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forthegothicheroine · 6 months ago

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Ah, Waxwork (1988)! The epitome of "I didn't say it was good, I said I liked it." A trashy horror comedy which became infamous among a very specific community of monster fuckers: those too hardcore for Edward Cullen and too squeamish for Pinhead.

I was going to just make a bullet-point list of my thoughts upon rewatch, but there's too much to say, so you lucky people get a full recap!

Our protagonist is Mark, a rich boy who for some reason attends community college. He lives under the thumb of his ridiculous sitcom-villain mother, and has to rely upon his butler sneaking him coffee and cigarettes. I suppose we're seeing what Bruce Wayne's life would be like in a world without alley muggings.

Mark getting sexually rejected will be a running theme in this movie, so let's meet the women who will be doing the rejecting: China and Sarah! These college classmates of his are that improbably 80s horror movie duo, the evil slut and the sweet virgin who are for some unexplained reason besties. China has exchanged Mark for a football player, and she smokes and wears sunglasses and comments on boy's bodies while Sarah acts mildly scandalized. They walk to school, discussing boys and just how promiscuous is too promiscuous, when they see something at the side of the street- a new Waxwork house!

Little do they know what darkness and delight await them inside.

Isn't this a bit outdated, the girls ask each other? You're telling me, I respond, as a former actress at a tourist attraction that was next door to Madame Tussaud's, I have no idea who buys tickets.

They are welcomed at the door by holy shit, David Warner? I really hope he filmed this directly back to back with The Company of Wolves. David Warner invites them to come to a special private opening with a group of up to six people- any more would be too crowded! And China, apparently having nothing better to do as a sexy party girl in the 1980s, agrees. Thus, the rest of the friend group is roped in to attending.

Mark is there, mostly to be hurt whenever China talks about how much fun she's having sleeping with guys who aren't him. There's a dating couple who will show up now and again late in the movie but don't really matter. There are, of course, China and Sarah. And then-

Oh my god. I hadn't seen Twin Peaks yet when I first saw this movie, but oh my god, that's Bobby from Twin Peaks. Doing the same movement tics and vocal cadence that he did as Bobby from Twin Peaks. This is so distracting, you have no idea how much.

Anyway, the gang go to the waxwork house and speaking of Twin Peaks, they are greeted by a small man doing the Peter Dinklage bit from Living in Oblivion ("Make it weird, put a dwarf in it!") We don't have too much time to dell on that, though. The kids hang out for a bit so China has more time to sexually insult Mark, and then they are finally allowed into the wax museum itself.

The waxwork is, all in all, actually pretty cool! It's a bunch of scenes from "history", by which we mean classic pre-80s horror movies. There's the Mummy, there's the Invisible Man, there's Audrey II, there's Jack the Ripper. Keep in mind that all of these exhibits, not just Jack the Ripper, will later prove to have been taken directly from real life events. The sequel muddies this with horror movie scenes that take place in alternate dimensions in a cosmos that weirdly resembles Moorcock's Eternal Champion mythos, but we're not talking about the sequel right now.

I wish I could write a novelization of this movie and just go nuts on the worldbuilding. My speculations would make for an epic of Tolkienesque length.

Bobby from Twin Peaks is the first to go exactly where you're expecting: into an exhibit to get killed. He stumbles into a scene from the Wolf Man (which oddly enough looks a bit like the 2010 Wolf Man but they're obviously trying to do either the original Universal or Hammer version.) He bitches about this, how it must be a hologram and a super lame one at that because there are, like, no girls in bikinis or anything, just some dick in a cabin telling him to run for his life!

(Put a pin in that, by the way.)

He should have listened. But hey, someone has to be the first bit of canon fodder.

The Wolf Man is, of all people, John Rhys-Meyers! He pleads with Bobby to run, but it's too late- his transformation has begun! This is not a bad werewolf look, as practical effects go; he's got a snout and everything. The extremely long ears are what bother me. I felt this way in the Into the Woods movie as well- Johnny Depp just looked like a really sleazy rabbit. But this Wolf Man is a real deal monster, and while Bobby cowers after taking a flesh wound, he sets upon a pair of hunters who have tracked him down, ripping the younger one in half straight through the head.

As goofy as it is, Waxwork gets pretty damn gory.

The older hunter, who's clearly supposed to be Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, ends his reign of terror with a silver bullet. And when the wounded Bobby starts to transform as well, Van Helsing puts a stop to that with a second shot. Fade out to the waxwork exhibit, which now has a half-transformed victim beside the Wolf Man.

So much for Bobby. But eh, fuck 'im, he wasn't much of a character. China, on the other hand...

China notices a display with a particularly handsome villain. She takes a step over the velvet rope to take a closer look, and thus seals her fate.

(Side note: I don't know if I'd survive the movie or be first to get killed, because I would be going "But we're not supposed to touch the exhibits!" the whole time.)

