While Waxwork has earned a bit of a reputation as a cult classic, it’s fan base is still definitely small, which is unfortunate. Zach Galligan and Deborah Foreman both do good work as square-jawed hero and virginal heroine, but Patrick Macnee and David Warner in particular steal the show. It’s as smart as it is gruesome, as funny as it is scary, it’s classy and campy in equal doses. Waxwork is one of the better low budget outputs of the late 1980’s. It did very little to recapture the charm of this film though. The movie ends with something that viewers must have taken as a cliffhanger because Waxwork spawned a sequel, Waxwork II: Lost in Time, again directed by Anthony Hickox. All the wax monsters come to life, emerge from their exhibits and begin to attack what’s left of our heroes, but the primary focus is on a sword fight between Mark and the Marquis de Sade. The finale is great, though, bringing everything together in a surprisingly explosive climax for such a low budget movie. He failed, and it’s now up to Mark to stop Lincoln from unleashing a Madame Tussauds apocalypse. The film pads on mythology as it builds to its conclusion, with Mark visiting Sir Wilfred (Patrick Macnee) who tells Mark that his grandfather devoted his life to keep this very thing (wax figures running amok and taking over the world, apparently) from happening. In all likelihood, it was probably this aspect of the film and the inclusion of de Sade that got Hickox the job directing Hellraiser III. And she doesn’t want that fantasy ruined for her. She’s trapped in a fantasy, not a nightmare, even if it’s self-destructive. When Mark appears to save her, she does not want to be saved and refuses to even try and remember who Mark is, at least for a moment. When it comes to a head, she’s on her knees with de Sade announcing that he is going to whip her to death, and Sarah is begging him to do it. He represents everything that Sarah keeps deep down, every urge she won’t let herself feel. He’s the face of pleasure and pain intertwined, in fact, he’s where the term sadism originated from. He was famous for sexual liberation so extreme that it frequently resulted in death. Sarah is completely taken, even smitten, with the Marquis de Sade. Yet with Sarah, it’s not a classic literary monster that captures her attention, but a monster of historical significance. The sex-driven China is captivated by the Count, even as a wax figure, and so she steps in to get a better look. Most of the characters see something in a particular exhibit in the waxwork that lures them into the world of that monster. She plays to that repression, what it really means, and what hidden desires might be lurking just underneath it. But Hickox uses her to explore that very character type and what it means. At first glimpse she’s almost a stock character. She is in a lot of ways the typical repressed virgin. Where Waxwork gets really interesting, though, is in the characterization of its heroine, Sarah (played by Deborah Foreman). For such an FX-heavy production, it’s impressive to see that everything from the werewolves down to the man-eating plants appear to be handled with equal care. Decapitations and eviscerations abound, as well as a very inventive use of a wine rack, and Keen handles these sequences just as well as the monsters. Generally a horror film with a more fantasy-based premise will shy away from gore, but Waxwork has no interest in doing that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |