In 1973, Bing Crosby Productions was focusing on churning out low-budget flicks that were heavily marketed with exploitative flair. (Despite the company\u2019s name, Crosby himself was not directly involved in the creation of these efforts.) With films including \u201cWillard\u201d (1971), \u201cBen\u201d (1972), \u201cYou\u2019ll Like My Mother\u201d (1972) and \u201cWalking Tall\u201d (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.
\n<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 both had extensive experience in television, which they used to keep the budget low. <\/p>\n
The resulting work was \u201cTerror in the Wax Museum,\u201d which plays like a mystery rather than a flat-out horror movie. Dupree\u2019s 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\u2019s main companion is Karkoff (Steven Merlo), a deaf-mute and disfigured hunchback who mostly follows him around while grunting pathetically.
\nDupree 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s associate who was promised the business. Complicating matters is the arrival of Dupree\u2019s niece Meg (Nicole Shelby), his only remaining relative, and Meg\u2019s pushy guardian Julia (Elsa Lanchester). <\/p>\n
Dupree\u2019s attorney (Patric Knowles) announces that Dupree\u2019s 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\u2019s business affairs. Sgt. Hawks is smitten by Meg, who is attracted to the young police detective.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s landlord, and his in-house entertainment Laurie Mell (Shani Wallis), who earns extra money after work as a streetwalker. <\/p>\n
Julia agrees to sell the museum\u2019s collection to Burns, but before the deal is signed he is killed on a foggy twilight street by someone dressed like the wax museum\u2019s Jack the Ripper statute. Burns\u2019 body is dumped in the museum with a sword through his gut. Meg \u2013 who is now living in the museum\u2019s upstairs apartments with Julia \u2013 starts to have nightmares about the wax figures chasing her, and she awakes one night to see Dupree in her room. <\/p>\n
Remarkably, a letter from Dupree that was lost in the British postal system arrives at his attorney\u2019s 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\u2019s closing by someone disguised as a bobby. Laurie\u2019s head is deposited in the museum\u2019s Marie Antoinette display, which Meg discovers after hearing the display\u2019s guillotine blade falling. Even more unsettling, the museum\u2019s Jack the Ripper statue has come to life and pursues Meg with his blade \u2013 but when Meg scratches the Ripper\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cTerror in the Wax Museum\u201d has turned into a polarizing film, with some people treating it with ridicule \u2013 it was one of the titles featured in the RiffTrax series that added snarky putdown commentary tracks to sketchy films \u2013 and others appreciating it as a B-grade entertainment. Both camps have valid arguments for their feelings. <\/p>\n
To the film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
On the plus side, the film\u2019s 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. \u201cTerror in the Wax Museum\u201d also gave Shani Wallis her first screen role after she achieved stardom as Nancy in the 1968 musical \u201cOliver!\u201d \u2013 she was a vibrant presence whose on-screen performances were much too few and far-between.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cLiving Picture\u201d ensemble, posed as the nefarious figures in Dupree\u2019s presentation, with Don Herbert giving Jack the Ripper a sexy yet fiendish vibe. <\/p>\n
Oddly, \u201cTerror of the Wax Museum\u201d received an \u201cX\u201d certificate from the British Board of Film Censors that limited its audience to those 18 and older \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
The U.S. distribution by Cinerama Releasing Corporation positioned the film as a flat-out horror movie, with advertising taglines \u201cYou can\u2019t tell the living from the dead\u201d while prominently featuring the misshapen Karkoff emerging from a vat of hot wax under the heading \u201cKarkoff is here! In the wax museum.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1973, Bing Crosby Productions was focusing on churning out low-budget flicks that were heavily marketed with exploitative flair. (Despite the company\u2019s name, Crosby himself was not directly involved in the creation of these efforts.) With films including \u201cWillard\u201d (1971), \u201cBen\u201d (1972), \u201cYou\u2019ll Like My Mother\u201d (1972) and \u201cWalking Tall\u201d (1973), the company offered a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":45288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1369],"tags":[3497,477,520,2784,3496,3495],"class_list":["post-45287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-retro-cinema","tag-broderick-crawford","tag-horror","tag-jack-the-ripper","tag-john-carradine","tag-ray-milland","tag-terror-in-the-wax-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45287"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45290,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45287\/revisions\/45290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}