HOUSE OF WAX (1953) Commentary Track

Mike: 00:01:32

You know, we started this so long ago. We were still in a free country when we started this series.

Cody: 00:01:36

I too remember: 1994

Mike: 00:01:40

Wait, what movies came out in: 1994

Cody: 00:01:42

Cody Candyman. I'm not actually sure if that's true.

Mike: 00:01:48

But you said it with such gravitas.

Cody: 00:01:51

I knew I had to commit. That was. That was all I knew. I'm looking this up. Hold on, please.

Mike: 00:01:59

Jurassic Park.

Cody: 00:02:00

candy men. Candyman came out: 1992

Jamie: 00:02:08

So you picked the one year there could be no candy man.

Cody: 00:02:12

Yeah, yeah. When was the first leprechaun? When? Please save me, leprechaun.

Mike: 00:02:16

When was the first leprechaun?

Jamie: 00:02:19

The first leprechaun was like 89, man.

Cody: 00:02:21

1993.

Mike: 00:02:23

Really?

Cody: 00:02:23

1993 was the very first leprechaun.

Jamie: 00:02:26

Seems too late to be trying out the leprechaun. Yeah, and we should have known better.

Cody: 00:02:30

But it kind of makes sense that they went to the hood so fast. Right? Because that seems like a very 90s way of handling your franchise.

Jamie: 00:02:36

But that's speed. Running in space so quickly.

Mike: 00:02:40

But wasn't in space. Was the fourth.

Cody: 00:02:43

Okay, so it was Leprechaun 2. 94, Leprechaun 3, 95, Leprechaun 4 in space 97. And then they went to the hood. I thought was the other way around.

They went to the hood in: 2000

Jamie: 00:02:57

Oh yeah, Leprechaun.

And the hood was the soft reboot because technically that does not take place in the same continuity as the other ones because the leprechaun has been imprisoned in the hood for like 100 years.

Cody: 00:03:08

Yeah, it's a different leprechaun.

Mike: 00:03:10

You could make the argument all leprechauns in that universe are look exactly the same.

Jamie: 00:03:15

So they're all work Davis and they're.

Cody: 00:03:17

All assholes for some reason. My. As soon as you said all leprechauns, my mind auto filled that to all leprechauns go to heaven.

And I'm just imagining the crossover of all dogs and all leprechauns going to heaven.

Jamie: 00:03:27

If Box Office Pulp has an official stance we want to take, it's all vampires go to hell. All leprechauns go to heaven.

Cody: 00:03:35

Yeah.

Mike: 00:03:35

Would Roddy Dangerfield still star in All Leprechauns Go to Heaven?

Cody: 00:03:40

I think he was just in Rover Dangerfield.

Mike: 00:03:42

Incidental character though.

Jamie: 00:03:44

Like I said, you're thinking of Rover Dangerfield. Yeah, that's.

Mike: 00:03:46

Yeah, I was, I was. I could picture him as a dog. That's the problem.

Cody: 00:03:50

Thank God you made that mistake, Mike. So everyone's gonna be thinking that you're an idiot instead of me for saying that Candyman came out in 94.

Mike: 00:03:57

Woo.

Cody: 00:03:57

Really saved my ass.

Jamie: 00:03:58

Get your together, Mike.

Cody: 00:03:59

Oh, I know man. Ah, anyways, I knew he was gonna.

Jamie: 00:04:02

Be R rated once I had a.

Cody: 00:04:04

Really good intro there. Damn it, Jamie.

Mike: 00:04:06

Yes.

Cody: 00:04:06

Stop me. Welcome to Box Office Pulp. What if we just got sadder every time we introduced the show?

Mike: 00:04:11

I mean, I think we do get sadder, but just it's eternalized.

Cody: 00:04:15

Anyways, welcome to Box Office Pulp, your one stop podcast for movies, madness, moxie, and tonight, the Wax shenanigans return in one of the finest moments in wax history, in my opinion. Here I'm your host, Cody. Joining me today for this bop in a movie are my co host, Mike. Say hello, Mike.

Mike: 00:04:31

One of my favorite pieces of trivia from this film is is that the first person to ever die by the electric chair did not actually look at all like Charles Bronson and actually had a very big bushy beard. Which means it was decided that no, Charles Bronson definitely looks like somebody who would have died by the electric chair.

Jamie: 00:04:50

More so than the person who actually.

Mike: 00:04:52

Died by the electric chair.

Cody: 00:04:54

I mean, that's just the way history rules. We don't know what anyone historically really looks like. Abraham Lincoln.

Jamie: 00:04:59

No.

Cody: 00:05:00

That guy, five foot three, Cody.

Jamie: 00:05:02

Yeah.

Mike: 00:05:02

Now, are you saying that even if there are pictures of the person, we still don't know what they look like historically?

Cody: 00:05:07

Oh, you believe in photos. That's cute.

Mike: 00:05:10

Oh, no. Well, you've been on 4chan again, haven't you?

Cody: 00:05:16

Also joining me today, Jamie. Tell me, Jamie, you don't believe in the conspiracy that is big photograph, do you?

Jamie: 00:05:22

Well, I don't really know what I believe in anymore, considering since the last time we recorded a commentary, I was caught up in a tragic fire which has now prevented me from the use of my podcasting hands.

Cody: 00:05:36

No, it's a tragedy.

Jamie: 00:05:38

I can't even hold the microphone anymore.

Cody: 00:05:41

What a world. What a cruel world.

Mike: 00:05:43

It doesn't explain the wheelchair, though. I think you just don't want to walk.

Jamie: 00:05:46

It's going to make it very difficult whenever I get down the stairs. I'll figure that out later.

Cody: 00:05:51

I'm going to save my rants about Mike disrespecting people in wheelchairs for later.

Mike: 00:05:55

I'm saying Jamie has the use of her legs.

Jamie: 00:05:59

The wheelchair remains Mike.

Mike: 00:06:01

Also, this is going back to the photograph thing, but you think we could try to make a right wing person have the crazy argument that photographs are too woke?

Cody: 00:06:09

Right wing people believe that Tom Hanks is a pedophile who drinks the blood of children to stay eternally young. They'll believe anything.

Mike: 00:06:17

Wait, that's not true.

Cody: 00:06:18

I mean, have you looked at Tom Hanks? It's not like he looks like he's 30 years old.

Mike: 00:06:21

Have you seen Colin?

Cody: 00:06:23

Is this like a Dorian Gray situation? What are you implying?

Mike: 00:06:25

I don't know. I just really wanted to bring up the existence of Colin Hanks.

Cody: 00:06:31

I'd like to imagine that you just have a little notebook that you're drawing a heart over his face on right now.

Mike: 00:06:35

No one does that.

Cody: 00:06:37

Mike Harts, Fargo and then just a lot of pink hearts.

Mike: 00:06:41

Well, that's just true.

Cody: 00:06:43

It's a good show. It's a good show. Great cast, Irwin.

Jamie: 00:06:45

They always do it. Corrupted by the wickedness of the world.

Cody: 00:06:48

Are you talking about Chet, Chad?

Jamie: 00:06:49

What was the other one is ever talking about Chet?

Cody: 00:06:53

I was.

Mike: 00:06:54

He's dead.

Jamie: 00:06:55

I'm glad that we're recording this in the same room for the first time so Mike can finally see the unnecessary physicality I bring into any kind of funny voice I do.

Mike: 00:07:05

Oh, you're going to be. You're going to have to unfortunately witness the same. Hopefully I don't do start doing Palpatine.

Cody: 00:07:10

Both of you have to snitch on each other to me, if I'm talking and you're doing jerk off motions because that's going to hurt my self esteem.

Mike: 00:07:17

I think it's assumed for people listening to this podcast what a horrible opening this is.

Cody: 00:07:23

I had a good one and we weren't recording. So now it's just this that every.

Mike: 00:07:27

Joke we do involves a jerk off motion.

Cody: 00:07:29

I'm still just bummed that you revealed the curtain that this is a bad intro. Maybe we could have tricked him into thinking this was an okay one. Oh, well.

Mike: 00:07:36

Oh, no.

Cody: 00:07:37

Oh, well.

Jamie: 00:07:38

The precious Bop confidence shattered our sponsors.

Mike: 00:07:44

Yeah.

Cody: 00:07:44

All right, let's just get into it tonight. It's been a while, I know, but we're finally back with more wax.

I feel like I say this every two months and just surprise people with more wax movies.

Mike: 00:07:54

People are gonna be really confused because we haven't released any of the episodes we record because we're banking them, but for us, there's like three months between recordings. Dude, God are gonna hear them like a week apart eventually.

Cody: 00:08:06

And yeah, just know you're gonna see us change. Completely old and wizened throughout the recording of this. It's been years talking about wax.

Jamie: 00:08:14

I feel like this is how recording a season of the Last Drive in is like.

Cody: 00:08:18

he crown jewel of wax movies.: 1953

We planned on doing this literally two and a half months ago. And I know this because tonight's drink I started making two and a half months ago.

So I'm very curious to see what all that extra time has done to my concoction. Folks, if you want to drink along with me, you don't actually have to wait that long. This was a choice on my part.

So if you want to drink, it's called the Joan of Arc. The ingredients you're going to need is 1.5 ounces of chamomile infused Irish whiskey. You're going to need a half ounce of honey liqueur.

You're going to need a half ounce of lemon juice, a quarter ounce of cucumber juice, three quarters of an ounce of rich honey syrup. If you haven't made honey syrup before or rich honey syrup before. You take two parts honey to one part water.

You heat up that water to like, a boiling point, put it into the honey honey, stir it around, It'll dissolve the honey and make it, you know, a nice, easy mix to dump in Anything. Mix all of those ingredients.

I put mine into a liter bottle that was coated with wax and then sealed it and left it for two and a half months so it would pick up characters of the wax. When I drink this thing normally, I do it for a week. So I'm curious to see what impact over two months has on this stuff. It's going to be exciting.

Jamie: 00:09:35

Cody, that was a bad idea. I usually don't interrupt these, but that was a bad idea.

Cody: 00:09:39

Maybe. Maybe this is why. This is food grade wax. This is food grade wax. It comes directly from bees.

Jamie: 00:09:46

Anyways, I like the term food grade wax. It seems like an oxymoron to me.

Cody: 00:09:51

I mean, I don't think there's a lot of people out there eating whole wax or anything, but this should not kill me.

Mike: 00:09:55

They are now.

Cody: 00:09:56

Anyways, folks, the wax part's optional. I just like it for the mouthfeel. Once you've got all those things mixed together, you're gonna top that off with 2 ounces of champagne.

So I have this in my hands now. It's been a little bit. I'm gonna top this off a little bit more champagne. Also, wish I had popped the cork inside the room while recording.

Could add some great asmr. Also, that's a lie. I didn't get one of the bottles that has the pop top. This is just a screw top. I cheaped out on the champagne.

Jamie: 00:10:21

We wouldn't have known either disappointments without you, Cody.

Cody: 00:10:24

I have to be honest. All right, let's give this a sip. Roo. The problem here is since I have topped this with champagne, that long sip was nothing but champagne.

