Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)

Directed: Georg Fenady

Screenplay: Jameson Brewer

Cast: Ray Milland as Harry Flexner; Elsa Lanchester as Julia Hawthorn; Maurice Evans as Inspector Daniels; John Carradine as Claude Dupree; Louis Hayward as Tim Fowley; Patric Knowles as Mr. Southcott; Broderick Crawford as Amos Burns; Shani Wallis as Laurie Mell; Mark Edwards as Sergeant Michael Hawks; Lisa Lu as Madame Yang; Steven Marlo as Karkov; Nicole Shelby as Margaret Collins

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A film produced by Bing Crosby of all people, Terror in the Wax Museum if anything feels like a throwback to the horror films of the past, fitting the time in the seventies when nostalgia brought to us films about classic Hollywood, and stars of the past returned for films and television roles. Terror… is a great example of this, just looking at the cast from the history of Universal horror films alongside others, in which Ray Milland (Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945)), John Carradine (countless horror films over the decades) and Elsa Lanchester (the Bride of Frankenstein) are among the leads.  

Set at a wax museum in the 1890s, at a transition point to a new owner, its original owner Claude Dupree (Carradine) is murdered by Jack the Ripper, one of his exhibits at a morbid museum depicting infamous murderers. His niece and her guardian (Elsa Lanchester) appear afterwards, and what this becomes is a sedate gothic period drama with a murder whodunit at its heart, as more people die over the time afterwards. Regardless of the film’s overall quality, there are highlights here, such as Lanchester herself, the moment she appears as a character catching the eye as a performer; at times detestable in her greed but nonetheless compelling to watch, the idea of bringing an older actor to a film is seen as good thing when it is someone like Lanchester who can give some energy to the material regardless of the size or position of role. It also has its eccentricities, such as poor Karkov (Steven Marlo), a disabled deaf-mute, created through facial prosthetics, who served his late owner and plays for once the sympathetic outsider who is likable. Clearly playing to being the monster of the film, only to be a lovely soul in a story where the monster is something more human, he is a character who we could have had more screen time with.

Beyond this, this is dry and dialogue heavy, exposition based rather than character driven, and Terror in the Wax Museum will be a struggle for many even who like classic horror cinema. It presents a morbid idea at its heart of note – we will have a wax museum on axe murderer Lizzie Borden that packs the public, but not those who helped save lives – but this is within a film which struggles with its pacing, very static and visually straightforward presentation barring one dream sequence in slow-mo. Less said about the segment in the Limehouse area of London the better, which plays into Chinese stereotypes of the “Dragon Lady” and making jokes about chopsticks. The only thing worth mentioning is the actress in the role herself, Lisa Lu, who was born in 1927 and was still in roles as far as Crazy Rich Asians (2018) onwards in her eighties and nineties. She is someone I only encountered one in a while, in a film like this in a thankless and brief role, but Lu belongs to a long list of Chinese and Chinese-American actors, unsung voices, who in a case like hers stretches decades between American television shows and cinema in terms of pop culture as an actress, which is someone to at least pay respect to.

Terror in the Wax Museum in general is undermined by how it casually wanders on in its short length, only over ninety minutes, with knowledge of how we know where the film is going, that it is either a supernatural killer wax statue mystery or a more mortal culprit, but the cast are oblivious to what we know until the final moments. It offers pleasures, and some of the attempts to recreate Victorian London do work, from the outside stages to the morbid songs of one female pub singer, but this does feel like a work not succeeding at all.