to make it look
like a suicide. So you would think at this point, okay,

(54:31):
Vincent Price's revenge checklist complete, Like it seems like, this
revenge plot would have taken the whole movie, but no,
it is done within twenty minutes. So what is the
rest of the drama going to consist of?

Speaker 1 (54:43):
Yeah, that's right, Doctor Fibes would have taken up the
entire length of the film trying to pull off this
level of completion with his revenge.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Well, let's check in with Mattie's fiance Kathy and her
roommate Sue. So again, it's funny because while Carolyn Jones
did the Betty Boop voice for Matthew, she comes off
as savvy and even cynical when talking with Sue. So
she's no longer playing at naive and she's talking to
her roommate Sue, and Sue is Phyllis Kirk and she's like, well,

(55:14):
you know, Maddie was going to marry me, so I
thought I could get my hands on that insurance money,
but he's dead. Lol. Anyway, I've got a new date
tonight and he's real handsome and he's a free spender. Meanwhile,
Kathy is like bracing against a door frame while Sue
pulls her course at laces tighter, and Kathy's very excited

(55:35):
about about her new bow again, he's you know, he's
he's a free spender. He's going to take her to
a place called the Hoffman House for dinner, and then
to quote Tony Pastors for the vaudeville show, which I
don't know. That doesn't sound like a cheap date. Does
sound like he's pay he's paying up to go to
the nice places.

Speaker 1 (55:52):
But when we do see the vaudeville show, it's another Again.
I think it's a three D showcase. We get that
three D code approved to it, pushed at the camera,
like the what do you call the sort of pants
that they're wearing with all the ruffles.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
The ruffel pants underneath the dress. I don't know what.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
Yeah all that. Yeah, sots are really nuns and pantaloons. Yeah,
not even remotely riskue by modern modern standards. But I
guess this is a slightly risky moment in this film.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
Well, we don't see it in this scene. We see
it later when hilariously Scott takes Sue there to take
her mind off the fact that she is being chased
by a melted man. Yeah, but we learn a bit
here about Kathy and Sue's relationships, So the dynamic seems
to be that Kathy is. She has an active social life,
ended nose for money, she's trying to marry rich, whereas

(56:45):
Sue seems very modest and she's kind of a homebody.
And if this movie were set one hundred years later,
I think Sue would be a nerd with glasses. Who doesn't,
you know, take her glasses off. Until the scene in
the third act where she's modeling to be Marie Antoinette
or something.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
Yeah, but you definitely get the vibe here that they're
both doing what they can to scrap, buy and make
it in a man's world.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
That's right. And you know what, I liked their relationship.
They're good friends and they take care of each other.
Kathy says, you know, we're so different. You've got the brains,
and what I've got is well what I've got. And
so Sue has in this at the beginning here come
on hard time. She's out of work and out of money,
and Kathy's helping her out. She right before she leaves

(57:27):
for the date, she gives her the last fifty cents
in her purse to buy some supper and says, I
don't need any mad money. I never get mad. So
later that night, Sue comes home after trying to get
a job as a hat check attendant working under some
tyrannical theater manager. That doesn't work out. She doesn't get
the job. We don't see that scene, but we get
the impression that it's because the theater manager is a

(57:48):
creep and Sue wouldn't put up with it and just left.
So Sue's trying to sneak up to her room, but
the land lady of their building is posted like a
century She's waiting in the parlor to demand immediately, like
you cannot stay here tonight unless you give me the rent.
And I think Sue was waiting for Kathy to get
back from her date with some money so she could

(58:09):
so that could she could borrow it from her, so
that could be the rent.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
I think, mm hmm, yeah, I believe that was the arrangement.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Yeah, yeah, So Sue goes up to the room to
see if she can borrow the money, but instead Kathy
is dead. She finds Kathy murdered in her room, and
then she is startled by a terrifying melted man in black,
the same man we saw killing Matthew Burke, and a
chase scene follows I would say, very good tense chase scene.
Sue escapes out the window and onto the streets below,