So I'm going to get to the bottom of this drink halfway through the commentary, and all of a sudden it's going to be like, what have I done?

Jamie: 00:10:38

You'll hear it. I am now drunk.

Cody: 00:10:40

It'll be the intermission when the ping pong balls are going. All of a sudden you'll just hear a change in the timbre of my voice. All right, so theoretically, that's not poison, folks.

If you want to drink along, maybe it's good. I don't know, maybe you just like champagne. That's good to drink, too.

But go ahead and make that drink and come back, continue the show, and then we leave for another three months and come back to finish the podcast.

Mike: 00:10:59

No, we're doing it. We're doing it.

Cody: 00:11:01

We're making progress. It's happening. I don't think completing a podcast makes us good people or not in this day and age.

Mike: 00:11:08

I Think so? No, the bar is very low.

Cody: 00:11:11

That means Joe Rogan's great God, he.

Mike: 00:11:14

Doesn'T do a podcast. He does a radio show he calls a podcast.

Jamie: 00:11:17

I feel. I have felt very bitter about that point for the past decade.

Cody: 00:11:20

Oh, my God. I'm gonna move us past this because I feel like we're getting to a semantics battle that's gonna take 40 minutes.

Jamie: 00:11:26

Good only for House of Wax.

Cody: 00:11:30

All right, folks, do you have: 1953

I will not be disappointed if you just listen to our voices without Vincent Price on your screen. It will be better if you can see that handsome, handsome man, though.

Mike: 00:11:48

And the commentary will be a lot better than this opening, we hope.

Cody: 00:11:52

I mean, there's no promises in life.

Mike: 00:11:54

We got to believe. Trust the wax.

Cody: 00:11:57

All right, Mike, would you do us the honors and count us down?

Jamie: 00:12:00

Yes.

Mike: 00:12:00

All right. One, two, three.

Cody: 00:12:06

Waxening. Go. All right, folks, I have a lot of movie facts, and normally I just run through them as fast as I can the first five minutes of the movie.

But a majority of my notes now are just tied up into the people that made this film. So I'm going to spread them out a little bit.

Jamie: 00:12:23

Tied up in wax, you might say.

Cody: 00:12:25

Ah, clever. Let's start with the basics. This was directed by Andre De Toth.

Toth lost an eye during a childhood accident, which makes this movie's accomplishments in 3D amazing to me. They took a guy who could not see 3D and told him, hey, do you want to make one of the first 3D movies?

And he actually was the guy who wanted to do that. He volunteered for the position because he viewed it as a mathematical challenge.

He had a strong understanding of how the human eye worked and perceived depth, and he was able to calculate all the shots to give optimal 3D effects, mixing depth of field and more gimmicky actions like the paddle ball section at the intermission. Again, this guy did it without depth perception. He just knew the math so well. He's like, yep, that one's good. Put in the can.

Jamie: 00:13:14

And in the years after, he actually spoke at length about it, his feelings on 3D and where it went wrong, which I think are very prescient, because everything he said, you could say about the 3D resurrection that we lived through after Avatar, which is because he couldn't see the 3D he was only doing it when it was necessary to sell the gimmick or to create depth of field, to get you pulled into the movie and feel like the movie was this, like entire living world in front of you you could walk into. And he swears that, like Beethoven not being able to hear his own music, he somehow was able to make the 3D better not knowing it was there.

Cody: 00:14:04

Something I learned about Beethoven recently was he was using an early version of bone conduction to actually hear the music as he played.

He had a metal wire that went from the piano to his mouth that he would bite down onto, and the vibrations from the piano would basically tell him if he was hitting the right notes. Fun fact and an aside. I don't think there's a Beethoven wax figure inside of this place at all.

Mike: 00:14:26

There should be. So.

Cody: 00:14:29

demy Award for co writing the: 1950

Just those two credits alone would make you, you know, Hollywood royalty.

Mike: 00:14:53

It's wild.

Cody: 00:14:55

Also, and this is not related to anything at all, but it's just such a weird fact I wanted to mention. He was married seven times, including an eight year stint with Veronica Lake. So that this guy, he. He had a crazy life.

Jamie: 00:15:10

Well, that's a fascinating detail I found out from actually an old Fangoria interview from the 80s that I found archived on their website. The top actually got his.

His start as a teenager in the art world doing a one man sculpture and painting show, which was apparently booed out of town the first night. And he was so upset that he destroyed all of his own creations and never sculpted or painted professionally again.

I wonder why Mr. Of the Wax Museum spoke to him so much. Because remaking that was entirely his idea.

Cody: 00:15:57

Yeah, I'm torn. I want to keep going into the screenplay stuff. Oh, go ahead.

Jamie: 00:16:04

Oh.

I was just gonna say the only reason he was in a position to request a movie of Warner Brothers is he was about to walk away from them when he was directing a movie, I believe, called Springfield Rifle with Gary Cooper, where they wanted Cooper to play the first ever undercover agent in a Western because people were already getting bored with westerns and the studio said, no, that's weird. You're not doing this. So he was going to walk, and if he walked, Gary Cooper would walk. So to get Them on everybody back down to the table.

They say, okay, pick your next movie. And he said, I want to remake Mystery of the Wax Museum.

Cody: 00:16:44

And I want to get into that too. Because if you looked at Warner brothers in the 40s and the first half of the 50s, they were very opposed to making horror films.

They did not make many at all. And that, that kind of explains how we got here. I always kind of wonder that, like, why the hell were they making House of Wax?

That is completely against grain for them. Anyways, we've got Vincent Price on screen right now. I'm sure we'll be talking about him very much throughout the entire thing.

Just great role from him too. You feel like he is actually in love with each one of these things he has sculpted, which sells the entire premise of the movie.

If he was callous about his own artwork or you didn't buy the chemistry between him and a lump of wax, this wouldn't go anywhere. To get back to our credits here, we've got a screenplay by Crane Wilbur.

it was readapted for film in: 1959

I think the Bat has been done a whole bunch of different times. So that was probably huge money in the bank for Crane Wilbur. Back to Price for a second. Here we have him as Henry Jared.

This movie would really lead to a career resurgence as a horror icon for Price.

After this, he would go on to make the Mad Magician, the Fly House on Haunted Hill, the Tingler, the Bat, House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, the Raven, Diary of a Madman, the Haunted Palace, Twice Told Tales, Last Mountain, Earth, the Mask of the Red Death, and more. I mean, there's a reason why when you go into Target right now, you can buy a Vincent Price action figure from Nika.

The guy is kind of horror royalty, Right. And I would say deservedly so. Every time he is in a movie, it's just an absolute treat.

I want more Price in everything I'm watching, even when he is the main character.

Mike: 00:18:54

And we were very close to not getting him as a horror actor or really a name actor in general. It's. He really had a choice between this and a particular play that he wanted to do. Yeah.

And he chose this even though he kind of wanted to do the play more. And he still.

And I think he spoke on kind of, he had regrets for not doing the play, but at the same time he said like other actors did and did a great job, but it meant absolutely nothing for their overall careers. It was just a thing they did once.

Cody: 00:19:32

Right.

Mike: 00:19:33

Meanwhile, I owe literally everything to doing House of Wax.

Cody: 00:19:39

And yeah, it's a solid point too, because if you look at Price's early career, throughout the 30s and 40s, it was a lot of serious dramatic roles. He did a lot of stage work. He was more of a serious actor than Paul Poorer. Icon. So lucky you asked for career changes.

Jamie: 00:19:57

Well, it's weird seeing him in movie, in like proto horror films like Leave her to Heaven, where it's like, very easily Vincent Price could have been the respectable, older, safe man in a horror movie. Not the horror icon, not the boogeyman. It's like even imagining a world with Vincent Price as a slightly different horror icon is very interesting.

Cody: 00:20:24

Yeah. Plus, I love old school horror where it's, hey, this is a famous actor. Let's put him in everything we possibly can.

You know, Vincent Price or any of the horror Hammer stars, you know, Christopher Lee, those kind of guys, obviously they got iconic roles that they came back to over and over again. Christopher Lee had his whole Dracula thing, he did the Mummy. But Vincent Price doesn't have a huge number of sequels throughout his career.

I'm struggling to think of any really, besides Phibes.

Jamie: 00:20:51

Technically, he played the Invisible man twice.

Mike: 00:20:54

Yeah, there we go. But that's actually kind of wild to me because he. I mean, Visible man was years and years before this. Yeah.

But it didn't result becoming a horror actor.

Jamie: 00:21:05

He's also like good guy, Invisible man and that. So it's still not quite the same. Yeah.

Which again, for a while, it's like it was in the cards for Price to be in horror, but as the guy fighting the monster, not the monster itself.

Cody: 00:21:20

Yeah, it's like a heel change, which works out for us.

But the larger point was, this is just fascinating to me because his charisma was so good in these roles that he became iconic in the genre itself just by being thrown into everything because the studio knew he was a bankable star. Not really the same way you'd see it done now.

So much like, you know, think of Freddy Krueger, you know, Robert Englund, great actor, obviously, and we all love him as Freddy and he's cameoed in a lot of things. He's had small roles in a lot of things. But that Freddy role is just so iconic that that's basically his whole career.

That's what you think of first and last. Bryce gets to be like a hundred different guys.

Jamie: 00:22:03

I think a key factor in that so many of those later roles were really building on the archetype he discovered in this movie, which is just being duplicitous and charming.

Cody: 00:22:16

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:22:16

Nobody can play the dude who is obviously the villain, who. You don't want to be the villain because he's so much fun. Quite like Vincent Price.

Cody: 00:22:24

He can have a little bit of murder as a treat. He's earned it.

Mike: 00:22:28

You. You kind of were glad he was murdering you in the middle of it. Like, oh, it's good for him that he's me. To me, like, that's why he.

Him and Corman work so well together in those type of roles, because if you look at something like House of Usher, you couldn't imagine another actor portraying that particular role in that particular movie and in that adaptation, because it takes what Price has to do it where you don't know where the character is coming from at any given moment.

Cody: 00:23:01

I would say with Corman, he knew exactly the tone to strike. With Price, that's why something like the Mask of the Red Death, where he's a very sadistic character, still works for me. Like, it's.

It's sadistic, but it's fun.

Pryce seems like he's having a fun time and kind of winking at the camera slightly, whereas something like Witchfinder General is a little bit more meaner spirited in my mind. And that one I don't enjoy as much.

Mike: 00:23:27

Yeah, that stuff's interesting just to see Price go, like, because Price did play a lot of heavies before House of Wax. They're just more traditional heavies, I think, probably just because of his height, honestly.

Cody: 00:23:40

Yeah.

It's amazing watching him in this movie around everyone else and they play up the fact that he looks like he's, you know, 8 inches taller than everybody around him.

Mike: 00:23:48

But, like, the fact he could kind of turn that on and be very vicious. But he didn't really go for it for every role. He only did it here and there in little bits.

Cody: 00:23:58

Yeah.

