Nightmare in Wax

I'm not sure what the 80's repackaging with the burning skull has to do with it but............ It's like someone filmed a community play. What's wrong with that? Definitely some good shoe clicking foley artist work. It's good to see a movie where people smoke cigarettes as they work/act - improv smoking. Cameron Mitchell movies are always watchable. Especially when there is an eye-patch involved. Some people called this a "Z" Movie and that's what it is, but good still under proper conditions. Would be good in IMAX 3-D. Gave it a "5" because it's definitely one of those get it or not movies. I think I bought a lawnmower from that detective guy in scene 29 over at ACE in 1974. Would actually be good at a drive-in with a six pack.

I must really like you folks to sit through $#%^ like this so you don't have to.As painful as it is I'll recap some of the plot.Excuse me if I start yawning.

Vince Renaud was Paragon Studios' top make up expert. He is in the middle of an affair with Paragons top female star. She is coveted by the studio head who built her career.When Renaud informs the jealous man at a party the studio boss sets Renauds face on fire.Instead of having the boss arrested Renaud opts for a bygones be bygones out look.Yeah, I can understand that.

Actually Renaud is crazier than a loon and has worked out an evil plan of revenge. After opening up a wax museum Renaud perfects a serum to put people into suspended animation.Then he starts kidnapping and "freezing" actors from Paragon Studios. The actors are put on display as wax figures. They need a shot of the old serum every once in a while to keep them rigid.Good thing these folks are stiffs as actors.

Renaud (who runs around in a strange outfit complete with a short cape)commits a few murders.One very unnerving scene has him motoring around town with a woman he just killed. He's planting a few kisses on her as well. YUCK!Of course the Police are absolute morons (led by Scott "I have no talent" Brady).The movie crawls on to an absolute horesbleep ending.

To say this movie reeks is an understatement.Cameron Mitchell (Renaud) chews up the scenery rolling his eyes and whispering stupid lines like"I love to hear you scream!It excites me!"So glad somebody is excited about this waste of film.The acting is horrible, the plot & dialogue just screams of incompetence and the director has no clue.

Your time would be better spent dry shaving a pit bull.Hold your nose and run from this garbage!

THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) with Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray was remade in 1953 as HOUSE OF WAX with Vincent Price. Both of these films are horror classics in their own right. NIGHTMARE IN WAX is a remake of the remake, with Cameron Mitchel in the role of bitter, disfigured, wax figure creator, Vincent Renard.

True to the original plot, people are disappearing, shortly before new wax dummies appear in Vincent's studio. There's a new "twist", in that these are more like zombies than corpses dipped in wax. Vengeful and totally bananas, Mitchell plays Renard like he's channeling eeevil Captain Kirk in an eye patch, with oatmeal on his face!

Absurd and thuddingly boring, enduring this movie is like swimming through mud. Sans any terror, drama, or suspense, even its attempts at humor fall dead. Seemingly made over a long weekend, the production values are much like those found in TV commercials of the period. This is cinematic cruelty, a dull knife through the viewer's brainpan...

The career of Cameron Mitchell is fairly typical of a good, but second line actor after the collapse of the studio system. Left adrift they took work where they found it and Mitchell appeared in some awful films after the Fifties. Nightmare In Wax could be considered one of them, but the screenplay makes this film a camp delight with Mitchell leading an entire cast in an object lesson in overacting.

Cameron Mitchell is our protagonist in this film, he plays a former studio makeup artist who was burned and lost an eye as a result of an accident. He starts a Hollywood Wax Museum, but this man through a combination of drugs and hypnosis is using live subjects as his exhibits. He's planning revenge on those he felt wronged him. Scott Brady is a cop who suspects, but can't prove his involvement in the disappearance of some Hollywood notables.

Anne Helm is the girl Mitchell once loved, Berry Kroeger does a great caricature of a studio head, casting couch and all. Kroeger's latest squeeze is blond bimbo Victoria Carroll. Carroll in her own way gives the best performance in the film.

Nightmare In Wax is a fun black comedy, not to be taken seriously. It's hardly a great film, but far more enjoyable than I thought.

I enjoyed Nightmare in Wax, taking it on the pulpy level that it intends and achieves. It's fun. It's not mindlessly sadistic (so if you want that, look elsewhere). Not hopelessly incompetent, either (just a bit, maybe, but hope is there).

I admit that at first I confused it with a wax museum horror featuring a curator with a false hand, which is interchangeable with a hook or a cleaver. Were there two versions of this film? No; the man with the cleaver was Patrick O'Neal in Chamber of Horrors (1966). It gave me a restless night figuring that one out. These things worry horror fans.

The Patrick O'Neal film is a classier offering. The photography is much glossier, and Wilfred Hyde-White adds his own charm to the proceedings. But Cameron Mitchell in Nightmare in Wax adds his own special (if not too refined) touch of wickedness, pursuing Anne Helm through his Faustian workshop, hypodermic in hand. That chase between tottering dummies and bubbling vats doesn't quite elevate the film into the realms of horror achieved by Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray... but it's pretty good, all the same.

A couple of years before Nightmare in Wax, Cameron Mitchell starred in a Spanish/West German co-production of Island of the Doomed (1967) (a.k.a. The Bloodsuckers, The Maneater of Hydra, etc.) I was fortunate enough to see that sharing a double-bill with Slaughter of the Vampires. That was in my long-ago teens. Much more recently I bought it on DVD (with the widescreen sadly cropped). Now wouldn't it be great if someone had the discrimination (I shan't say the taste) to bring out a restored widescreen double-DVD of both Nightmare in Wax and Island of the Doomed. We can only hope!