DVD LINER SUMMARIES

In the wicked performance that crowned him the movie's master of the macabre, Vincent Price plays a renowned wax sculptor plunged into madness when an arsonist destroys his life's work. Unable to use his flame-scarred hands, he devises a new--and murderous--way of restocking his House of Wax. The sweet dread and sheer fun of this creepy classic, co-starring Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones and Charles Bronson and directed by Andre de Toth, had its roots in a Warner Bros. chiller from 20 years before: Mystery of the Wax Museum, starring Lionel Atwill as the wax-wielding madman and Fay Wray as a potential victim. Directed by Michael Curtiz and shot in a chillingly effective early two-color Technicolor process, it and its spooky remake offer you a delicious double-dip in a paraffin bath of terror.

Arctic researchers discover a huge, frozen spaceling inside a crash-landed UFO, then fight for their lives after the murderous being (a pre-"Gunsmoke" James Arness) emerges from icy captivity. Will other creatures soon follow? The famed final words of this film are both warning and answer: "Keep watching the skies!"

"It was an evil house from the beginning, a house that was born bad." The place is the 90-year old mansion called Hill House. No one lives there. Or so it seems. But please do come in. Because even if you don't believe in ghosts, there's no denying the terror of The Haunting. Robert Wise returned to psychological horror for this much admired, first screen adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Four people come to the house to study its supernatural phenomena. Or has the house drawn at least one of them to it? The answer will unnerve you in this "elegantly sinister scare movie. It's good fun" (Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies).

Of these four titles, House of Wax is the most joyfully macabre. Comparing it to the Curtiz prototype, which is easy to do since Mystery of the Wax Museum is included on the flipside of the House of Wax DVD, you'll notice that De Toth turned everything up to 11 while remaining structurally faithful to the apparently beloved original; as indicated by the correlative shift from a Voltaire dummy in Mystery to a John Wilkes Booth dummy in House, things went from cerebral to visceral. De Toth additionally profits from the casting of Vincent Price, whose whiskers copy the Van Gogh-/Dürer-/Dali-influenced look of Mystery counterpart Lionel Atwill but whose countenance comedically screams artiste! where Atwill's might lend itself better to Russian nobility. What you don't expect is De Toth's modernization, if you will, to keep from spilling over into the time period of the basic premise (first concocted for the stage by Charles Belden), yet House of Wax actually takes place a couple of decades before the 1933-set Mystery of the Wax Museum, a film whose Prohibition parallels, if laying fertile ground for bootleg humour, feel less at home than do House's corseted lasses, hansom cabs (glimpsed briefly in the opening minutes of Mystery, granted), and other Ripper-era visuals that forecast doom.

De Toth's film is of course bursting with 3-D gimmickry, such as a paddleball sideshow act and a bust of Charles Bronson's (née Buchinsky) head that's thrust out at us (Bronson appears as Price's deaf-mute assistant!), but I think House of Wax would still leave a deeper psychic imprint than Mystery does without these in-your-face touches. When, for instance, the wax sculptor (Igor in Mystery, Jarrod--and all people named Jarrod are scoundrels--in House) and his business partner have an altercation that leads Igor's associate to torch the wax museum in Mystery, it comes down to insurance money, but the same scene in De Toth's hands gains the rich subtext of the plebeian's resentment of all things cultured: Jarrod's arsonist takes glee in melting his prized statues, every match lit to scorn artistic pride. (The way this prologue predicts Price's relationship with the commerce-focused founder of AIP Samuel Z. Arkoff is also difficult to miss.) Photographed, like the previous Curtiz-Atwill collaboration Doctor X, in two-tone Technicolor, Mystery of the Wax Museum is not without its drawing cards (at the very least, it intrigues as one of the earliest attempts at combining genres), though it's nowhere near as fun as its eventual update.

Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World was improved upon twentysomething years later, too, by a down-and-dirtier approach, but it doesn't pale in comparison to John Carpenter's The Thing so much as it offers a respectable podling alternative--it's a baby-picture in a scrapbook, or one of Dr. Carrington's (Robert Cornthwaite) fresh-sprouted organisms, intriguing for the fact of what it will become. Although those exclusively familiar with the Carpenter reimagining may find themselves disappointed that the body-snatching intrigue is nonexistent, that Nyby's "Thing" (James Arness) takes on the corporeal form of a Frankenstein redux, or that it's not a penis-waver, welcoming of women to diffuse the testosterone-heavy mix, Nyby brings a terseness to the proceedings that's almost preferable to Carpenter's protraction, and The Thing from Another World has an unmistakable anti-communist bent (Carrington is practically dressed like a Cossack as he acts as a human shield between the U.S. troops and the alien, pleading to the former that the Thing's wisdom is simply beyond American comprehension just before it beats the crap out of him) that's dated but that heightens the picture nonetheless. (The Thing's brooding doesn't really cohere into anything beyond pure nihilism.) If Nyby, betraying fondness for eye-level angles and overlapping dialogue, is a filmmaker in the Hawks mold to a self-concealing degree, remember that he was Hawks' editor on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Red River, and The Big Sky and likely found his shooting style through osmosis.

Another modest film that was later perverted into Hollywood pageantry, Robert Wise's The Haunting, based on the Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House, invalidated Jan De Bont's 1999 remake before cameras even rolled on it, so inferior is De Bont to Wise and so bloated was De Bont's budget for a novel Wise adapted on the cheap without having to sacrifice pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, to say that Wise's The Haunting is better than De Bont's The Haunting damns the Wise picture to faint praise; to be sure, the source material contains characters more tolerable on the page as well as a subjective narrative that is only deceptively cinematic, leading, in Wise's compulsive fidelity, to awkward passages in which we hear the troubled heroine's (Julie Harris) guilty interior monologue. That Psycho got away with a similar conceit goes to show that some pictures achieve alchemy and some do not.

Though a contraption built for pre-Information Age audiences film can overcome a jaded viewer, the aggravating expositional banter (Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson) claims that people are quick to blame environmental factors for mysterious occurrences because we're always searching for the simplest explanation, but isn't attributing the weirdness in our lives to paranormal meddling ever the least taxing interpretation?) and baffling tides of calm and hysteria that ebb and flow throughout The Haunting deter involvement, making the film's assets (gorgeous cinematography, one or two fabulous set-pieces) that much more difficult to appreciate in context.

The House of Wax/Mystery of the Wax Museum platter also sports the Warner Pathe "Camera on the World" newsreel "Round-the-Clock Premiere: Coast Hails 'House of Wax'" (2 mins.): Ronald Reagan, Shelly Winters, and a chained man in a gorilla suit (escorted by Bela Lugosi himself) are among the photographed attendees to the film's unveiling--no Vincent Price, however, unless he was the one wearing that monkey suit. House of Wax's theatrical trailer rounds out the disc; seeing as how Mystery of the Wax Museum was considered lost until the 1960s, perhaps viable supplementary material for it is in commensurately short supply.

The Thing from Another World DVD features the film's theatrical trailer in a fuzzy dupe that doesn't impress. For competitive extras, I refer thee to The Haunting, with its comprehensive omnibus commentary by Wise, screenwriter Nelson Gidding, and actors Harris, Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, and an uncredited Johnson. His voice weakened by age, Wise nevertheless evinces an aptitude for the yak-track, but it's Harris who deserves a gold star for admitting that she was battling depression during production and felt isolated from her ironic co-stars for taking the picture seriously. A still gallery, The Haunting's trailer, a cast and crew listing, and an altogether feckless text-based summary of the horror genre ("Things That Go Bump in the Night") cap off the disc.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
88/77 minutes
MPAA
PG/Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English Dolby Surround/English Mono
French Mono,
Spanish Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Spanish
DVD-10
Region One
Warner

Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada
or Compare Prices

DVD VITALS:
Running Time
87 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Spanish
DVD-5
Region One
Warner

Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada
or Compare Prices

DVD VITALS:
Running Time
112 minutes
MPAA
G
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English Mono,
French Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Warner

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Published: August 4, 2003