To interrupt from Vincent Price, I would just want to focus on the fire happening right now, which is one happening in beautiful Technicolor, and two is probably the more realistic portrayal of burning wax that we've seen out of all the wax movies so far.

Jamie: 00:24:15

And all the other ones, like precious moment figurines going up.

Cody: 00:24:18

Yeah, all the other ones, they have to really speed up the footage or have, like, heat guns in there. This. I'm pretty sure they basically lit a set on fire and filmed it.

Mike: 00:24:27

Yeah, this was one of the last things they did because they pretty much reused all the wax figures from the later House of Wax in the film. And this was also a thing where the fire immediately got out of control.

They had two small fires, and, yeah, it got a little unwieldy and then combined and then pretty much the set caught fire. A lot of this is actually being filmed while the fire department's arriving to put out the fire.

Price almost had, like, his eyebrows and job and like that.

Jamie: 00:25:03

You can watch this and watch Vincent Price almost die.

Mike: 00:25:06

But they knew that. But the tall knew if he didn't film anything, they were fucked. Like, the amount of money it would take to redo every single wax figure would.

Would pretty much put the movie out of production. So he just filmed all of them melting.

Jamie: 00:25:26

I'm gonna.

Cody: 00:25:27

I'm gonna get to the budget of the movie in a second here. But that's actually a huge factor in this film. It was incredibly expensive to make, but I'll get to that later. Sorry to cut you off.

Jamie: 00:25:37

Because of the need for all the deep focus they were doing for the 3D. There are no stunt people in this film. So, yeah, everyone who nearly dies are just the very expensive actors. They pay.

Cody: 00:25:50

Like that moment there where Price walks off screen to go get a bucket of water. Again, this is all on fire in real time.

So they probably had an actual bucket of water out there and some makeup applied to his face while he's off camera so he could run back in and finish the scene. It wasn't like they're swapping him for a stuntman right there. Stuff that could probably not happen again because it'd be too dangerous for anybody.

Mike: 00:26:15

I mean, this is insane shit to have your, like, lead actors doing.

Cody: 00:26:18

No, you wouldn't be able to insure someone to do this now. Like, unless you're Tom Cruise and you can just pay for your own insurance while you're jumping off the Roll Solace building. It's not happening.

Jamie: 00:26:28

You're basically dropping Vincent Price in the middle of a Japanese wrestling show. Survive the electric electrified pool, Vince.

Cody: 00:26:37

I mean, even in older films, they could cheat a little bit because they would have, you know, like, the little gas burners underneath the camera to give the impression that the flames are coming from everywhere. This is literally a house fire. They just stuck the guys in and let them have a fist fight.

Jamie: 00:26:50

Look at how close Price is to actual burning furniture.

Cody: 00:26:55

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:26:55

It makes me scared for him. Like nearly 100 years later.

Cody: 00:26:59

It's got to be like a thousand degrees inside of this place. I'm getting sucked into this. I'm going to keep giving off some of our movie facts.

Mike: 00:27:08

And there's like, this, like, stunt coming up. I think it's. It's insane to watch him, like, just walk around looking at things. This.

Fires that are getting bigger as you're watching him walk around and all this coverage out of goddamn control.

Cody: 00:27:28

It works so well too, because they managed to get solo shots. You know, basically every one of the mannequins falling apart. And from the little bit of intro.

Mike: 00:27:35

We got up and this right here, like, he goes through there and then that thing falls over. Like.

Cody: 00:27:41

Yeah, that's an insane stunt. That's wild. That's a crazy gag. But I was gonna say too. It sells the emotional impact of the film so much.

Two, that we get so many great shots of all of these wax figures melting away because they're basically friends and, you know, romantic figures to Vincent Price in this film.

So he has just watched all of his friends die for the sake of a greedy partner who wasn't willing to wait an extra month so they could sell the place and he could get a share back.

Jamie: 00:28:11

Honestly, it's wild saying this after we've seen a couple of these things burned to the ground.

But this is the best wax museum burning in any of these movies, I think, because you have an actual emotional attachment, if not to the figures themselves, into what they mean for.

Mike: 00:28:33

For a price here.

Jamie: 00:28:34

In any other wax museum movie, the museum burns at the end and it feels like a moral judgment on. On the sculpture, there's something both more. More interesting and also, like, just more up. And how in the realistic burning of the figures.

Mike: 00:28:54

Yeah, I mean, there's some. There's some amazing shots in there. Like Joan of Arc, pretty much her eyes hollow out at a certain point. I. I mean, that you.

You couldn't have planned it to melt that way. It's so perfect to jump to the.

Cody: 00:29:13

Action on screen for a second, though. I want to introduce. We've got Carolyn Jones right here as Kathy Gray.

s as Morticia addams from the: 1960

This was one of her earliest roles, and she was just really building steam as a star, which is honestly probably why her character isn't that central to the movie. Anyways, little fun fact for you at home. Enjoy that. There you go.

Jamie: 00:29:38

That's so fun seeing her character in this movie, which kind of feels like a primordial proto slasher, being an extremely early version of the blonde party girl archetype that we'd see cut to ribbons by slashers a hundred times in the 80s.

Cody: 00:30:01

It's funny you mentioned this is a proto slasher, though, because I was just thinking yesterday, this is, in my mind, very reminiscent of early Giallos. Yeah, I'm just thinking of it because of the colors. Because you watch something like Blood and Black Lace, visually that movie's arresting.

lick. And, you know, this was: 1953

So this was a pretty bold choice by Warner Brothers. Be like, we want this to be a marquee movie. We want it being 3D. We want it to be in color, which was.

Jamie: 00:30:37

It looks shocking to audiences. I mean, a lot of stuff in House of Wax does not look particularly startling or scary to modern audiences.

Even to, like, people in, like, the 70s and 80s. This seemed to be very old hat to them by some of the older coverage I've seen.

But like I mentioned Lever to Heaven earlier, that movie being a thriller where people die in it in color freaked people out the year it came out. So imagine just the fact that they made a horror movie with this much capital H, you know, horror imagery.

Like a guy, a deformed dude, stalking around people being boiled in wax in beautiful Technicolor. That had to be disturbing.

Mike: 00:31:25

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:31:26

Even to the crowds that were just going for a fun popcorn movie.

Cody: 00:31:29

And this is such a wonderful makeup, too. I mean, we would get more realistic burns, I guess, later on with. You have various things, Freddy Krueger whatnot.

But this is still a horrifying look. Yeah. Complete disfigurement. I mean, we're not supposed to know it's Vincent Price, but it's very obvious. It's pretty obvious.

The revenge plot makes total sense. So why would it be anyone else?

Mike: 00:31:50

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where if you wish they didn't show him and just. It was more like Jalo, where you see his hands, you see him from behind or something.

Cody: 00:31:59

Yeah, Just the black cloak and the hat.

Mike: 00:32:01

Yeah.

Cody: 00:32:02

Shadows.

Mike: 00:32:02

But, you know, you kind of. You also kind of want the monster guy walking around.

Cody: 00:32:06

But it gets a great early scare. I mean, because we are. It took a while to get this much setup done. We're 20 minutes in. We got an hour 10 left.

So I understand why they're like, okay, let's put a jolt in here.

Mike: 00:32:18

Yeah. Also, this really. This entire movie, but this scene in particular, this. This is post code, but it really, like, stretches it.

Jamie: 00:32:30

Yeah.

Cody: 00:32:31

So as long as we're talking about the look of the film, I'm going to jump over to the cinematography. So this was filmed by two different DPs. We had Bert Glennon and Peverell Marley.

get healthy again, again for: 1950

We just saw that guy actually thrown down and, you know, Pantomima hanging. The whole, you know, it's not totally in shadow. It's not just hinted at. We get to see his corpse right here.

Jamie: 00:33:11

Yeah.

Cody: 00:33:12

Fairly bold stuff. Anyway, sorry, back to Peverell. He was Cecil B. DeMille's cameraman for the most part, and he was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Suez in: 1938

And he's one of only six cinematographers with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that includes Hal Moore, Ray Renehan, Leon Shamroy, Pascal Wexler and Conrad Hall. There will be a test at the end of the episode, so make sure you remember those.

nated for two Academy Awards,: 1939

But Glennon worked with a whole bunch of famous directors, including John ford, Cecil B. DeMille and Raw Walsh.

His son, James Glennon, would grow up to be an accomplished cinematographer in his own right, filming the forest scenes for Return of the Jedi, assisting with RoboCop. And he was the DP for election and About Schmidt. Oh, and he also earned an epi. An Emmy for lensing Deadwood.

Jamie: 00:34:20

Oh, wow.

Cody: 00:34:21

Yeah. So I. I don't know which parts he filmed. Most of the movie was filmed chronologically, which is weird.

I'll get into that later when we talk about the editing. So I'm assuming most of the stuff we are watching now is.

Is probably already moving into Marley's work, But I'm not 100% sure on that, so don't quote me. Either way, they were blessed to have two of the greatest cinematographies cinematographers of their era working on this film.

Which again just adds to how prestige this picture was viewed within Warner Brothers. Just a weird, weird thing.

Mike: 00:35:01

It's just like a big lavish gothic production that is very old Hollywood, but also something that Hollywood will always kind of return to as being doing some kind of big lavish production.

Cody: 00:35:16

cause this movie is again old: 1953

You know, the firemen come in there with like water on a horse and I like that. When you're doing modern horror, it's just not as scary to do something in a contemporary setting.

Like it's hard to make people think like a modern day wax museum or convenience store is scary or if you have a cell phone, you know, any of that. It's just harder to make people think it's scary.

Whereas if you remove yourself and put it a couple years in the past, automatically it becomes easier to sell terror. I think psychologically for me it's probably because I look at this and I go, well, every year we're inventing more ways for people to connect.

Right now if someone broke into my house, the neighbors would probably hear it. I've got smoke detectors. If there's a fire, I could call them on my cell phone for help. I could go on my computer and like IM someone for help.

get help in a bad situation.: 1800

If someone attacks you, you just got to handle it yourself or die.

Mike: 00:36:34

Also I, I going into like a little bit more about like why this production was made specifically. This was a time where the suburbs were filling up a lot more.

There was a less vested interest probably in like urban environments and theater going had really started to slip in the early 50s, especially as TV became more prevalent.

There needed to be a reason for getting people to not just watch things on the screen at home and actually get out back to the theater, go back to the cities and stuff. And it's oh, interesting that it's pretty much an eternal rule that Hollywood will jump immediately to 3D to get people to go back to the theater.

Cody: 00:37:27

They had a couple different things. There was 3D, obviously we'll get More into that.

But around this time too, we had Cinemascope and the idea of, well, if you're watching on a little tiny square tv, wouldn't be cool if we had a theater that was gigantic and wrapped all the way around you. It feels innovative.

Mike: 00:37:46

Imax. Yeah.

Cody: 00:37:47

I'm just, I'm disappointed now because we're in the streaming era, which is essentially the same problem. Right. People just want to stay at home instead of go to the theater.