(58:37):
and then the melted man in black runs after her,
and they're chasing through this maze of alley ways in
a foggy night. Sue barely escapes, making it to the
home of a friend, a sculptor named Scott Andrews who
lives with his mother. Again thumbs up to the chase scene.
I love the street sets.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Yeah, yeah, the great, great, great streets they create here, dark, gothic, wonderful.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
So police investigators the next day arrive at the scene
of Kathy's murder, or maybe it's later that night, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
They show up and they're trying to figure out what's
going on at the morgue. They determined the cause of
death with strangulation, and they determined that she had been drugged,
probably in a drink beforehand.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
Hmm.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
It makes you wonder who her date was with was
the date involved in the murder, but we assume also
that her date was not with the melted Vincent Price
because she says the guy she was going out with
was very handsome.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
Yeah, they never really tell us one way or another.
I guess, if I had to try and put it
together in my head, I guess maybe one of Vincent
Price's two underlings that we meet later.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Or it could be Vincent Price with the wax face
we see him with later.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
I guess you'd think the cops would figure this out, though, like,
who is she saying? This is not a police procedural,
So if we don't even go down this direction anyway.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
At the MO there is some comic relief with the orderlies,
and there's one point where they're in the room with
all of the bodies and one of the corpses pops
up under the sheet, but the orderly is like, ah, yeah,
they do that sometimes it's the embalming fluid. But no,
after they leave, it pops up again and it is
not the embalming fluid. It is our melted assailant pretending

(01:00:21):
to be a corpse.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
This whole sequence plays out pretty much exactly like it
does in the original picture, and in the original picture
also just a very haunting scene of the of the morgue,
So yeah, they recreate it well, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
But he locates the body of Kathy Gray and he
proceeds to steal it from the morgue. He lowers the
body out the window to a couple of co conspirators
waiting below, who are also dressed in dark cloaks and hats.
And I did laugh here because the fake body prop
they use for the rope lowering is very stiff and
obviously very light. Later, Sue and her friend Scott and

(01:00:59):
Scott's mother are at the police station being interrogated, and
the interrogation consists of the police asking things like, quote,
are you sure you didn't imagine all of it? And
also they tell her it is impossible for a human
being to look the way you described. Oh, and we
find out in the scene that the body of Matthew
Burke was similarly stolen from the morgue.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Yeah, it gradually becomes apparent that bodies are being stolen
and bodies are disappearing all over town.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
Right, So a new scene later Sidney Wallace remember him,
He was the investor who had to go to Egypt
for three weeks, but he was going to invest in
Henry Jared's museum. Well, he shows up at a door
in an alleyway and he's greeted by a young jacked

(01:01:50):
Charles Bronson, who we will later be informed is named Igor.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Yeah. Yeah. By the way, one thing I pointed out
in the documentary is that Bronson was already pretty big
in Italy under his birth name, but he was big
enough that when they put the poster out for the
Italian market, his head is prominently featured, like it's almost

(01:02:16):
like starring Charles Bronson.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Well, his head is actually prominent in the movie because
there are multiple wax casts of it, because what we
learn in the scene is that Igor is one of
the pupils of Professor Jared, now revealed to be still alive,
and Igor tries to make wax figures of other people,
but he always ends up making his own face. That

(01:02:40):
almost seems like an interesting, rare neurological condition where you
perceive everybody else's face to be exactly the same, everybody
else's face to be the same as your own.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Yeah, it seems like the kind of thing you might
build an entire Twilight Zone episode out of, but it's
not really explored here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:55):
Well anyway, so Wallace here, he says he got a
letter telling him to come meet Professor Jared this address,
and yet he's confused because Professor Jared is supposed to
be dead, but nope, here is Vincent Price and not melted.
He looks like regular unmelted Vincent Price. His hands are
scarred and he moves with the help of a wheelchair,
but his face is back to normal. And Jared says, hey, Wallace,

