Waxwork (1988)

Posted By: brian@brianschell.com May 25, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

It’s got a lot of humor and silliness mixed with horror. And it’s almost like an anthology with little sub-stories as people are pulled into the exhibits. It’s got stuff going for it, not quite great, but entertaining – more so for Horror Guy Kevin than for Horror Guy Brian. A moderate thumbs-up overall.

Synopsis

It’s a dark and stormy night at the big old house. The owner’s head is set on fire, and all his valuables are stolen.

Mark and his wealthy mother talk about “us and them.” They also mention that some people have recently gone missing in town. She’s a snob. He’s a college student, but she won’t allow him to have caffeine until he’s all grown up. The butler sneaks him coffee and a cigarette.

Sarah and China talk about boys. Suddenly, they notice a waxwork exhibit. They’ve never seen it before. The man outside is very strange, and he invites them to a private showing at midnight, and they can bring up to six friends. Then he vanishes.

Mark rushes to class, and it looks like his history teacher is a Nazi. Sarah tells Mark, Tony, Gemma, and a few others about the waxworks, and they all want to go see it. They go there at midnight, right there in the residential neighborhood, a very strange location.

A little person named Junior opens the door and lets them in. The inner doors open, and they go into the museum. All the wax figures look surprisingly real here.

Tony accidentally drops his lighter into a display and steps through a portal— he’s got long hair and is in the woods now. He wonders if it’s hypnosis or holograms. He walks up to the big house, and someone inside tells him to go away. He goes inside and talks to an angry man who turns into a werewolf.

The werewolf bites him, and then two men come in with a gun and silver bullets. Tony soon starts to turn as well, and the old man with the gun shoots them both. Back in the museum, Mark walks right past the werewolf exhibit.

China steps up into the Dracula exhibit, and the portal gets her as well. Dracula’s in his castle, throwing a dinner party. He serves China some raw meat in blood sauce. She takes a bite, and everyone else at the table slurps their bloody meat. Afterward, she is sent to her room, and she wonders about the intense dream she’s having.

Stefan, Dracula’s son, comes in and tries to bite her. She runs downstairs straight into a cell where a man named Charles tells her about vampires. She uses a cross to make him explode. She tries to get away but runs right into Dracula. Chomp! Back in the waxwork, Mark notices Tony is gone.

Sarah checks out the Marquis de Sade’s display with interest. Mark wants to leave since he can’t find Tony or China. Junior says they left a little earlier.

A football player comes into the waxworks, and the proprietor pushes him into the Phantom of the Opera display. He’s aghast that they made a movie about that.

Mark likes Sarah, and Sarah likes Mark, but she’s playing hard to get. They both go home.

Mark calls China and Tony’s families in the morning, but neither of them came home last night. He goes to the police, and Inspector Roberts says thirteen people have gone missing in the past two weeks.

Roberts and Mark go back to the waxwork to investigate. The proprietor lets them in, but he doubts the missing teens visited the place yet since they aren’t even open yet. The detective looks around, but there’s nothing there to see, so they leave.

Roberts returns and sneaks in again later. He looks at the victim in the Dracula display and takes a big chunk of the face of the wax statue that looks like China as a sample. He steps into an Egyptian display and helps a man to open a mummy’s tomb. Now he’s part of one of the stories. The old professor there reads a scroll with a curse on it.

Sarah opens a book on the Marquis de Sade in Mark’s attic. Things get all weird, but then Mark interrupts her with details of his grandfather’s mysterious death. Mr. Lincoln, the grandfather’s assistant, went missing at that time. Lincoln is the same man who runs the waxworks today. Meanwhile, the mummy in the Egyptian display wakes up and kills everyone in the tomb.

Mark and Sarah go to see Sir Wilfred, and they tell him the story so far. He says that Mark’s grandfather collected 18 horror trinkets, all of which were stolen 40 years ago by Mr. Lincoln, who sold his own soul to the devil. Lincoln has created whole environments for his victims— all eighteen of them. Once he gets all of them, the dead shall rise and consume all things. They have to burn the waxworks.

Mark and Sarah return to the museum to set the displays on fire. Sarah steps into the Marquis de Sade display. He chains Sarah up and prepares to whip her, but she’s really into that.

Meanwhile, Mark has stepped into black-and-white land, and the zombies are coming for him. He jumps back through the portal and ends up in deSadeland. He breaks in to release Sarah, who doesn’t really want to be released. He demonstrates to the Marquis that he can’t be hurt because he knows this all isn’t real. Sarah gives in and goes with Mark back to the real world.

The bad guys in the museum grab Mark and Sarah as a young couple come in to check out the displays. They soon disappear into the displays and are killed.

“Live, my children. Live,” says Lincoln. The displays all come to life. The werewolf, Dracula, the Marquis, Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein, Mummy, and all the others.

Suddenly, Sir Wilfred comes in with Mark’s butler and others. He gives everyone swords, and they battle the monsters. China comes to Mark, and she apologizes, but she’s a vampire now and tries to bite him.

It comes down to Mark vs. The Marquis fencing and Lincoln watches. The Marquis loses, but Lincoln’s got a gun. Lincoln is the guy who killed Mark’s grandfather and stole his 18 trinkets. Wilfred shoots Lincoln in the back, and he falls into a vat of wax because, of course, someone would have to fall into that open vat of wax.

The fire spreads throughout the waxworks, and the young couple are the only ones who escape.

Commentary

The editing and cinematography are absolutely terrible, and the acting from most of the “teens” is equally bad.

The werewolf costume isn’t terrible. The mummy segment is pretty short, but he looks good, being suitably slimy under the wrappings. All the monsters at the end look pretty decent, but the big climactic battle at the end was pretty bad. It looked like a long saloon fight from a cheap Western.

It’s got all the usual horror tropes, but it’s also got a ton of comedy, some of which is very good and some that falls flat. It’s entertaining, but a little too silly for my taste.