Director: Bud Townsend
Writer: Rex Carlton
From: Cult Cinema
Actors from one particular movie studio start disappearing shortly before exhibits of them show up at the local wax museum. The police start investigating, but find something more sinister than they expected.
After a Marie and Tony, a celebrity couple at Paragon Pictures, announce their engagement, Tony is attacked with a syringe by a figure he recognizes. Several weeks later, Tony still hasn’t been found and the police are questioning Vinnie (Cameron Mitchell, our lord and savior), the operator of a local wax museum. The museum has a display of three other Paragon actors who’ve all likewise disappeared under similar circumstances and Tony will soon join their ranks.
Vinnie wears an eye patch and has scars on the right side of his face from an incident with Max Black, the head of Paragon. And before I go further into the plot, I have to mention the make-up: it’s terrible. The make-up looks like Mitchell fell asleep on some silly putty and no one told him. The awfulness is emphasized by the fact that his character is a brilliant make-up artist. The movie repeats how good he was at his job and has several scenes of him applying make-up to the ultra-realistic wax heads he’s molding. So you end up with a narrative problem, this make-up genius couldn’t find a way to apply make-up to his own face, and a technical one, the movie’s calling attention to make-up work when its own make-up work is garbage.
Anyway, the cops talk to Vinnie and learn that he was originally engaged to Marie while she was Max’s object of affection. When Max was told, he threw a cocktail at Vinnie while Vinnie was lighting a cigarette, setting Vinnie on fire. Vinnie suggests to the cops that Max has murdered his actors to collect the insurance money. When the police talk to Marie, they learn she tried to stay with Vinnie, but he drove her away.
Up until about half-an-hour into the movie, the cops seem like the point-of-view characters and that the story is going to be a mystery with some fantastical or gothic overtones. Is Vinnie murdering people and hiding the bodies in his museum? Is Max orchestrating these disappearances for his own purposes? Is Marie a black widow and covering up her crimes with Max or Vinnie’s help?
Nope, this is post-House of Wax so it’s just Vinnie kidnapping people and injecting them with some zombie serum as part of some convoluted revenge scheme against Max. Granted, that’s what you suspect from the moment the credits roll, but because the movie makes an effort to hide the assailant in the beginning and then uses the cops to build up the backstory, you get the sense that something more interesting might be at work. Then the movie tells you you’re wrong.
Vinnie’s been making a wax model of a go-go dancer that’s dating Max and convinces her to bring him to the museum. Max gets dosed, the girl gets killed, and Vinnie manages to pin the murder on Max. Finally Marie comes to the museum, Vinnie traps her, explains his plan, and commands all his zombies to help him kill Max. Just as Max is about to be lowered into the molten wax, he starts laughing at Vinnie, enraging him to the point where Vinnie lunges for Max and falls into the vat himself. As he’s drowning, Vinnie sees all the people he’s kidnapped laughing at him.
Then he seemingly wakes up without any scars. Marie is calling him saying tonight’s the night they tell Max about their engagement. Then Vinnie, to his horror, has visions of everything that happened after that point. THE END
So… it was all a dream? Maybe? Or the wax museum stuff was a dream? Or it’s a psychosis he’s having after getting attacked by Max? I really couldn’t tell you because I really can’t care.
This movie has some connections to other pieces in the Misery Mill, and not just because it stars our lord and savior, Cameron Mitchell. Director Bud Townsend also directed the misguided and seemingly willfully dull Coach and The Beach Girls and writer/producer Rex Carlton also wrote and produced Blood of Dracula’s Castle and the classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. In fact, if you hit the IMDB page for Carlton, you can see the movie posters for all three flicks and their similar aesthetic.
Townsend’s flicks are from the loathed Marimark Productions and this film shows that his vision as an auteur had always been to strip away the interesting parts of a film and leave the audience bored. Nightmare in Wax is more interesting than his later works, I’d call it the best of the three, but it still hits a moment where all the air leaks out and the movie’s left to putter for more than an hour to its conclusion.
Carlton’s script is a little more interesting and it’s doubly-interesting to think of him as the producer. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is public domain and I don’t think any of Carlton’s other works are, even though there’s nothing there to be protected. He likely learned from the mistake of letting Brain slip into the public domain, but didn’t recognize that it’s replayability and attention largely came from the fact that it was free-to-use. He was your standard exploitation producer, trying to crank out films to make a quick buck. Apparently he didn’t do it quickly enough, though, seeing as he ultimately committed suicide because he couldn’t pay the mob back the money he’d borrowed for his films. As with any sordid Hollywood story, that sounds like a better movie than anything he made.
As for Nightmare in Wax, it starts promisingly enough precisely because it feels like it’s not going to be an exploitation film about someone making wax models from corpses. Since that’s exactly what it is, it’s not a recommend. A snarky enough group could get some pleasure from it, though. The pacing is really problematic. Half-an-hour in I thought it was more than halfway done. Instead, it was less than a third. Mitchell does have one good sequence where he kills the go-go dancer. He’s chases her through the museum, trying to make her scream as much as possible, then leads the police on a chase to make them think Max killed the girl. Mitchell is weird, sadistic, and strangely lackadaisical throughout the chase which makes it more entertaining. While that sequence isn’t enough to recommend the movie, it deserves mention.
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