In 1973, Bing Crosby Productions was focusing on churning out low-budget flicks that were heavily marketed with exploitative flair. (Despite the company’s name, Crosby himself was not directly involved in the creation of these efforts.) With films including “Willard” (1971), “Ben” (1972), “You’ll Like My Mother” (1972) and “Walking Tall” (1973), the company offered a happy blend of violence, horror and thrills in contemporary settings. These titles proved very popular, and the company decided to dust off the concept of a wax museum setting for a horror film and brought back Jack the Ripper as key figure in its murder plot.
However, the company deviated from its well-established pattern by creating a period piece set at the turn of the 20th century and populating the cast with a line-up of older famous actors who were a tad past their prime. Brothers George and Andrew Fenady were recruited to helm the film, with George as director and Andrew as producer – both had extensive experience in television, which they used to keep the budget low.
The resulting work was “Terror in the Wax Museum,” which plays like a mystery rather than a flat-out horror movie. Dupree’s Wax Museum of London is run by the elderly Claude Dupree (John Carradine), whose lifetime devotion to his work has made him more than a little eccentric. His displays concentrate on notorious killers including Attila the Hun, Lucrezia Borgia, Bluebeard and, of course, Jack the Ripper. Dupree’s main companion is Karkoff (Steven Merlo), a deaf-mute and disfigured hunchback who mostly follows him around while grunting pathetically.
Dupree is being pressured by the American businessman Amos Burns (Broderick Crawford) to sell his wax models for display across the Atlantic, but Dupree is hesitant to part with his creations.
In a dream sequence, Dupree imagines the wax statues have come to life and seek revenge on him for the potential sale. Dupree awakens from his dream, but upon investigating a noise in his venue he is murdered by an unknown fiend.
Inspector Daniels of Scotland Yard (Maurice Evans) and his handsome young assistant Sgt. Michael Hawks (Mark W. Edwards) are investigating the case, and their list of suspects include Burns and Flexner (Ray Milland), Dupree’s associate who was promised the business. Complicating matters is the arrival of Dupree’s niece Meg (Nicole Shelby), his only remaining relative, and Meg’s pushy guardian Julia (Elsa Lanchester).
Dupree’s attorney (Patric Knowles) announces that Dupree’s will is missing, which creates a fracas because Flexner insists Dupree promised him the business while Julia insists that Meg is the rightful heir and that she will conduct her ward’s business affairs. Sgt. Hawks is smitten by Meg, who is attracted to the young police detective.
Outside of this odd circle is the pub next door to the wax museum that is run by the pleasant Tim Fowley (Louis Hayward), who was also Dupree’s landlord, and his in-house entertainment Laurie Mell (Shani Wallis), who earns extra money after work as a streetwalker.
Julia agrees to sell the museum’s collection to Burns, but before the deal is signed he is killed on a foggy twilight street by someone dressed like the wax museum’s Jack the Ripper statute. Burns’ body is dumped in the museum with a sword through his gut. Meg – who is now living in the museum’s upstairs apartments with Julia – starts to have nightmares about the wax figures chasing her, and she awakes one night to see Dupree in her room.
Remarkably, a letter from Dupree that was lost in the British postal system arrives at his attorney’s office that details how he wants his estate to be settled, and it adds there is a hidden fortune somewhere in the museum. After this happens, Laurie Mell is killed on the street after the pub’s closing by someone disguised as a bobby. Laurie’s head is deposited in the museum’s Marie Antoinette display, which Meg discovers after hearing the display’s guillotine blade falling. Even more unsettling, the museum’s Jack the Ripper statue has come to life and pursues Meg with his blade – but when Meg scratches the Ripper’s face, strips of wax are loosened to reveal a flesh-and-blood villain underneath. Sgt. Hawks saves the day in a life-and-death brawl with the faux-Ripper, who meets his end by falling on an axe. But while Hawks unmasks the fiend, the identity is not revealed until the closing shot of a new waxwork display showing Dupree falling victim to his slayer.
“Terror in the Wax Museum” has turned into a polarizing film, with some people treating it with ridicule – it was one of the titles featured in the RiffTrax series that added snarky putdown commentary tracks to sketchy films – and others appreciating it as a B-grade entertainment. Both camps have valid arguments for their feelings.
To the film’s discredit, there are some aspects of the production that create unintentional laughs, such as remarkably bad make-up and costuming inflicted on the Karkoff character and having a guardian for Meg looks ludicrous given that Charlotte Selby was 34 years old when the film was made and could not convincingly pass as a minor. The film’s London setting is a tribute to bad movie cliches, with a surplus amount of too-loud and too-gregarious Cockneys along with evening streets burdened in pea-soup fog.
On the plus side, the film’s old-time stars are clearly enjoying themselves and chew the scenery with termite-worthy intensity. There is nothing subtle in their emoting and gestures, but the uniform level of hamming creates a jolly environment. “Terror in the Wax Museum” also gave Shani Wallis her first screen role after she achieved stardom as Nancy in the 1968 musical “Oliver!” – she was a vibrant presence whose on-screen performances were much too few and far-between.
As for the wax statues, the filmmakers made the interesting choice of using actors to play the display pieces. Members of the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts Pageant of the Masters, a southern California “Living Picture” ensemble, posed as the nefarious figures in Dupree’s presentation, with Don Herbert giving Jack the Ripper a sexy yet fiendish vibe.
Oddly, “Terror of the Wax Museum” received an “X” certificate from the British Board of Film Censors that limited its audience to those 18 and older – there was nothing in the film that could be viewed as objectionable to children and younger teens. In contrast, the Motion Picture Association of America gave it a PG rating.
The U.S. distribution by Cinerama Releasing Corporation positioned the film as a flat-out horror movie, with advertising taglines “You can’t tell the living from the dead” while prominently featuring the misshapen Karkoff emerging from a vat of hot wax under the heading “Karkoff is here! In the wax museum.”