Waxwork, You Make Me Melt

Normally, a trip to the Ontario Science Centre wouldn’t remind me of Jumbo Video, but this weekend it did, and for a very good reason. This weekend, I saw the latest Body Worlds exhibit, called The Story of the Heart. In case you’re been living in a steamer trunk in someone’s attic for the past decade Body Worlds is the travelling exhibit comprised of actual dead bodies (and body parts) of humans (and some animals) that have been plastinated in order to preserve them. Created by Gunther von Hagens, they’re part science, part art and part magnet for our morbid curiosity. They also reminded me of the 1988 movie Waxwork, which I bought (used) from the local Jumbo Video when I was a kid and watched over and over again. (Even more than my used copies of Above the Law and Robo Cop 3!)

It’s been years since I’d seen the film, but a few weeks ago I scored the DVD of Waxwork and the sequel Waxwork II: Lost in Time, for four bucks no less – for that price I decided to suck it up and the buy the crummy no frills pan-and-scan version that Artisan put out. Curse them, but it’s the only North American DVD version available.

The film stars Zach Galligan, who most know from his starring role in Gremlins, and… well, not much else. (I don’t what the heck happened to him, but by 1994 for he was headlining Cyborg 3: The Recycler.) Here, he plays Mark, a spoiled rich, clean cut Republican-type, which is pretty bizarre hero choice for a horror movie. The movie starts out like a bad John Hughes film, with Mark and his friends hanging out at school and trading “clever” dialogue. We learn that he’s hung up on China, a stuck-up prima donna who’s more interested in a guy on the football team and– ah, who cares, it’s all filler until a bunch of the kids go to wax museum. Then the fun starts.

The waxwork is actually in the middle of the suburbs, which may be subtext but is probably more a case of the location people finding a creepy mansion that happened to have a lawn and white picket fence. In any case, they acknowledge the absurdity of it in the film and it’s a nice comedic touch in movie with a Tales From the Crypt spirit to it. David Jennings, who you might recognize from movies such as the Omen, Time Bandits and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, plays the creepy curator. Along with his midget butler and tall, gangly butler, he ushers the kids into the exhibit space, which houses dozens of roped off displays based on horror movies, from the classics, such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, to more contemporary ones, such as The Little Shop of Horrors, Night of the Living Dead and, oddly, Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive.

When one of the kids steps over the rope, he’s transported inside the world of the display, and give a period makeover. He enters a cabin in the woods, where a man – played by John Rhys-Davis – turns into a werewolf. The kid dies and, back in the real world, becomes part of the exhibit. There’s a back story involving a cop who investigates, a connection to Mark’s dead grandfather and a wheelchair-bound former acquaintance of his grandfather’s, played by British character actor Patrick Macnee (The Avengers TV show), and some horror movie mumbo jumbo informs us that once the waxworks gets eighteen victims (six plus six plus six = evil!) the statues will come to life and – again, blah, blah, blah, let’s get back to the monsters.

Writer/director Anthony Hickox dreamed up an ideal concept for a budding horror fan such as myself: a bunch of mini-monster movies (occurring every time someone gets sucked into a display), ending with a huge battle with all the monsters (OK, and some aliens and The Marquis de Sade). It’s that more-creature-bang-for-your-buck philosophy that drove the Universal monsters team-ups of the ‘40s and the Godzilla-versus-a-buttload-of-giant-monsters movies. (The Waxwork creatures come courtesy Bob Keen: Alien, Hellraiser, Candyman.)

Plus, there was some titillation with the de Sade stuff, and – even better – gore aplenty. Heads get crushed and ripped off, gross zombies attack and, the pièce de résistance: the white room sequence. It takes place in an all white room in which there’s a guy strapped to a table who has a chunk of his leg stripped of the meat. A vampire tears another chunk off and eats eat, then three females vamps in white gown arrive and are promptly staked, spraying blood all over the walls. One is even impaled on champagne bottles, sending sprays of bubbly everywhere. These were the gnarliest things I’d ever seen in a movie up to that point.

Watching Waxwork again gave me the same thrills as my second-hand Jumbo Video copy. Even if the duds, hair and speech are all hopelessly dated, the concept is still solid and the pre-CGI effects are classic. And, in one sequence, the cop digs into one of the wax figures with a knife and retrieves a chunk of flesh which looks an awful like a fragment of one of the Body Worlds corpses. I wonder if there was a Jumbo Video in Gunther von Hagens’ neighbourhood…

 

-Dave Alexander