(01:03:17):
I'm opening a new wax museum. This one will be
dedicated to the themes of terror, agony, crime, malice, and execution.
And we're going to send people into the streets telling
their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death?
Do you want end? Do you want to invest? Seems
like Wallace is going to invest, but he shows him
around first. He's like, you know, here's my facility. Here

(01:03:37):
is Charles Bronson. This is my student. He makes wax faces.
Now that my hands are too scarred to do it.
He's got another student downstairs named Leon. He also does
the wax for him. Oh and here is my giant
vat of boiling wax.

Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
Oh I love this vat of wax. It's got this
pink tent to it just looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
And he shows how he uses the boiling wax to
make the skin that he pours. He uses a sort
of sprinkler system to pour the melted wax over the
mold of a body, which is made of plaster, by
the way, not flesh. And then he reveals the most
recent wax effigy he has finished. Igor opens a box

(01:04:20):
which just looks like a coffin standing up, and then oh,
there is Matthew Burke. He looks so lifelike, and he
falls toward the camera out of the box, and Price
says he hanged himself in an elevator shaft. And then intermission.
So my version of this movie, the intermission card just

(01:04:41):
said intermission. But I found screenshots of the intermission card
on the internet that said intermission ten minutes. What's what's
going on there?

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
I believe the version I watched said ten minutes as well.
I didn't go back and double check, but I remember
when it came up and I was like, oh, I've
got some time here. But then we don't get the
actual ten minutes or whatever, so we go right back
into the picture. But I have to say I kind
of miss the when I do go to a theater
these days, I kind of miss the intermission, especially when

(01:05:11):
we're dealing with like three hour long pictures. And you
know you're drinking coffee. You need to get up and
go to the bathroom after a while, and you just
have to sort of guess or maybe do some research
and find out what scenes you need to hit. And
then it's got to be this rushed affair to use
the bathroom and get back to the seat. It seems
like why not do the intermissions, and especially in these

(01:05:34):
theaters where you have assigned seats nowadays, like let people
stroll out there, use the bathroom, buy some more food
and what have you?

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
Agreed? Intermissions are nice, but yeah, likewise my version of
the movie, the intermission only lasted a few seconds. So
after the intermission, the new house of Wax is open
and it is bustling. It's obviously doing great business. It
is also deeply morbid and prurient. All it's just wax
executions and belly dancers, and Vincent Price is going around

(01:06:04):
handing out smelling salts to the ladies who are fainting
in the middle of his museum. And here's the part
where they have hired a paddle ball barker to get
people in the door. He is out front, just whipping
the paddle balls and talking a mile a minute.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Yeah, Reggie rymal here absolutely threatening any and everyone who
comes within paddleball reach of him just ride in their faces,
then ride in the camera, and he even basically breaks
the fourth wall and threatens a moviegoer in their popcorn,
though not in like a total Grimlins two winky Winky way,

(01:06:41):
but but still it gets dangerously close to that level.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
I don't know, I think it is almost Krimlin's two level,
because he's starting to say he looks directly into the
camera and he says, I see you sitting. So what
he's doing already is he's hitting the paddle ball at
like somebody's hat. He's like, I can knock the feather
off of your hate and he's, you know, doing that.
But then he looks into the camera he says, look,
you there holding a box of popcorn. I'm going to

(01:07:07):
hit the popcorn.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Yeah. Yeah, but but if you really want to do
you could think, well, there's a kid with popcorn there
on the street, and that's what he's aiming at. And
it's just out of we can't see it because we're
that's where we're positioned. But yeah, it's it's still very gimmicky.
It's a very gimmicky moment. This is the moment of
the film where they're fully embracing the gimmick of three D,