And theaters have not responded with the same enthusiasm that they had in the 50s for reviving the theatrical experience. The most you could say is, okay, well, now you could order a beer and a chicken sandwich at your theater. That's cool.

But most people don't want to spend the extra money for that. And sure, we have recliners, those are nice and comfy. But they haven't done anything about people being rude in theaters.

They haven't done anything to combat spoilers in theaters. The release windows are now so small that people just go, well, fuck it, I'll wait a month and I'll just watch this on digital.

Mike: 00:38:27

Yeah, They've done nothing to actually improve the theater going experience because back then, honestly, the.

As cliche as it sounds, there really weren't the same sort of problems people had going to the theater that we all have now of rude assholes and bad, you know, the screens, bad, the sounds crackling. Theaters were upkept at the time and now I can't even get my theater to put in a new bulb in the projector.

Jamie: 00:39:03

I also feel like studios take way more of a bite out of local theaters than they did back then. So that kind of, that kind of maintenance and upkeep and giving a shit of a local theater chain, you're just not going to see that anymore.

Cody: 00:39:17

I want to drink for just a second. I just love what we're watching right now.

Mike: 00:39:21

This is incredible.

Cody: 00:39:22

These, these foggy streets. There's a disfigured, cloaked man kind of limp chasing after you. It's such a nightmare thing.

Mike: 00:39:30

And it's. You don't see in Hollywood productions around that time at all, really.

Stuff you wouldn't see until like in probably the 60s with a lot of European and Italian cinema.

Cody: 00:39:43

Yeah, this is just beautiful.

Mike: 00:39:45

I love it.

Jamie: 00:39:46

felt in a weird way, like the: 1953

Oh yeah, I remember when, when scary movies looked like this. Now the, the depth of field they are able to pull off in this sequence is so breathtaking.

Cody: 00:40:28

Oh yeah. I can only imagine what this is like in a 3D theater and just thinking like, wow, you could probably actually feel how long the street is.

Also, I just love this little visual repeated pattern as they're running past all of these windows that have lights within them. So you get flick of darkness, flick of light and the person kind of being silhouetted as they cross each part of the building. It's a neat visual.

Mike: 00:40:52

Also a lot of like, neat, I don't know, storytelling things that you probably.

Honestly, if you watch a lot of old horror movies like this, you don't really see characters do smart characters like she takes her shoes off so she doesn't make sounds on the cobblestone street.

Jamie: 00:41:07

Yeah.

Mike: 00:41:07

You know, like they're little details but they add so much. Especially for what audiences were used to and used to. The way characters would be like a chase scene would literally.

Well, the only thing that's going to happen is two characters chase each other until the sequence is over.

Jamie: 00:41:24

They call somebody, calls somebody's name over and over again.

Cody: 00:41:28

This is excellent. Cat and mouse. All right, going through my list of credits because boy, we're really stretching this one out. The editing was done here by Rudy Fair.

Now that's a big name, not necessarily one that you're going to recognize, but his impact on film is undeniable. So I want to get into him more than I typically do most editors.

on the film Prizzy's honor in: 1985

So he was a power player in WB for decades and he held kind of an odd amount of power on this production. Jack Warner himself put Fehr on the job and told Fair the project needed to be finished five weeks after shooting was completed.

Fair agreed that that was possible, but told Warner that the movie would need to be shot in the same sequence as the script so he could edit the movie as the sequences were coming in. Not necessarily a revolutionary idea in modern think because look at all the Saw movies. That's essentially how they're done.

dule for all of those. But in: 1953

If you know anything about films, you know they're not filmed in the same order as the script because it'd be prohibitedly expensive. Right.

You film in the availability of your actors, you film where the sets are available and you clump those things in the best way possible to save you money. Not the case here. Jack Warner agreed with fair and accepted that it would be an expensive adjustment, which is an understatement.

million in: 1953

Jamie: 00:43:33

Yeah, the top said. Apparently he was called into a round table meeting with the brass of Warner Brothers at one point.

And Jack Warner called him a blackmailing bastard for trying to weasel out of getting the movie made in that exact time frame for that exact budget.

And when the movie came in under what Jack Warner had thought and costing less money, Warner was so furious that he could not meddle with the production because it was already over. He begrudgingly sent to Toth a bottle of Jack Daniels with a note that said, you one eyed son of a. Get drunk and go totally blind.

Mike: 00:44:22

Oh, that's an old timer.

Cody: 00:44:23

That's beautiful. I didn't know that story. That's fantastic. But it paid off.

for: 1953

That was $60 million. Let's call that an animated fantasy. Then we had the Robe, which is a movie I don't know anything about that made $36 million.

Jamie: 00:45:01

It was a bible epic, a biblical epic.

Cody: 00:45:04

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:45:05

I have not thought about the Robe in 100 years.

Cody: 00:45:07

Second highest grossing film of 53. It's also amazing to me that Peter Pan kicked that much ass. Like it basically doubled second place.

Then there was From Here to Eternity in third place. That made $30 million. That was obviously a romance war drama. I'm sure people are aware of that one.

Then we had House of Wax, $23.8 million and horror film. Then it was Shane. $20 million. Classic Western. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, $12 million musical Hondo, 8.2 million.

Another Western, how to Marry a Millionaire, $7.3 million romantic comedy. This is exciting to me. In ninth place, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. $5 million. Another horror film. We got two in the top 10 in 53.

Jamie: 00:45:51

Imagine having being able to rest on your laurels having ousted Shane at the boss box office. You get to say that for the rest of your life.

Mike: 00:46:00

Right?

Cody: 00:46:01

Ooh, and a classic Scare the Morgue.

Mike: 00:46:04

And it's so good that you have the. The corpse that actually sits up. No, that. That is just the embalming fluid.

Cody: 00:46:11

That's just a corpse.

Mike: 00:46:12

Like, that guy was completely right. That. That's not the. That's not actually the killer. And what a movie for the time to have a scene that takes place. Like, for a.

What is a big budget main release movie to have a scene that takes place in a morgue. There's also very scandalous. Like, I mean, we can all see which ones. Carolyn Jones for other reasons, but like that. That's.

I'm bringing out my kidnapping code can do and, and stuff that you don't like. Yes, there were scenes like that in a lot of movies back then, but not stuff you would see from major studios.

Not stuff you would see in color, definitely.

Cody: 00:46:58

Yeah.

Jamie: 00:46:58

be like Fairly scandalous for: 1953

I mean, that's like several uninterrupted minutes of a curvy woman in her underwear being dressed by another beautiful woman. A Friday the 13th TNA scene, like 53 style.

Cody: 00:47:26

I just want to point out here, little fun twist because now we see that the killer has accomplices who are dressed the same as him.

Jamie: 00:47:34

The Children of Wax.

Mike: 00:47:35

I mean, like, we.

Cody: 00:47:36

It's strange because we understand the mystery immediately.

Like, we know it's Vincent Price, but this enriches things like, okay, he's got extra guys and, you know, we're eventually going to meet Price and realize he's in a wheelchair. And they keep really trying to build this mystery out, even though we have the solution. But it still works for me.

I think it's because the characters don't understand what's happening and it's okay that they trust the audience knows more than them. Oh, this is like that ironic tie.

Mike: 00:48:03

Outside the police officer. There's the Bobby that's hanging out. If you. This is something I. I noticed after a couple of viewings.

If you notice in the House of Wax, the horror version of House of Wax, that Jared builds he right inside. He actually has a Bobby standing guard the exact same way, which feels very mocking and I like that little detail. But.

But yeah, like Mystery of the Wax Museum has very similar problem where for the most part you get it. But I think it kind of is able to drag it out in a more this because it is played as like a straight on this.

Like a reporter is trying to get to the bottom of something. The reveal feels a little bit more earned and isn't like, so, oh, so that's how he did it. Which is how this kind of comes across.

How, how he is both the deformed person and I don't know if they were.

They were thinking like, oh, maybe Bron, you know, Igor is the deformed one and has like a wax face or something like that, you know, but there wasn't a lot of build to that.

Cody: 00:49:22

Yeah, I guess the first time I watched the movie as a kid, I wasn't necessarily trying to solve the movie or just along for the ride. So it didn't occur to me until the face is revealed that, oh, Vincent Price is the killer.

So it, I don't know, it was probably more engaging for children, but even as an adult, I still really enjoy it. I don't mind that the mystery is pretty obvious. So just. Hey, actually, I'm going to change points again here.

We'll come back to the box office in a second. But lookie, lookie who we have here. This is Charles Bronson. As eager.

Bronson was such an unknown at this point, he was still being credited with his birth name, Charles Buchinsky.

So in the 60s, his career would really pop off with roles in the Magnificent Seven, the Great Escape, Dirty Dozen, Once Upon a Time in the west side note. One of my absolute favorite westerns. If you have not seen Once Upon a Time the west, you're really missing out. Spectacular movie.

Jamie: 00:50:17

Absolutely keen.

Cody: 00:50:19

Then by the 70s, he was the world's top box office star, being paid $1 million per film. And here he is in the Wax Museum as a mute. Heavy, but man, look at that jawline.

Jamie: 00:50:34

It seems like they've used makeup to make him uglier somehow.

Cody: 00:50:41

He just has a very defined face. He looks like he's chiseled out of rock. He's perfect for a role like this.

Mike: 00:50:47

Gold miner. Apparently he was an asshole.

Jamie: 00:50:50

No, Bronson.

Cody: 00:50:52

Yeah.

Mike: 00:50:52

Even on this set he was apparently an.

Cody: 00:50:54

Oh, but he doesn't have any lines.

Jamie: 00:50:59

He just kept sculpting his own face over and over every time somebody tried to Talk to him. Very standoffish.

Mike: 00:51:08

Feels like it's. It feels like the fact he sculpt, he makes all of his sculpts look like him is supposed to be a plot point, but it never really comes up now.

Cody: 00:51:17

Well, it plays later on. Right. Because we have the gag where you see his head on the shelf with all the other heads and turns out it's his actual face.

Mike: 00:51:28

But you know, I think, I don't.

Cody: 00:51:29

Think you actually need this much lead up for that, but I think that's a connecting point.

Mike: 00:51:33

Yeah, I think, you know, if they had done a thing where they put a little bit of makeup on, on Price to give him a little bit of the same features and like very subtle ways would have been interesting.

Cody: 00:51:46

But yeah, I will say for Bronson, for mute acting, I, I love the stuff he's doing with his hands. Like this is very nice hand acting, very expressive.

Mike: 00:51:57

Doing a lot of great stuff. Like the character, considering the character has nothing to do, really like you feel like he's in a large portion of the movie more than he even is.

Cody: 00:52:06

Yeah, he finds a lot of busy work to do in the background. So it feels like this is a talented actor.

Obviously I'm saying that because I know what he would come become later on, but for a kind of thankless role, he's really given it his all. I want to jump back and finish off our box office conversation here.

of: 1953

I don't think there's any sequels. Definitely no sequels in here. The only remake really be House of Wax because Mystery of the Wax Museum is essentially the proto version of this film.

