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THE WAX MASK Commentary Track
Get ready to pour yourself a cocktail, put on an old opera record, and inject yourself with a chemical compound that stretches the bounds of death in a terrifying fusion of science and art, because the crew at Box Office Pulp is back on their wax bullshit with a commentary track for Sergio Stivaletti's Fulci-by-another-name fable, 1997's Wax Mask. The legendary special effects master responsible for the Demons franchise only ever directed a single feature, and this slasher by way of a giallo by way of a Wax Museum mystery has been unfairly forgotten by even the most stalwart horror faithfuls. Listen to the tale of Dario Argento's last boon to a dying frenemy, a museum owner driven by heartbreak to murder and mad science, and a dubbing track that descended into pure, unfiltered Italiano.
So remove your mesh mask to reveal your wax mask to reveal your robot(?) skull by listening now!
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Transcript
And then I just took a nap. I don't even do the intro.
Jamie:Welcome to the sleepiest episode of Box Office Pulp.
Cody:We're rebranding. We're gonna be like an ASMR thing where we just talk you to sleep during some of our favorite movies. Hello, I'm Robert Osborne.
Mike:I feel like we would get famous doing that.
Cody:For some reason, I want to be the Joe Pera of movie podcasts.
Jamie:Cody Alf explains cinematography to you at night.
Cody:Every episode is me describing the plot of the movie Werewolves. Once again, this would have been funny if people actually heard me talk about werewolves for the last hour. Hour that was not recorded.
Jamie:Cody Wax so poetic, so poetically about the time Frank Grillo was a United States Marine who was also a scientist fighting werewolves in theaters now.
Mike:It's good to have hobbies in theaters now. I'm not releasing this until we actually record other wax museum movies.
Cody:No, Mike, it's going to be immediately dating us.
No, it's going to be much funnier if we just keep saying welcome back to Wax Month, which has now been extended to Wax Quarterly, which has now been extended to the Year of Wax. It takes us six years to record.
Jamie:Four titled it in a text conversation.
Mike:Winter's Wax and I'm Wax Season of Wax. We didn't say how long the season was going to be. Look, some stuff happened. Some tragedy happened to my life. I didn't really feel like recording.
Trump got elected Again, we didn't feel like recording. Stuff went down, and now we are returning from whence we came, which is covered in wax.
Cody:Can we just actually spread this out to be seasonal? Like once every four months? We're like, here's a wax commentary. Enjoy. Who. Who knows what's gonna happen, folks?
Maybe you get more wax, maybe you don't. I don't know. I'm just running the thing, so.
Welcome to Box Office Pulp, your one stop podcast for movies madness, moxie, and tonight, the finest Italian imported wax you've ever seen. I'm your host, Cody. Joining me today are my co host, Mike. Say hello, Mike.
Mike:Oh, God, I'm gonna puke.
Cody:That's how Mike starts every phone conversation with me. He just calls me up in the middle of the night and says that.
Mike:It'S the only way I can sleep.
Cody:Well, that's why we're making this into an ASMR podcast. So people go to bed without calling me up and saying they're gonna throw up.
Mike:How's everybody doing right now, baby? Everybody. Everybody looking forward to watching the movie with us?
Cody:You got your popcorn, Jamie, Give me your best asmr.
Jamie:Careful, you might catch feelings.
Cody:I was waiting for you to, like, rub your fingertips against, like, some tin foil or something.
Jamie:Oh, wait, wait.
Cody:Oh. Oh, no.
Jamie:I wish I had my nails long again. Damn.
Cody:Oh, it sounded like you were breaking something. I didn't like that.
Mike:It sounded like you were crunching roaches.
Cody:Oh, I don't like that either. You know what?
Jamie:I'm not going to say what that was now.
Cody:Good. It's a mystery and should remain that way tonight, folks. We are of course continuing our wax coverage with. Is it wax mask or the wax mask?
Mike:The wax mask.
Cody:The wax mask.
Mike:The wax mask. You know what? It does have a fucking name.
Cody:You know that? I tripped over that too. It turns out it's surprisingly hard to say the wax mask.
Jamie:Personally, I am only referring to it by its original Italian title. The tears I shed carve trenches in the wax that is my face.
Cody:A solid joke.
Jamie:It's all downhill from here.
Cody:Yes. Speaking of downhill from here, I got a little funky with the. The drink of the evening, folks.
If you want to drink along with me, you're going to have to pause this podcast for about a week. But once. Once you have the pre. The actual cocktail itself is very simple. So I infused whiskey with a candle.
So you're gonna have to start off by finding some food grade beeswax. Specifically, you want the food grade stuff, because who knows what they're putting into like those lavender ones that they're using for candles.
I don't want anyone dying from this. Make sure you are getting the food grade wax. What you're gonna do then is it comes in like little pellets.
So you're just gonna dump a bunch of those into a bottle of glass. A glass bottle would probably be a nicer way to say that.
And then what I did was I just put that glass bottle into some boiling water and just for a couple of minutes until all the wax pellets had melted.
Took it out with tongs and just kind of swung around my head a few times, got burning water everywhere and then coated the inside of that glass with the wax. At that point, you're ready to go. You just pour in whatever liquor you want, let it sit for at least three days.
I did like a week and then just filtered out. This won't actually change the flavor of the alcohol, but it will change the mouthfeel, which is the most pretentious thing I plan on saying.