(01:07:32):
and not for immersion in the picture, but just for
the spectacle itself.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
So many pretensions Henry Jared had of keeping dignity and
fine art as the as the purpose of music his museum,
this has all been abandoned. So he has a gimmicky
barker out front, get luring people in by by taunting them.
And when he leads the tour, it is now all
wax score. He's quoting Shakespeare and making comments like yes,

(01:07:58):
Anne Boleyn, her husband King Henry found a way to
cut their marriage short. And then he uses at one point,
he uses a guillotine to decapitate a wax French aristocrat
and this makes people scream and faint.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
Yeah, he's just fully embracing all of the gore that
he he didn't want to embrace previously. He's like, I'm back,
I'm changed. Now you want gore, you got it?

Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
Oh, and then here's a familiar exhibit. He's he's like
showing off the scenes of crimes. He's like Matthew Burke,
the stockbroker and I'm just thinking, is this a quote
crime worthy of a museum piece. It doesn't make doesn't
really fit in with the famous historical executions here.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Yeah. Again, it's a moment where this is clearly not
a police procedural because amid all of these historic and
famous deaths, here is a less newsworthy death about someone
personally connected to me and my business pursuits.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Who died several weeks ago.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Yeah, and everyone's like, oh, oh yeah, very impressive.

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):
So Sue and Scott Scott the sculptor, come to visit
the museum, and they're commenting on everything. They're like, wow, yeah,
these are really well done. Scott, even as a professional,
is highly impressed, and he says Sue has been modeling
for him, she's been posing for I guess his sculpture is.
I don't know if he is a wax sculptor or

(01:09:20):
some other kind of sculptor. I don't recall if they
reveal that. But eventually Sue wanders over to the exhibit
showing Joan of arc at the stake ready to be burned,
and let's zoom in on her face. Why that looks
an awful lot like Carolyn Jones Sue's roommate Kathy. Sue
is greatly disturbed to see her dead friend's face perfectly

(01:09:41):
reproduced in wax sculpture, and she starts to kind of
freak out about this, but Vincent Price comes over to explain.
He says that after she was killed, he saw her
face in a picture in the newspaper and use that
as a model for his joan of arc and Sue
accepts this, but still seems troubled by how it can
look so real, And of course Vincent Price is very

(01:10:04):
creepy about it. He says, that's the finest compliment I've
ever received, And then Jared starts asking old Scott the
sculptor what he's He's like, I hear you're a sculptor, Scott,
show me your hands, and then he shows him his hands,
and Vincent Price says, yes, mine, we're once like that,
and so they make arrangements to work together sometime. But

(01:10:27):
while Jared is talking, he also just starts hallucinating Sue
as Marie Antoinette. She's like fading in and out of
her regular costume and then into the Marie Antoinette get up.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
Yeah, this is he sees her as his favorite is
like he wants to recreate his favorite Marie Antoinette, and
this is clearly the woman whose likeness he needs to
transform into her.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
Right, He is desperate to wax this woman, so Jared
asks Sue to model for him, and she I think
she kind of agrees, But then they leave and you
know they're they're walking out and we get another another
shot of the paddleball guy as we leave. It's like
one was not enough.

Speaker 1 (01:11:13):
He is really impressive. Like there at one point, and
maybe it's the earliest scene. He does the bit where
he's using two paddleballs at once, but then he ends
up doing three and he catches all the balls in
his mouth. Uh, it's it's pretty great. You might not
think you need to see this performance, but after you
see it, you're like that, that's that's really good. This

(01:11:34):
man was at the top of his game.

Speaker 3 (01:11:36):
Later that night, though, when Sue is in her bedroom,
we see the melted wax man in the in the
hat and cloak sneaking up to the window and he
sort of he like throws throws a grappling hook or
something and like swings across the alleyway to her window
and he's sneaking up on her, but Sue wakes up
before he reaches her. She screams and he runs away.