These are essentially all original films. I don't know if any of these were. Some of them were obviously based on books like Peter Pan, the Robes, based on the Bible.

But there's a lot of originality in this collection compared to something you would see later on where it's, you know, a top 10 of 200 million dollar giant action movies that are all sequels to one another.

Jamie: 00:53:17

Yeah, I think the big difference there is so many of those movies had names to draw them in, either, either established names or up and coming. So like, like Marilyn Monroe and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

So I had a completely different landscape there where you're not so much going to movies because of the premise or what you necessarily are being promised. You just want to see those people again.

Cody: 00:53:47

There was that, and some of it was pure spectacle too.

Jamie: 00:53:50

Right.

Cody: 00:53:50

Like the beast from 20,000 fathoms. People were going to that so they could see like the giant stop motion dinosaur destroy a city.

Which, I mean, yeah, I still go to theaters when they're promising a giant monster destroying cities. So that's universal.

Jamie: 00:54:05

Considering how well the Monsterverse movies are going, I think that's just a consistent thing throughout. Throughout cinema, people will always go for big monster crush Building it speaks to.

Cody: 00:54:18

Me deep within my lizard brain.

Jamie: 00:54:22

So. God, this is the most bubble gum wax I've ever seen in these waxes.

Mike: 00:54:26

It looks delicious.

Jamie: 00:54:28

Like, I kind of want to swim around in it.

Mike: 00:54:30

Yeah.

Cody: 00:54:34

then it was also released in: 1971

ie. And then it was remade in: 2005

We've already covered that episode by this point, but not a lot of relation to this movie, but, you know, kind of inspired by it and it probably fans into it.

Mike: 00:55:16

Yeah.

It's also worth bringing up that because of the success of this, there was an attempt to pretty much immediately create a television show based off of it that did not get far. But the footage from it would later be expanded upon and released as Chamber of Horrors, which we considered doing commentary for.

Cody: 00:55:37

I do love that movie.

Mike: 00:55:39

It is actually. It is actually really good. We did consider doing commentary for that.

Cody: 00:55:44

That one's fun.

Jamie: 00:55:45

I have not seen that movie yet. Mike, is there anything in there conducive to a House of Wax television series? I don't know how that would exist.

Mike: 00:55:57

So what it was going to be was pretty much. It was like. It was similar to Friday the 13th, the series, actually, in a lot of ways, except, like, they owned House of Wax.

And I think it was like detective characters or something. Right. I can't quite remember.

And they would investigate various, like, crimes, like killers, you know, serial killers before that was coined and stuff like. Which is pretty much what Chamber of Horrors is. It was what the pilot more or less was, which was going after this one particular killer.

So a lot of, like, crime stories and Macabre stuff.

And that's how it would sort of like how exactly it played into everything and what it has to necessarily do with the plot of House of Wax, that's debatable. But there is a House of Wax there.

Cody: 00:56:47

Speaking of plot, Mike, we're at the most important part of the movie, the Ping Pong Ball Man.

Mike: 00:56:53

So it seems those weren't invented yet. I just want to point that out.

Cody: 00:56:57

Yeah, it seems weird, right? To have an intermission 45 minutes into an hour and a half long movie.

But because this was filmed in 3D, essentially they're using twice as much film to make this thing. And the projectors running it used twice as much film.

So they had to put a break in here because it was the equivalent of like, you know, a full movie happening at this point, film wise.

Jamie: 00:57:17

They were also very worried that a full color 3D movie would just hurt people's eyes if they had to watch it the entire time.

Cody: 00:57:26

So this has an old fashioned 10 minute break which has been mercifully cut from home video releases. Although I'm curious what the overture would have been that they played while this was happening.

Mike: 00:57:36

I say leave it in.

Cody: 00:57:38

You can always scene skip me, that alternate cut.

But I know I'm kind of torn on the idea of the Ping Pong Ball man because it seems so gimmicky compared to most of the other things that are happening.

Mike: 00:57:48

Jenny has a great anecdote about the Ping Pong Ball man, his official name, by the way.

Jamie: 00:57:54

Yeah. When asked about it years after the fact to like totally double down, the fact that, oh, yeah, it's incredibly silly, it's stupid.

It stops the movie dead in its tracks. He swears that was on purpose. Yes. He was very against doing Gimmicks for the 3D. He only wanted to use it for filmmaking purposes.

But Warner Brothers was footing the bill for a 3D extravaganza. So they needed at least one big showy gimmick moment.

So one of the producers, Brian Foy, had the idea of, oh, let's just make it a vaudeville thing and have like an old timey entertainment man come out and show off this gimmicky new feature, kind of winking at the, at the audience a little bit, that this is for fun and games.

The reason he went that way with it is Brian Foy was one of the younger sons of Eddie Foy, vaudeville legend and leader of Eddie and the Seven Foys, of which Brian was one of the members.

Cody: 00:59:08

It's a lot of foys.

Jamie: 00:59:11

So an old. The Son of an old timey vaudeville man, who himself was a vaudeville child star, used vaudeville to sell a gimmick in a movie.

Cody: 00:59:27

I just want to point out here, I love the switch that people can see in the mentality of Jared here. In the first House of Wax he had, it was mostly beautiful women, right? I guess he had Edgar Allen Poe and some other stuff like that.

But now it's an actual property House of horrors. You know, we've got the guillotine coming down, chopping off heads and scaring the audience. We have torture racks.

Mike: 00:59:51

It's.

Cody: 00:59:51

It's a much darker thing that he swore up and down in the opening segment that he was not interested in doing. And now it seems like that's the only thing he wants to make.

Jamie: 01:00:01

Well, that's something that really struck me whenever I was watching this for the commentary. It was actually my first time ever viewing it. We've seen so many stories like this with this basic setup.

You know, there's a sensitive artist who's, you know, his work is turned cruel by an a miss, a careless and fickle public. But there's such an interesting psychology to how he operates in the Prelude and how he operates in the rest of the film.

It would be one thing for a much more simplistic movie to just say, oh, well, he paint like he sculpts beautiful women now and now he sculpts killers.

But in that monologue that Price gives, you see, he is specifically sculpting people who are famous for either either being dead or being violently murdered at the height of their lives. Like even in that monologue he gives about John Wilkes Booth, you see, he's not capturing the murder of Lincoln to capture a murder.

He's capturing that because in the mind of John Wilkes Booth, that was his happiest moment. That was when he was most alive. Cleopatra meeting with Mark Anthony before their death is when those two are the most alive.

Marie Antoinette before facing the guillotine was when she was the most alive. And to see that then inverted to, to here, where.

No, I just do executions specifically with a lot of imagery from the French Revolution where, where death was made such a glorious spectacle in, in such a grand way. It feels like it's doing more than just shaking its fist at the audience and saying like, yeah, you like dark things, huh?

It feels like more like it's speaking to the fact that you, you can only, you can only stare at the beauty of something ugly before, for so long before that beauty loses its look. Stir. And you're just left with the cold, scary reality of it.

And you can see that like the most with like Joan of Arc here and the two different versions of her. We see one that feels like a celebration of life and one that's is just a dead lady who's about to be burned at the stake.

Cody: 01:02:42

I also really appreciate that they, they include the bits where Vincent Price is showing off his former partner as kind of the cap of the tour. And he has to mention too, it's a new mystery. Was he killed or was it suicide? Only time will tell.

Like, I just love the psychology there of not only does he have to show his murder off, but he has to kind of hint that, who knows, maybe it wasn't suicide and it's just a murder that happened in the city. It wasn't anyone particularly important. It wasn't a particularly graphic murder or anything.

But it's important to him and he gets to show off his revenge. So he finds a way to work in this rather mundane piece of history to a collection of some of history's biggest characters.

Mike: 01:03:27

We talked a little bit about it in some of the previous ones, sort of knowing we eventually get to this in mystery to really like delve into this topic. But to me, what really separates stuff like the classic House of Wax style store of story is it's the metatextual stuff.

It's the fact that, I mean, the fact it's executions. You know, what, what, what g. What do people gather around in those times to watch? They watched executions, so it's him recreating that.

But it's also not only that, not only am I kind of mocking you by giving you what you want, you're part of it. Like, I'm turning you into the exhibits. Like you are obsessed with the macabre. Like, it's. I try to give you beauty and you had no interest in it.

I give you this and it's all you want to see. You know, it's, it's very damning and it's, it's very meta towards the horror audience itself and just people in general.

Because as I said, you know, that's. That was a fun night.

It was a fun day out for the family when you'd go to see the hangings at the, at the gallows or when the guillotine was invented and you get to go see that those things attracted a crowd. Like, oh yeah, if it had gone on longer, they would have started selling tickets.

Jamie: 01:04:55

go. True crime culture in the: 1800

Cody: 01:05:17

It's interesting because. Oh, go ahead.

Mike: 01:05:19

No, and then I just want to say, like, on top of that, you also have this veneer of seeing women as pretty much purely objects. Something to, you know, essentially, like, freeze an amber to. To hold and utilize for some purpose.

You know, that's what his mind is at at this point. Like, that's all he can see. I think that's even kind of heightened, this joke about, like, the. The caveman dragging off the cave woman.

You know, he kind of just makes a chuckling joke about it, but it's almost highlighting the fact that, like, that's how he's, at this point, kind of utilizing women. He's sort of stealing them and. And utilizing them in this very macabre way. And all he sees when he looks at her is Marie Antoinette.

Like, she's just a thing to take and mold and freeze in place and pose the exact way he wants it.

Cody: 01:06:19

But I think for his character, too, at the start of the movie, he is a creator. He gets to do everything by himself with his own hands. And he's been rendered kind of impotent at this point.

Mike: 01:06:28

Right.

Cody: 01:06:29

He's mentioned he still has his limbs, but they can't support the weight of his body. He has to have assistance now because he can't do all the sculpting himself.

He doesn't have the fine motor materials to actually sculpt these things like he used to. How much of that is true? I don't know. They kind of leave that a little vague.

But there is the idea that he's been robbed of his own agency to a certain degree. And psychologically, I think he's turning it around and going, okay, well, then I will possess these women if I can't possess my own faculties.

All this is interesting to me because we see this is one of the earlier wax movies. Obviously, we had Mystery of the Wax museum in the 30s, but as movies would go on, we would find more and more ways to motivate evil.

Wax museum ownership in Wax Work is just basically a mad scientist movie. You don't really get the sense that he deeply cares about his art. In House of Wax, the remake, the killer is inherited the wax. Right.

It's not like they necessarily love the wax in the same way. It's something that's foisted upon them.

Jamie: 01:07:40

Inherited the wax, by the way.

Cody: 01:07:44

For this one, it's a creator who's built his own friends. These are all people he loves. But he's not trying to necessarily assert himself as God originally over them.

Whereas to Mike's point, in this section, after he's been disfigured and torn down, that's all he's really going after. He's creating these wax figures to dominate and control his victims.

You know, he freezes them in wax, he puts them on display so he can hold their beauty forever. I think it's a. It's kind of the purest distillation of that idea.