China emerges into a Christopher Lee-worthy dark castle, wearing a white prom dress that's good enough period attire for this sort of movie. Thus begins the Dracula sequence, the first reason this movie has a very specific cult following.

As a teen in the '00s, I frequented web rings of blogs that reviewed old science fiction movies. There was one sight which was dedicated to cataloging every vampire movie the author could find- her favorites were The Lost Boys, Mr. Vampire and Interview with the Vampire- and she listed this as the single sexiest depiction of Dracula on film. Naturally, I spent the next several pre-streaming era years hunting down a VHS.

And who do we have playing sexy Dracula? In yet another 'you're not gonna believe this' casting choice, Miles "How Much Keefe" O'Keefe! The man known to all MSTies as Ator, and to other shlock aficionados as Tarzan! I have no idea why they cast him, but you know what? That barbarian warrior cleans up pretty damn well.

China is too stunned by her surroundings to quibble, and takes the part of a gothic heroine staying at the castle, whose fiance "unfortunately had to leave just now." Dracula introduces her to his lovely lady friends and his brooding adult son Stephan, and serves her a meal of steak tartar in salty red sauce, the suggestive setup for a rather gruesome payoff later.

In-character, Sarah is cornered in her room by Stephan, who says that his father wants her for himself and that he'd be banished from the castle if it was known he put his hands on her first- but before he can get past the fangs-out stage of his assault, she flees down the hallway, as far as she can run, until she reaches a room out of a Saw movie poster, half-dungeon and half-kitchen.

Her fiancee- that is, the fiancee in whatever real-life story she stepped into- is chained up, with one leg gruesomely cut down to the bone to serve to his captors and his own unknowing bride. China tries and fails to unchain him while he runs her through a quick explanation of what vampires are and how to kill him, just in time for Stephan to catch up with her.

China is surprisingly heroic in this scene, given how completely unsympathetic the movie had set her up to be. Son of Dracula goes down with a cross burned into his forehead, while she takes out a few Brides via wine bottles through the chest. When the chained up fiancee turns, though, she flees, sobbing, though the castle, her white gown covered in blood.

"Going somewhere, my beauty?" Dracula asks. She turns and looks into his eyes- and now it is too late. She falls under his hypnotic trance, and he lowers her to the floor, ending her human life in an ecstatic kiss.

It's a better way to go than she would have gotten in most other dumb horror movies of this era.

Mark- remember Mark?- has finally noticed that two of his friends (such as they are) have gone missing. He figures they must have gone off to hook up, but that doesn't feel right- for some reason, he knows that Bobby is the one man that China would never ever want to fuck. Sarah is less concerned, as she's focused on a statue of the Marquis de Sade looking like a sexy pirate. When Mark does get her to leave with him, he shoots his shot, but Sarah says that while he's a nice guy and she likes him a lot, she's looking for something...different.

Sarah's whole deal, as you may have guessed, is that she's a virgin at least in part because she can only be satisfied by BDSM, a desire she learned about through secretively reading de Sade but has no contemporary sex ed language to talk about. To the film's credit, this very Clive Barker plotline isn't used to make her unsympathetic or deserving of death, but rather to enhance the theme of Mark getting sexually rejected.

(Also, Mark paid his ESL housekeeper to write an essay for him, which was demanded by a history professor who was weirdly into Hitler. To his dismay, the essay read "I do not like dictators. They do the shouting and wear the small mustaches."

Well. She's not wrong.)

When China and Bobby fail to reappear the next day, Mark and Sarah go off to investigate. A mean cop tells them that lots of people have recently gone missing, and ends up investigating on his own- an investigation that ends with him being killed by the Mummy while the theme from Swan Lake plays in the background. (The title music in Universal's original Mummy and Dracula! The music I walked down the aisle to at my wedding! It's a little detail I liked.)

China's jock boyfriend also shows up to get killed by the Phantom of the Opera, while David Warner shakes his head in surprise to learn that he knew the character from a movie. "They'll make a movie of anything these days!" he says. However, I found myself focusing on the brief close-up where we saw that the Phantom had a mustache. A well-maintained mustache. Half-covered by a half-mask. Does he shave and maintain it on the deformed side, too? These are the kind of questions my novelization would go into.

Mark and Sarah get a quick rundown on everything from a professorly type of guy in a wheelchair who's basically the Criminologist from Rocky Horror. He tells them that via something something dark magic, victims are being given to evil men who are long dead to revive them and then something something destroy the world. For all I joke, it is my fondest dream to be this kind guy- a librarian who could give the protagonist exactly the book they need to fight Dracula.

Remember that pin I had you put in the Wolf Man pleading with Bobby to run? That brings up the question of what this movie considers "evil men". The Wolf Man really didn't want to kill anybody, but his body was taken over by the curse! And what about Audrey II? I'll grant that the plant sure was a dick, but was he a man? And what about all the ghouls in the zombie exhibit? The first time I watched this I also quibbled about the Marquis de Sade being here alongside actual murders, but I'll let that slide this time- the sheer scale of his imagination for evil was impressive enough, even if he didn't get to do most of it.