(01:11:57):
And then next we just go straight to the Burlett
three D spectacle that you talked about earlier. So they're
at the music hall, Sue and Scott are there together,
and we just get to watch the can Can dancers
in three D kicking kicking up a storm. Also time
to stop and appreciate a food and bev scene. You know,
we should, we should rate the food and beverages in

(01:12:19):
movies more often. So in this scene, our heroes are
delivered a logger for the man, a sasparilla for the lady,
and two knockwursts on rye. Looks like maybe they get
a couple of little Cornischans with sausage sandwiches. I rate
this movie meal of three out of ten.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
What.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
I don't know, if you're in the mood for it,
it could work out, you know. Like the cornichons.

Speaker 3 (01:12:40):
I like Cornischans. The sandwiches look kind of kind of
boring and dry, like it doesn't even look like the
bread is toasted. It just don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
The sasparilla looks good. It's in a nice classy little glass.

Speaker 3 (01:12:51):
Okay, agree there. So they're sitting there watching this dance
show and Sue is like, it doesn't see improper, all
those girls showing their talents, and then Scott explains. He says, look,
you've been going around with the weight of the world
on your shoulders. You're obsessed with your dead friend reincarnated

(01:13:11):
as a wax martyr. You're seeing melted stalkers in your
bedroom at night. You need to watch a show like
this to quote bring you back to Normalcy'd say this
is one of the least convincing statements in the film.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
But anyway, it's Bloomers in three D? What can you
what can you say? Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Yeah yeah? And in all honesty, I think this scene
probably is just like the paddle Ball, Like they wanted
an excuse to have a three D a spectacle can
can dancers kicking and jamming their butts in your face?
So they found a way to fit it into the plot.
But you know, it's it's funny, it works, it's pretty good. Yeah,
But in the middle of this dance show, Sue is

(01:13:50):
preoccupied with something about the wax Joan of Arc. Not
only did it look exactly like Kathy, it had any
irregular piercing in only one ear, just like the real Kathy.
How could Jared have seen that from a newspaper photo
and Scott that. She explains this to Scott and he's like,
you know what you need. You need to talk to

(01:14:10):
a cop. I'm gonna take you to the police station
tomorrow and they'll tell you there's nothing to worry about.
And so she's looking kind of like sad and dejected,
while Scott's like, now relax, honey, and enjoy the show,
and he's all jazzed up about it. The dancing resumes
and then anyway, there is a scene the next day,
I think where they get They do go and talk

(01:14:30):
to the police, and unexpectedly the police start investigating this.
They go and check on the museum and stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
Yeah, they don't completely laugh off. I mean they do
laugh at her, but they still follow up.

Speaker 3 (01:14:42):
Now, there's a few other scenes in here leading up
to the climax. There's one part where they're at the
museum and she's investigating the Kathy sculpture and then Vincent
Price shows up with a box and opens it and
it's a wax sculpture of Sue's own head and he
shows it to Sue, like do you like it? But

(01:15:03):
he still wants her to model sometime. And then meanwhile,
also the police are poking around in the museum and
they start noticing that a bunch of the wax figures
in the room look exactly like the faces of bodies
that have recently gone missing from the morgue. But they're
just like Hunt, that's odd and just kind of whiffs
over their heads. So there's more of a police investigation plot.

(01:15:24):
They interrogate Wallace, they hunt down Leon, one of the
two pupils, and arrest him, figure out his real identity
and stuff. But it's all building up to this final
confrontation where one night, Sue goes to the wax Museum
to meet Scott but she can't find him, And there's
a wonderful creepy scene where she's walking around in the
darkened museum amongst the exhibits and all these scenes of

(01:15:46):
murder and stuff, and she's calling out Scot Scott, and
meanwhile Charles Bronson is creeping around. There's one point where
you see a wax head that you think, or you
see what you think is a wax head, but it's
really Charles Bronson's actual head.

Speaker 1 (01:16:00):
Yeah, great fake out, and there's.