I think we've seen derivative versions of it later on or ones that aren't as inspired. I think just a generic mad scientist isn't as inspiring as someone who is deeply in love with his creations.

Mike: 01:08:30

Yeah.

Jamie: 01:08:33

What's funny is, at least according to Detolf, they really didn't adhere that closely to the screenplay, which was pretty much a faithful remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum. And he seemed to work a lot with Price, particularly on this character.

So I'm very curious how much of Price's dialogue in this movie is just him going off.

Cody: 01:09:01

I am curious about that too. I've heard from the other side that Detal's claims on that might be a little bit of ego fueled.

Not necessarily narcissism, but him maybe exaggerating how important he was the story. But again, that's from the writer's point of view where he's like, no, no, no, no. A lot of my stuff was still there. They didn't make it all up.

I'm sure there was probably some improv and some adjustments. There always are. But it also feels like detoth was big on kind of building up his own stories too, when he tells them.

Mike: 01:09:33

Oh, of course. I do think the speeches are very Price.

Cody: 01:09:38

I'm curious, does anyone know if the actual screenplay is out there for review? Because that seems like it should be an easy mystery. You just read the original and then watch the movie.

Mike: 01:09:47

Are you saying we didn't do our research first?

Cody: 01:09:51

It's not like we had two months to do this. Also, this was according to the commentary track. That's on the WB release of the movie on Blu Ray. Another kind of scandalous moment.

I mean, the can can, when it first came out was incredibly risque.

But even in the 50s, to have a movie where you're kind of showing these girls, you know, hinting at their underwear was still kind of shocking coming off of the code.

Jamie: 01:10:17

Well, what the camera does hold. Hold on. A woman's Ass for shockingly long in this sequence.

Cody: 01:10:24

That's the weird thing about this movie because we have some kind of shocking grotesqueries. We've got, obviously not a huge amount of gore, but it is still violent. But it's wrapped up in prestige period drama.

Like, we have: 1800

Like, hey, what if we took the veneer of a very prestigious Pride and Prejudice kind of film, but then also included a giallo on the side, Which I like. I think it makes it even more subversive having those two odds thrown together.

Jamie: 01:11:11

to remind myself was made in: 1953

Cody: 01:11:20

Yes. Yeah. Again, watching this, I really. I keep going back to Blood and Black Lace. It feels like the direction processor of that movie.

And it's wild to think that it's, you know, like a decade between the two or. As we know, I'm not great with dates, so I'm gonna. I'm gonna look up.

onfirmed that wasn't, like, a: 1952

Mike: 01:11:45

I also think, like, stuff like this scene are kind of interesting. The fact we. We just came from the chamber of horrors and we see that this is something that people go for is death.

And then on the other side, you essentially see everybody congregating to go see sex.

Cody: 01:12:01

Both ends of the spectrum.

Mike: 01:12:02

Yeah. It's like. And they're. And they're. And you have pretty much our main character kind of weirded out by both equally.

And the fact that people go to see any of this stuff. Once again, very interesting. Like little metal look at things. I. I do think maybe the main character's pretty weak. You know, she. She's not.

Jamie: 01:12:23

She's okay.

Cody: 01:12:25

It's the leading hero. The. The dude who is freaking real bad. Yeah. He could finish in the movie and no one notice.

Mike: 01:12:32

It's. It.

Cody: 01:12:33

What's.

Mike: 01:12:33

What's tragic to me, though, is in Mystery of the Wax Museum, you. We have Fay Ray's character.

Cody: 01:12:39

Yeah.

Jamie: 01:12:40

Who's.

Mike: 01:12:41

So. Who's great.

Cody: 01:12:43

If I'm remembering, that's the. She's a newspaper reporter in that one.

Mike: 01:12:46

Right? Newspaper reporter.

Cody: 01:12:48

Lois Lane kind of thing. Like, very, very assertive.

Mike: 01:12:51

It's very. It's great. And she carries the entire movie. And you're really missing that here where the. Pretty much. I mean, Price is the main character.

Cody: 01:13:02

That's such a shame because you watch Price and he is fun, he's captivating. And then we go to our main characters and they're okay. Our lead actress, she's. She's fun to watch in the chase scene.

She really sells the fear and the intelligence too. Like we talked before, you know, taking her shoes off so the cobblestones don't echo. The lead dude is just there. He's very vanilla.

Jamie: 01:13:25

Honestly, they nearly killed this dude while filming this movie. And controversial take. I don't think anyone would have noticed.

Mike: 01:13:32

Ouch. They could have left it in the film, him dead.

Cody: 01:13:36

I mean, they almost killed Price with fire. Why not?

Jamie: 01:13:39

I mean, going back to what you were saying about this character's role, or at least the role of the female lead in this being kind of diminished.

From Mystery of the Wax Museum, one of my favorite anecdotes I was able to find was apparently Phyllis Kirk showed up on set the first day of filming wearing fake boobs and a top. Had to pull her aside and say that it's not that kind of movie. That's not why we hired you.

Cody: 01:14:11

Seems very Babylon.

Jamie: 01:14:15

She was not particularly happy about being in a horror movie at all and seemed to have a. A very uncharitable view of what kind of movie they were making.

Mike: 01:14:25

Yeah, she said she ended up having fun making it, but yeah, she. The studio just had her under contract and she just didn't want to take a penalty. Yeah.

Cody: 01:14:37

ane. Blood and black lace was: 1964

Mike: 01:14:46

So, yeah.

Cody: 01:14:47

Decade later, which makes a lot of sense. But it also feels like these two movies could have come out, like, two years apart.

Jamie: 01:14:51

Oh, yeah. It's crazy.

I haven't really seen any Giallo directors specifically reference this as an American influence, but there's so much of not just giallo, but future slashers. In House of Wax, there's kind of like a westerns become samurai movies, which become Summer, which becomes spaghetti westerns.

Kind of feedback loop going on between Proto, then Giallo, then slashers.

Cody: 01:15:27

Yeah, I. I think there's.

Mike: 01:15:30

A lot.

Cody: 01:15:30

Of borrowed history through there as the genre shifts. I. I don't want to get too far into it, but my understanding of the evolution was you really start off with these kind of horror films in the 50s.

A lot of the film noirs that were happening in the 40s into the 50s, then you had Germany doing, like, their crimes, which were more violent forms of the film noir, and then those kind of morph into the jello of the, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, the slasher really takes off trying to say, hey, what if we took some of that Italian stuff and made it make a little more sense and maybe a little more graphic? And then eventually we shed the mystery aspect for most of these slashers because they were going to franchise mode.

Then Scream comes along and changes the game by saying, hey, what if we make this kind of reflection on the history of these movies? And then people never left that.

It's been 20 years of people basically just getting more and more meta with their movies, more aware of what they're doing. There's a lot more nuance there. But in my mind, that's kind of the general trajectory of the slasher part of the horror genre. I'm very excited.

Eureka is putting out a crimmy set next month, so it's gonna be my first chance to see a lot of those movies. You read about them in books, but it's gonna be cool to actually see what that genre actually is.

Jamie: 01:16:52

Yeah, it's crazy the amount of like essential building blocks of foreign cinema that just have not been that easy to find over the decades, even for cinephiles.

Cody: 01:17:10

A little fun fact here. In: 2014

Jamie: 01:17:20

I fascinated. That took till: 2014

Cody: 01:17:23

I don't know how long it takes a movie to get like elected for the National Film Registry. I feel like there's probably like a long waiting period. They just added Star Wars a couple years back. I think that's true.

So it's probably like, yeah, you got to wait like 40 years before we even consider you.

Mike: 01:17:41

Also, we're just on a lot of close ups of price. And I just want to talk about something I've always loved about his performance post accident.

And I like to think I'm not just reading into things, but if you really pay attention to his performance, especially since there are a lot of pretty amazing close ups in that very first scene, he's less animated. Like there's a dullness to him. Like there's a lot of mouth movement, sure. But he's actually a lot more still in the face.

He's making a lot of body movements.

Cody: 01:18:16

He's.

Mike: 01:18:17

He's having a lot of fun with the chair, getting to spin around and do things and push himself. But there's actually not a lot of facial movement. And he's essentially like teeing you up for the false face that he's wearing.

Cody: 01:18:33

Through acting Well, I love it, too, going off of all that.

If you rewind back to his first wheelchair tour of this version of the House of Horrors, it seems like the tone has shifted from admiration to sardonic. Now that he's talking about this House of Horrors, it's kind of like he's amused by all the murders, but it.

It's more of an autopilot presentation than the more enthusiastic one he gives at the start of the film.

Mike: 01:19:02

He's very mocking of the figures as well. Like, he always has jokes for all of them.

Cody: 01:19:06

I was just laughing at this detective putting his finger across the mustache. What a silly little bit.

Mike: 01:19:13

Oh, and you know what? Leon's on screen. So Leon, played by Nedrick Young, was uncredited.

He did not get a credit of any kind for the release of this movie because he was on the blacklist at the time. The Hollywood blacklist for Communist ties. Alleged Communist ties.

Cody: 01:19:34

Yeah.

Mike: 01:19:35

Which also, at the same time, this is something.

This movie is something that helped get Price out of that, because Price had been on the gray list, which is people who were opposed to Nazis before the US entered World War II, which meant he pretty much was put directly on the blacklist as soon as soon as it opened, because, you know, opposing Nazis before America opposed Nazis meant you were a Communist, more or less. And he had to work very, very hard to get out of that.

And this was actually pretty much the thing that helped get him get his career going, which he didn't know would be over because of that blacklist.

Cody: 01:20:20

Yeah. Price's associations Pre World War II are a little dicey, I guess. Problematic, maybe be the right word.

When Hitler was first rising to power, he was pro Hitler. He came to realize that was a mistake. Became vehemently opposed to Hitler early on, before America was even involved in the war.

So he was on both sides of that fence, unfortunately.

And when Hollywood came calling for him, he had to basically swear off and say, no, no, no, I don't believe in Communism at all, and sign affidavits to that effect, which maybe doesn't agree with the fact that I think he was at several meetings for Communism.

Mike: 01:21:04

He very clearly was.

Cody: 01:21:06

Yeah. So the guy bounced around politically a little bit there, but I think he found his way, obviously towards the end of his life.

I would say my political views line up fairly closely with his. He did a lot to represent the arts. He was out there promoting, like, LGBTQ rights of its time.

Jamie: 01:21:27

Yeah. He was one of the first celebrities to donate serious money to AIDS research.

Cody: 01:21:32

Yeah. So it's one of the.

It's, it's tough if you look at his early history where he actually had a part where he's like, no, I think the Nazi party is doing the right thing. And where he ended up at completely different viewpoints.

But at least it showed that he was willing to reflect and change his opinion based on evidence. Which is not to disparage the man either, because we know all the things that he did later in his life.

There's all sorts of feel good stories about Vincent Price. It's just kind of surprising if you go back and read about his early history and kind of go, oh, I didn't expect to see that in there.

Jamie: 01:22:06

It's shocking to look at American culture in general back then and see how, Oh, how much of a hands off approach people seem to take to what was going on in foreign countries. Just, well, they have a strong man, I guess that's okay. That's what some countries need.