Mark and Sarah go to burn the waxwork down, but the temptation to fuck the Marquis is too much and Sarah just willingly goes right into his wax exhibit. Mark falls into the zombie exhibit, where it goes black and white in a pastiche of Night of the Living Dead as he fights off walking corpses and crawling disembodied hands.

Sarah has a better time. Now we see the second part of why this movie has a very specific cult reputation.

The Marquis de Sade, as portrayed in Waxwork, is dashing man with long dark hair, a puffy shirt open to reveal a very hair chest, wearing leather boots and gloves and always carrying a whip. He is entertaining a man (blonde and similarly good-looking, played by the director) whom he calls "your majesty", who will later to be revealed as Prince George of England, the future George IV. This struck me as absolutely hilarious.

For the prince's entertainment, he offers the sole virgin in his stable of beauties- Sarah, of course, stepping forward to have her arms affixed over her head proudly and eagerly. He leans in and whispers his intentions to Sarah- to whip her bloody, hand her over to George and his men for their enjoyment, then torture her to death- and she kisses him and swoons into her chains.

This scene is interesting because of how it's shot. There's no nudity in this movie- the only skin Sarah proceeds to expose is her back. I don't want to use terms like "male gaze" or "female gaze" because the former is a greater scale film theory term and the latter isn't really a term outside of tumblr, but this scene and the one with Dracula are presented as bodice rippers. Whether or not women went to see this movie, let alone enjoyed it, both scenes but especially the one with Sarah and de Sade are portrayed as female sexual fantasies. We don't see much of Sarah's body, but we see many close-ups of her face, perspiring and biting her lip as she waits for each sting of the whip.

Britain's "Video Nasties" list from 1984 banned many gory horror movies as obscene. Waxwork has far less gore than Evil Dead or Bay of Blood. As far as I know, it has never been banned under any obscenity laws.

By the time Mark (remember Mark?) gets out of his exhibit and into Sarah's, we are told that she has taken more whipping than any other woman the Marquis has ever seen, and enjoyed every bit of it. Mark saves her, but she pushes him away and runs back to the Marquis, kneeling at his foot and grasping at his boot. No, she protests, she wants to stay here! Smirking at the polo-clad dork from the future, de Sade said the line that dropped my jaw to the floor when I first saw this in my impressionable youth.

"Don't be angry just because she had her first orgasm at the end of a whip and not by your touch!"

Somehow not shriveling up and dying from that insult, Mark persuades Sarah that they should go because this setup did kill their friends and Your Mind Makes it Real and ugh, fine, Sarah will go back and save the world if she really has to. de Sade promises Mark that they'll meet again, though. ("How much did the Marquis de Sade know about this whole time and/or dimension traveling thing?" is another great question I would have expounded on in my novelization.)

But the kids have not yet saved the day, and their two friends from the very beginning are sacrificed in their places. The stars are right, the sacrifices have been made, and it's time for all the monsters and assorted villains to come to life and something something destroy the world! Thankfully, backup has arrived in the form of the wheelchair-bound expert from before and a while gang of his elderly and heroic friends, including Mark's totally-not-Alfred butler. Let the big chaotic fight scene commence!

Blood sprays left and right. Mark kills a zombified former friend, and weeps when his butler kills the vampirized China. Sarah tosses the small minion guy right into Audrey II. Dracula gets perhaps the lamest death onscreen he's ever had, surpassing even Scars of Dracula where he was randomly hit by lightning.

And the Marquis de Sade, who apparently is quite the swashbuckler, is flitting around with rapier and whip, having a grand old time. (At least it's better than what he supposedly did during the storming of the Bastille...) He beats Mark easily in combat, but makes the mistake of doing a gloating monologue before driving his blade through the boy's throat, giving Sarah the chance to break his spine with an ax. Let's hope Mark appreciates the sacrifice.

David Warner still must be confronted, however. Mark demands to know why he wants to destroy the world, and he smiles and responds "Somebody has to."

I guess you can't argue with that.

The elderly gentlemen give their lives to kill Warner, and the whole building goes up in flames. The only survivors are Mark, Sarah and a crawling disembodied hand who is off to set up the events of the sequel. Mark and Sarah embrace, but nothing more, at least not until the sequel.

Is Waxwork good? No. Is it scary? Some of the gory bits did make me wince. Is it funny? Sometimes on purpose, sometimes probably not on purpose. Is it offensive? We see a brief glimpse of what looks like a very racist tableau with an evil witch doctor or something, the role of the small minion is not exactly a great part, and China and Sarah were plucked right from the virgin-whore archetype with only somewhat more depth.

But do I watch it, fascinated, as if it is an esoteric text containing the secret alchemical formula for gold? I sure do.

#horror movies #waxwork

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