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
There's a Kathy hair reveal. She like goes up to
the sculpture of Joan of arcause she pulls the wig
off and it's Kathy's real blonde hair underneath. All has
come delight, that's right. And of course she's confronted here
by Charles Bronson and by Vincent Price.

Speaker 1 (01:16:20):
Now we get one of the great scenes in this
sequence that is also pretty much blow for blow exactly
what happens in the nineteen thirties picture as well, where
Vincent Price is there. He first of all, he gets
up out of his wheelchair. So Vincent Price's character here
is actually guilty of what the dude accuses the Big

(01:16:41):
Lebowski off in the Big Lebowski. Oh, he can clearly walk.
He's just using the wheelchair as part of this disguise.

Speaker 3 (01:16:48):
He's faking it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
Yeah, he's faking it. But then she tries to struggle
against him, and she hits him in the face a
couple of times, and when she does it like smashes
open his wax in false face, this wax face that
he's wearing that makes him look like Vincent Price and
reveals this heavily scarred visage beneath. It's a wonderful moment.

(01:17:11):
It was a great moment in the original film, but
this movie actually improves upon it with even better makeup,
with this amazing full color makeup.

Speaker 3 (01:17:20):
Agree excellent reveal. It's not much of a surprise because
I mean, again, who else would this melted guy be, like,
you know, it's got to be Vincent Price. But yeah,
a wonderful scene. And then this leads up to the
ending where now Sue is you know, she's basically she
has been tied to the train tracks by snidely whiplash.
In this case, she is laying down on the table

(01:17:42):
in the basement of the wax Museum under the big
vat of boiling wax. So because the plan is that
Jared is going to waxify Sue and turn her into
his new Marie Antoinette while she's still alive.

Speaker 1 (01:17:55):
Yeah, and you know, despite this being very much like
a Code approved film, we have implied nudity here. She's
supposed to be nude in there, and of course, you
know we'd never see any of the nudity, but it's
heavily implied. And later like when she's rescued, somebody has
to throw a coat over.

Speaker 3 (01:18:11):
Her, implied nudity being a hilarious content warning that we
once saw on the IMDb parental guide. Yes, I mean,
isn't the presence of any human body technically a case
of implied nudity?

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
It's like there somewhere, Yeah, so is the film Wine.
So it's close here. They do a great job building
the tension. We have these these dual scenes going on
where there's the battle against Igor on one hand, and
then there's Jared's wax preparations for Sue in the basement.
I thought both sequences were really skillfully composed and cut

(01:18:49):
together here.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
Yes, I agree, very tense sequence. Sue is in the
basement about to be waxed alive Scott. Meanwhile, he gets
in the fight with Charles Bronson and then Charles Bronson
wins and then puts him in the guillotine to guillotine him.
And then at the last moment they are saved by
the arrival of the police, which you know, that's a classic.
It's a very fifties movie kind of ending, one that

(01:19:13):
I always find incredibly unsatisfying. The hero and the heroine
do not find a way to best the villain of
their own accord. They have to be rescued by the authorities.
I don't know. I don't know why. I wonder if
audiences in the fifties found that as unsatisfying as I
think most people probably would today or for the time.

(01:19:35):
It's just like, oh, okay, yeah, good, you know, the
police saved the day. It like it robs us of
a certain kind of resolution to the dynamic between the characters.
If you don't see a way for the good characters
to save themselves, they just you know, dios x machin
it basically.

Speaker 1 (01:19:54):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's basically like Tarantula, where
all right, Colin Clint Eastwood in a jet fighter, a
character that we haven't seen before, is going to save
the day by blowing up the giant spider.