It's, it's a, a terrifying, it's terrifying to be reminded that that has not changed that much with how a lot of people look, look at very, very clearly disturbing things happening outside their borders.

Cody: 01:22:45

Well, you can see the parallel too of people before World War II saying, hey, America should be isolated. We don't want to get ourselves involved in another world war. That'd be awful.

And you look at the current temperament of the nation and people are saying, we don't need trade deals with China, we don't need to work with other countries, we don't have to give a shit about Canada. We're America, America first. And it seems like a thing we keep coming back to and it bites us in the ass.

Jamie: 01:23:12

Yep, that's all the top of the.

Cody: 01:23:16

Content I have today.

Jamie: 01:23:18

I was gonna say there's also the amount of people who thought you were specifically anti American. If you wanted us to get involved in a war because of how bad World War I was, like, oh, you want to fight the Nazis?

Oh, you want America to take over the world?

Cody: 01:23:34

Which, that one I can be a little sympathetic to. Because just imagine after World War I, the number of people that are coming home who have been shell shocked.

The people that are missing half their face, you know, legs, where we get.

Jamie: 01:23:46

20Th century horror from.

Cody: 01:23:48

Yeah, like I could understand why a culture would look at the aftermath of World War I and be like, yeah, count me out. I don't, I don't want that again.

Jamie: 01:23:57

n of photos of victims of the: 1939

Oh, yeah. I heard the top said was, needless to say, a very sobering experience for all of them. And left.

Left all of them walking away thinking, yeah, war is bad. War is very bad. Yeah, let's. Let's. Let's never look at anything like that again.

Cody: 01:24:49

I like that Tom Savini basically did the same thing, but his conclusion was, that'd be cool. Makeup.

Jamie: 01:24:57

Also something Price was kind enough to point out when asked about this movie years later.

Even though the credited makeup artist is Gordon Bao, who was head of the makeup department at Warner Brothers, it was actually his brother George Bao, who did all the makeup. It just.

At the time, whoever was in charge of your makeup department was the dude who did all of your makeup, as far as, you know, crediting and accolades went. So Millicent Patrick got screwed out of being credited for the Creature from the Black Lagoon design. It's just. She wasn't the department.

Cody: 01:25:37

Yeah. I was just about to mention that. That's the exact situation. Creature from Black Lagoon. Well, there are some sexism there too, Right?

Mike: 01:25:43

Because a lot I didn't help, but.

Cody: 01:25:45

Yeah, a lady making a monster.

Mike: 01:25:50

Yeah.

Jamie: 01:25:50

Her not being credited was regular studio politics. The head of that makeup department doing everything in his power to destroy her career and make sure no one would have heard of her years later.

That was sexism.

Mike: 01:26:03

Yeah.

Jamie: 01:26:04

We almost got a bride of the Creature touring a makeup show. Or Millicent Patrick would teach kids just like you how to apply monster makeup. And that got strangled in the crib by that dude.

Cody: 01:26:17

Hold up. We're about to see the most Scooby Doo gag of the movie.

Mike: 01:26:22

That's where this. That's where the gag comes from. Let's face it.

Cody: 01:26:25

It really is. It's. It's the eyeballs moving in a painting kind of joke, but it's framed perfectly.

Like, even the little shadow underneath his neck, like, they have some sort of disc or something. I don't know what that was because the shadow goes away, too. I don't know. They just framed that perfectly, so.

Really looks like one of the fake heads.

Jamie: 01:26:42

That must have been a great gag to see for the very first time in a movie ever. Yeah.

Cody: 01:26:49

I mean, it's brought down because we've seen it a million times now, but at the time when it was fresh, I bet that was very exciting.

Jamie: 01:26:55

I was like, there's a gag involving 3D coming later that I didn't Even really notice was meant to be a moment where you just see the silhouette of Bronson rise up out of a chair and walk forward. Which was supposed to be a jump scare.

Because if you're watching that in a theater with 3D for a split second, you think somebody got up out of their chair and walked into the movie. Something completely lost in a modern audience. But must.

Cody: 01:27:24

And especially since we're watching in 2D too, you know, you lose a lot of those bits.

Jamie: 01:27:29

Yeah.

Mike: 01:27:29

Have you ever watched in 3D, Cody?

Cody: 01:27:31

No, I. I have a 3D version of the movie on Blu Ray. WB put out like a, you know, dual disc, but I don't have a 3D TV and they. I don't think they even make 3D TVs anymore.

So I've been unfortunately unable to exploit that disc's capabilities.

Jamie: 01:27:50

I don't know if I've asked this before. Does your partial colorblindness mean you can't use old school 3D glasses?

Cody: 01:27:56

I don't think so because they're operating on red and blue and I'm pretty decent at blue. It's the overlap. It's purples that give me a tough time.

Jamie: 01:28:05

So.

Cody: 01:28:07

Yeah, like this also in 3D, just imagine, you know, the hand kind of sweeps the audience before going in the background and you have all these kind of floating grotesqueries in the background. This would be a much more impressive scene in 3D.

Mike: 01:28:19

Yeah. I mean, this would be incredible. People who have seen in 3D have talked about the depth of this movie is something to behold.

Cody: 01:28:27

I could imagine you can get a sense of it while you're watching a scene like this. And one thing I want to add, I've put this way off here, but obviously the 3D visual impact was huge.

But we don't really consider the fact that this was also made with stereophonic sound.

This was the first 3D movie that also had the feature, meaning there were additional sound channels throughout the theater presenting multiple layers of sound to the audience. So there was a back channel exclusively just for screams that they would pump in to get the audience kind of to jump at the right points.

So it was 3D in visual and 3D in sound. They had surround sound before anyone else with this picture.

Mike: 01:29:08

And unfortunately, like both of all, both of those things are completely lost. The stereophonic soundtrack is gone. Yeah. And the original prints were, I think, damaged in a flood or something like that.

So for like the 3D re release Warner Brothers did do, it was like $300,000 they spent to convert the movie to 3D. So it's still not quite the same. It's impossible to watch it the same way that it was ever actually intended to be watched, unfortunately.

Cody: 01:29:42

Yeah.

t actually watched. It's from: 1952

So it's basically like people are in Africa trying to set up the first railroad system, and lions keep attacking and killing people, so big game hunters have to kill. Come in and kill the lions. That's. That's basically the plot of the Ghost in the Darkness. So that was a childhood favorite of mine.

So it's very exciting to see that in there also. Oh, damn. It's the reveal. Could you imagine the impact if we hadn't gotten his face earlier in the movie?

Mike: 01:30:34

Yeah.

Cody: 01:30:35

It's a shame, but it already, like we talked about, like, it gives so many good jumps earlier in the movie.

Mike: 01:30:40

Yeah.

Cody: 01:30:41

And to make people really wait an hour and 18 minutes into a movie that's got nine minutes left, that'd be the typical form of it, Right? I guess it's like seeing the full shark in Jaws. You really get that in the back half of the movie. You save that jump.

Mike: 01:30:56

Yeah, but I mean, just even the jump. The jump scare of him standing from the chair is so well shot. Like, I could see old audiences losing their goddamn minds at that.

And that was the first time you get to actually see the makeup.

Cody: 01:31:09

It's a perfect Halloween clip.

Jamie: 01:31:13

It's one of the montage opera face reveal. Not in a Phantom of the Opera movie.

Mike: 01:31:17

Yeah.

Cody: 01:31:21

Apropos of nothing, that's half a joke because he's currently lifting a bottle of booze for the people that are listening to us. As a podcast. The drink I made for this show, I finally have.

I've been topping it off with more champagne, but I finally got down to the actual cocktail bit of it, and I'm gonna say real good. I think this might go into my stable. This is a tasty drink. If I die tomorrow from wax poisoning, it was worth it.

Well, the thing about infusing a cocktail with wax is you're not trying to pick up a flavor necessarily, but the little bit of wax particles that drop into the alcohol give it a different mouthfeel. It makes it a little Bit smoother.

Mike: 01:32:01

A little bit.

Cody: 01:32:02

Kind of smooth.

Jamie: 01:32:02

Silky.

Cody: 01:32:04

It's the most pretentious way to drink a cocktail, I'll admit. But it does make a slight difference to how a cocktail feels in your mouth.

Jamie: 01:32:15

eally feel the wax. Cody Alps: 2025

Cody: 01:32:20

It'S true. It's true.

Jamie: 01:32:23

How's it?

While we got a brief lull in the action, I just want to point out one of my favorite anecdotes I heard about this movie and I couldn't really find any documentation on this having actually happened. So this is entirely the word of Vincent Price.

But apparently Bella Lugosi was hired to join them to promote the movie in Chicago and got as far as hopping on the plane with them. And then it just didn't show up to any of the press events.

So nobody actually met Bela Lugosi, who that was in the movie, except Price, who just said hi to him briefly on the floor.

Mike: 01:33:00

Yeah, they never really got a chance to meet him. But no, Lugosi was part. He was there at the premiere.

He came out of a limousine wearing his Dracula cape and he was holding a leash attached to somebody in a gorilla costume, which is a deep cut Legosi reference, honestly.

Jamie: 01:33:21

Yeah, he was having fun that day.

Cody: 01:33:26

As long as we're talking about old Lugosi movies, it's a stretch. Forgive me, but I did want to get into the history of WB during the 40s, because WB as a studio just didn't really respect horror as a genre.

go back earlier to, like the: 1930

They did a couple to kind of keep pace with what Universal was doing. But then they had a long gap and they did one or two. The return of Dr. X, which has nothing to do with Dr. X, don't get it twisted.

But through the 40s, they basically made maybe one a year, maybe two a year. There was the smiling ghost, 41, the hidden hand, 42, cat people, 42, the mysterious doctor, 43, leopard man, the Beast With Five Fingers.

of their horror productions.: 1946

This movie came out seven years later. They had that long of a gap where, like, it doesn't pay to make horror films. We don't want to make them.

in the horror realm. Them was: 1954

Again, obviously that's a Toho production, but they had the American rights. That had to make a lot of money. They worked with Hammer to release the Curse of Frankenstein statewide and that was huge.

Horror was a gigantic deal for WB. But even in the 50s, they only made a, you know, two a year or something like that.

And most of them they didn't even make, they just acquired and threw out there. But if you jump forward to modern times, it would be insane to look at W and B and say, yeah, you guys don't do horror.

Mike: 01:35:36

Right.

Cody: 01:35:36

Because they have so many giant horror franchises under their belt. Fuck it. The IT movies have made an astronomical amount of money.

WB is very much all about horror in current days, but in the 40s and the 50s, it was an afterthought or derogatory. They didn't want to be a horror studio like Universal.

Jamie: 01:35:59

But can't we make nice musicals like mgm?

Mike: 01:36:02

Right.

Cody: 01:36:03

And it's so funny because you look at something like this. The times they did do horror, they had a huge return of investment. This movie was gigantic. Like we said, one of the biggest movies of the year.