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
I mean, I guess it's not quite a day of
sex mank in it to be fair, because we have
seen the police investigating up to this point, so like
there's a plot line of them figuring out what's going
on and getting there to that moment so that they
don't show up from out of nowhere, But we're not
really invested in the police characters. So I don't know,
it's just it's just not quite the same as it
would be if Sue or Scott themselves figured out a

(01:20:27):
way out of this.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
I guess it's ultimately in the grander cinematic tradition. It's
it's great to have that trope, though, because when that
trope is later subverted in films it can be especially
delightful and mean, with one of the prime examples, of
course being like Hitchcock's Psycho, where the picture lets you
know clearly that the you know, whatever rescue you thought

(01:20:51):
was gonna come is is maybe not going to work
after all. So when police intervention fails in later pictures,
it maybe it hits a little harder. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
There's a really good twist that inverts that in Silence
of the Lambs. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, like where you
think the cops are showing up to conclude the plot,
but in fact the heroine is on her own.

Speaker 1 (01:21:15):
Right, Yeah, they're they're hitting the wrong house.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
Yeah, but anyway, authority saving the day aside. It is
a really tense ending and I think it works great
for the most part, and.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
There's a lot more Grapplert like when they when they
when they arrest Igor, he's about to suplex a cop.
And then I don't know if you noticed, but when
Vincent Price's character is fighting off the authorities, at one
point he like picks a dude up like he's gonna
throw him into the wax. And of course we know
who's going in that wax.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):
Right, I mean, it's the end you know is coming.
It's it's kind of like it's Chekhov's gun. If there's
gun on the mantelpiece, it will probably be fired. If
there is a what would you call it, an open
topped large container of some kind of deadly liquid, whether
that that's a pool with piranhas in it or boiling
acid or boiling wax, the villain has got to fall in.

Speaker 1 (01:22:07):
It, exactly. I mean, that's what it's there for. We
want that spectacle even if there's and in this case,
there's nothing really gory afterwards, like you don't see a
skeleton rising to the surface or anything like that. We
don't see a wax cocooned Vincent Price, you know, falling
under the floor or anything. But just the spectacle of him,

(01:22:28):
of somebody landing in that stuff is enough.

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Yeah, that's not the stinger at the end. Instead, the
epilogue is just them at the police station with Sue
being like, thank you for putting your coat over my
naked body.

Speaker 1 (01:22:40):
The end.

Speaker 3 (01:22:41):
Yeah, that was a strange comment to end on.

Speaker 1 (01:22:46):
But yeah, yeah, but they got to send the folks
home happy, you know, the whole family came out, the
whole family. But at least people made the effort to
come to the big theater to get the big theater
experience with all this wonderful sound, three D effects. They
need to go home happy, so they'll come back next

(01:23:08):
time and watch more three D Warner Brothers pictures.

Speaker 3 (01:23:11):
Yeah, if they ever re released this again in three D,
I would absolutely go to a theater to watch it
in three D. I think that would be a blast.

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I really left this movie and the
research wanting to have the really for the first time
perhaps ever, really wanting to have a proper three D
cinema experience with whatever technology I can get my hands on,
so that the next time there's like a strong I

(01:23:39):
would I mean, obviously I would love to see this
picture re released in modern three D or some form
of three D in the theater, but I'll settle for
anything at this point, almost anything.

Speaker 3 (01:23:50):
All right, does that do it for House of Wax?

Speaker 1 (01:23:53):
I believe that will. We'll go ahead and seal off
the wax canister on this one, but we'll be back
next week with one three D picture. What'll it be?
I don't know. We're still looking around at things. I've
got another disc to check out here, so tune in
and find out. In the meantime, if you want to
hear more Weird House Cinema, well, we put this out

(01:24:14):
every Friday and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast
feed We're primarily a science podcast, but on Fridays we
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
weird film. If you want to see a complete list
of the films that we've covered on the show, we
can go to letterbox dot com as L E T
T E R B O x D. We have a
user account there called Weird House, and on that account
you'll find a list in order all the films we've covered.

(01:24:38):
It's pretty fun to check out.

Speaker 3 (01:24:39):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello. You can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:25:00):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.