And I think they were also in on the beast from 20,000 fathoms. I think that was also theirs. Don't quote me on that. I'm not 100% sure. I believe.

Mike: 01:36:21

I'm pretty sure.

Cody: 01:36:22

No, it was.

Mike: 01:36:23

Yeah.

Cody: 01:36:23

Because it was released in a Blu Ray pack as a WB Classics collection entry.

Mike: 01:36:29

Yeah, they did. They were so.

Cody: 01:36:31

They had two within 19.

Jamie: 01:36:32

Yeah.

Cody: 01:36:33

The same year that were a top 10 hit. And even then they were so hesitant they would get more into it later in the 50s with more, you know, giant bug, radioactive monster type films.

But it's so strange. Just imagine a world where WB just embraced it. They had the funds, they were big, they were popular.

They really could have cranked out some amazing films like this. It makes me really appreciate this film. Though it was unlikely this would ever happen, Luckily Toth really forced it in and because of it. Wow.

We got all these amazing Vincent Price films through the year. Who knows, Maybe we wouldn't have even had all the Bronson films if he didn't have this stepping stone.

Jamie: 01:37:15

I don't know.

Mike: 01:37:16

It's true, honestly. I mean, what is like the greatest lesson of pretty much any studio anywhere in Hollywood or.

Because it's really good for them and they'll never actually appreciate that fact.

Jamie: 01:37:33

So before we get too far away with it, I have got to tell this story. So that was a real guillotine we just saw.

Cody: 01:37:42

Why not? They already set the set on fire. Why not have a guillotine?

Jamie: 01:37:47

So on the day that actor Paul Picarney was told by Detath that they were planning to do that entire fist fight and near beheading in one continuous shot with an actual guillotine blade that he would have to be pulled out of seconds before it decapitated him while they were necessary. While they were setting up the shot, McKerney talked to a stuntman about how he would do the shot. And the stuntman said, I wouldn't unless.

And this is if you paid me a lot of money. I had my hand on the switch and I could activate it the second I was pulling my head away from it. Which he was not going to have that privilege on.

So whenever they say everyone in place, McKearney does not move a muscle. He just kind of looks at the director and says, dude, I don't want to make this movie. The Toth calls him a chicken coward.

So Bacarney threatens to kill him and is suspended from the movie for several days.

Cody: 01:39:03

Jesus.

Jamie: 01:39:06

A couple of days later, a representative from the studio goes to Bacarni's house and says, you gotta get back on set. He says, I'm only doing it if we can do the shot a different way. And he says, that's out of the question.

So studio had to contact him a second time saying, okay, there'll be a metal bar underneath the guillotine blade to make it slightly less likely you will die. So after his head was removed from the block, the bar slid out, allowing the blade to drop, which is the only reason that actor is still alive.

Cody: 01:39:49

Jesus.

Jamie: 01:39:50

That years later, Detoth apparently got his revenge because he hired Picardy in this big budget western he was doing and he was so excited to get the sides for the day. And he looked at it and it was a character who dies three pages in.

Mike: 01:40:07

In a really, really dangerous stunt.

Jamie: 01:40:10

Yeah, he fell off of a cliff and a horse drawn carriage. Jesus.

Mike: 01:40:15

And I want to point out that the way the, the blade was originally being held was a guy who had it between his thighs, squeezing it, essentially. So if he didn't have enough pressure on it, it would have slid out this.

Jamie: 01:40:33

Oh, man, I got the one time.

Cody: 01:40:36

Because if you watch that, if you.

Jamie: 01:40:38

Watch the movie right now, it would.

Cody: 01:40:39

Never occur to you that, oh, this was even a dangerous stunt. You just Assume like there's probably a foam blade or something and there's a very fragile fake head underneath it.

Mike: 01:40:49

And I feel like if you entered this story as an exhibit on the Rust trial, things could have turned out differently.

Jamie: 01:41:00

What I love is the blade doesn't cut anything. So there's no, no reason.

Mike: 01:41:04

It's a real blade.

Jamie: 01:41:05

Actual murder and murder impost.

Cody: 01:41:08

Not at all.

Jamie: 01:41:11

I think Detoth just wanted to seal the movie in blood for. For success reasons.

Cody: 01:41:18

That stunt Detot's wife there, that's. That's the story.

Mike: 01:41:25

But he was fucking his wife. But over to the left. That's a one eyed joke.

Cody: 01:41:33

Yeah, no, I got you.

Mike: 01:41:35

Because he only has one eye.

Cody: 01:41:36

Yeah, yeah, the eye patch thing, it doesn't work in 3D is the problem.

Mike: 01:41:45

I just wanted a really good one eye joke to end on.

Cody: 01:41:48

That is a great way to end the movie. I am disappointed we didn't get to talk about Vincent Price dying in a vat of bubblegum, but.

Mike: 01:41:54

No, bring it up, bring it up.

Cody: 01:41:55

Come on. That's it. You. If you watch the movie, you saw it. I don't have anything else to add to it.

Mike: 01:42:00

It is. Look, there has been people falling into vats of whack hot wax in movies. None of them will ever top Vincent Price falling into a hot vat of wax.

Cody: 01:42:13

I love how after he dies they just matter of factly have like the hero walk up and throw like a jacket over the woman who is still strapped into the wax applicator trade. No, bro, just take her out. Like where's the hustle here?

Mike: 01:42:29

Her shame had to be protected. Yes.

Jamie: 01:42:34

I just want to say nothing is more arch than the police pulling you away while you're trying to kill a man on a guillotine in a museum. And you're pulling like, no, no, he has to die this way.

Mike: 01:42:51

It will be educational in this environment.

Cody: 01:42:55

I really appreciate that. House of Wax 1 is the wax movie that spends the most amount of time in an actual house of wax. Like they're not joking.

This is a movie about a house of wax. It's about 70% of the movie. Which good truth in advertising. Two, in classic House of Wax fashion, House of anything fashion.

The house needs to burn down at the end. That's just how movies work. If you name something House of it needs to end in the house burning down.

House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, don't care. Burn down a mansion, Burn down a castle.

Jamie: 01:43:28

God, so many people were killed on the set of House of Gucci.

Cody: 01:43:33

I'm so happy I was trying to think of a joke for House of Gucci while I was saying that, and I didn't have any.

Mike: 01:43:41

Oh, the massacre. Poor God.

Jamie: 01:43:46

Jared Leto had that makeup burned into his face. 60 year old man forever now.

Cody: 01:43:54

favorite horror films of the: 1950

Creature from Black Lagoon still number one. But this is right up there. I really love this movie and it was just such a thrill to be able to go through it again and actually kind of nitpick it.

So thank you so much for joining. Our wax coverage is going to continue. I think we have one more in the lineup, right, Mike?

Mike: 01:44:19

One more. Unless we go to the silent film route and then we got two more, but I don't think we are.

Cody: 01:44:24

We've never done a silent film, have we?

Mike: 01:44:26

No, we haven't. We talked about it a lot and.

Cody: 01:44:28

It won't start now. So.

Mike: 01:44:33

Fuck you folks at home, go.

Cody: 01:44:36

Watch your own movies. You don't need us talking over them unless they have sound. Anyways, thank you so much for joining us.

Jamie: 01:44:42

Last episode of Box Office. We tell the audience that now they have the tools to watch movies by themselves.

Cody: 01:44:49

We've been training you since Prometheus to be critical about films. Go fuck your own shit.

Mike: 01:44:54

The contract is complete.

Cody: 01:44:56

We're free.

Jamie: 01:44:58

You know, Blu Rays have their own commentaries made by the people who made the films, right?

Cody: 01:45:03

They're pretty educational. They're better than us. Honestly, I don't know what you're doing here.

Mike: 01:45:06

Why have you been wasting our. Wasting your time with Box Office Pulp, you fools.

Cody: 01:45:12

But if you want to find more of us. Now that we buttered you up to listening to Box Office Pulp, this was definitely a great pep talk for that. You can find us on box officepulp.com.

we are on pretty much any place that has podcasts, so if you go to an itunes or Spotify, we'll be there. Look us up. We have other content, we swear. And more wax before and after this moment. It's all wax, baby. I didn't know what to say after that.

That was my smoothest outro I've ever done.

Mike: 01:45:36

I kind of want to bite into wax. Yeah.

Cody: 01:45:39

I'm gonna go melt some beeswax right now.

Mike: 01:45:41

Do it.

Cody: 01:45:41

I got a bunch left over from the cocktail thing. It turns out they just sell them in giant bags and I didn't need much. It's in pellets too, so it keeps falling all over my apartment. It's a mess.

Jamie: 01:45:52

Wait, are you slowly entombing yourself in a wax just from runoff?

Cody: 01:45:59

Let's put it this way. If you don't hear from me for two weeks, just assume I have been abducted by bees.

Mike: 01:46:03

I mean, I would have assumed that anyway, Cody.

Cody: 01:46:05

It makes the most sense.

Mike: 01:46:06

Bees.

Jamie: 01:46:08

I assume you have many, many candles in your house. We start burning them tonight. We begin encasing our clothing in wax. That white instant wax suit. And we just take it off.

Mike: 01:46:20

Oh, I like that idea. That would be so fashionable.

Cody: 01:46:23

Man, it's so fun to have a roommate.

Jamie: 01:46:26

Ah, you can come stay at Wax House, Cody.

Cody: 01:46:29

Oh, you can hang out in the wax pool, baby.

Mike: 01:46:33

I need solid wax. So you just kind of skid on it?

Cody: 01:46:37

Yeah. No, no, I get you're saying it was more fun when it was molten. All right, folks, well, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you come back again.

This has been box office pulp. That's a wrap. I forgot my catchphrase there. Panicked. I'm out of shape.

Jamie: 01:46:50

How can the. This has been Buck's office pull. Enjoy your burrito.

Cody: 01:46:53

Get the hell out of here. That's the other part of it. I didn't even do the normal bits.

Mike: 01:46:58

You get more out of life when.

Jamie: 01:47:00

You go out to a movie.

n of this variety review from: 1953

Warner Brothers House of Wax is the post mid century the jazz singer. What Al Jolson did to sound the Warners have repeated in three dimensions.

Houses playing wax in 3D will be BoCo okay for beast is capital as the number one menace. Frank Lovejoy is authoritative as the lieutenant. Phyllis Kirk is purity as the Angenou who looks fairly convincingly scared.

Barely convincing dream department. She needs a good shrill piercing shrieker as a voice stand in.

Paul Pekurney is okay as the Trinity and Carolyn Jones makes her moments count as the flighty kid who gets bumped off. Charles Bukins is the number two menace as the deaf mute. And Reggie Rhyme all as the barker is also standout.

Rest of the cast is professionally competent.

Mike: 01:48:23

Professionally competent.

Jamie: 01:48:25

What an amazing end for that kind of. Everyone else showed up. That black. That black face was very important to moviegoers at that point.

I'm gonna be saying Sako bo for every movie I see from now on Box Office Pulp that new dimension in sight and sound.

Cody: 01:48:44

Please remember to replace the speaker on.

Mike: 01:48:47

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