Tonight we'll see if I can top myself. The. In this case, I got some Jack Daniel's Tennessee honey. So I put that in with the wax and it changed.
It's silkier, it's smoother, it feels different in your mouth, I swear to God.
So anyways, once all that's done and you're good to go and you have your honey wax whiskey, you're going to take 2 ounces of that, you're going to take 1 ounce of lemon juice and 1 ounce simple syrup, and you're going to make yourself a nice, easy, simple whiskey sour, which I am about to test right now. How do the ASMR guys do it? Are they like putting the microphone up into the booze and like slurping or.
Jamie:I think there's a lot of slurping and lip smacking mostly. I mean, some more experiences. I don't usually go for those kind of vocal triggers, but I. I've seen around.
Cody:All right, that sounds like extra work. So I'm just going to enjoy this. Pretend I'm goobing all over the mic. That's pretty good. That is actually a very good cocktail.
Mike:Now, Cody, sing Tennessee Whiskey.
Cody:I don't know the lines.
Mike:Neither do I. I just know the title of the song.
Cody:Oh, no. So there you go, folks. If you want yourself a nice, smooth, silky honey whiskey sour. That's all you gotta do. Just.
Just take a bunch of bees hostage, make some wax booze.
Mike:And remember, folks at home, if you don't have Any food grade wax. Any old wax will do.
Cody:Box Office Pulp goes to jail.
Mike:Because.
Jamie:Ernest goes to jail. But it's BP guy. Box Office pulp is innocent.
Cody:No, he's not.
Mike:I'm more imagining it's the plot of the movie, the prison.
Cody:I was thinking more Ernest Goes to jail, but okay, sure, I like that too.
Mike:What about Ernest Goes to Camp? Yeah, it's that plot, but instead he's in a prison.
Cody:I was about to say, Mike, do you view camp as prison?
Mike:It depends on what's happening to me.
Cody:I guess that kind of was the Addams Family values, right? Like it was a camp, but it was. That was a prison.
Mike:Yeah.
Cody:All right.
Mike:We're here to talk about sad movie. Honestly, more to think about it, Ernst Goes to Camp was a sad.
Cody:Oh, I thought you're talking and family values. I'm like, no, it's not.
Mike:No, no. That was a fun romp for everybody.
Cody:Yeah. Okay.
Mike:Horny too. So horny it's almost uncomfortable.
Cody:Well, this, this doesn't have anything to do with wax. I'm getting us back on topic here. Mike, do you want to count us down to start off the waxening?
Mike:Just interesting little side part that has nothing to do with anybody watching this, but we have decided to actually watch the original Italian language version with different subtitles that are from the English dub, which has different dialogue.
So if we aren't immediately reacting to something ridiculous, it's because we just don't remember that original scene and it's not happening in front of us. So just to let you know that.
Cody:For me, this is going to be like watching a whole new movie. All right.
Mike:And this should line up with the Severin release that is available. So I don't know if people are.
Cody:Getting it from anywhere else. Is it even on streaming?
Jamie:It's on tubi.
Cody:Oh, cool. Good for tubi.
Mike:And it, it comes and goes off of shutterlock too. All right, one, two, three.
Cody:Oh, cool. Mine was like five seconds ahead. That won't cause any problems.
Mike:Now for 20 minutes of opening. Opening logos.
Cody:Hey, that's how modern films are made too. Well, this gives me a lot of time to get through my movie.
Mike:Fun facts presenter.
Cody:This was directed by Sergio and we hit my first Italian game. I am going to butcher Stivaletti. Stivoli does not have a ton of feature films on his IMDb but he's very well known for his special effects works.
So he's got credits for phenomena, demons, demons two, the church, Dracula, 3D, dark glasses. So he's still out there doing special effects in films. Speaking of which, that neat little Eiffel Tower composite shot we just passed.
Or am I ahead of you? Right. Are you seeing it right now?
Mike:Yeah, yeah.
Cody:Okay.
Jamie: eworks that just scream. It's: Mike:They were excited to try something out and they do. Stivalett does admit. Yeah, it doesn't. That shot does not work. But there actually was more that went into it than it seems, so.
Which actually comes around to making it a little bit impressive for the time.
Cody:Like, that was a hard shot considering too. You got the camera moving all over the place. You got the composite inside of the frame.
They made that a tough shot for what I'm assuming was a fairly low budget movie.
Jamie:There's always something weirdly beautiful about whenever a ludicrous amount of work is put into a shot that doesn't work.
Cody:I like it, though. I actually legitimately like it.
Jamie:Oh, I'm obsessed with that one moment that's in, I believe, the extended cut of the two towers where Legolas screams. They run as if the very whips of their masters were behind them.
And then suddenly they're in front of a sunset that is only in the movie because they nearly killed themselves filming that and then got the dailies back. Are like, oh, this scene sucks. Well, it's still going in.
Cody:We should mention here that Stivaletti was appointed by Dario Argento to direct this movie after Lucio Falci passed away. So there.
There's a lot of discussion about how different the movie would have been in its original form with its original director, but we'll never really know. So just appreciate what you got.
Mike:The script was very different.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, the more steampunk sci fi elements that are sprinkled in here were all Sergio, right?
Mike:Yep.
Cody:Yes.
Mike:The original one was actually more of like, more of like a sweeping epic about, like, the history of, like, Italy. And it was supposed to take place in Turin and didn't have, like, pretty much any gore.
Was like the first draft and Argento got very mad because Butcher Fulci. Why is there no gore here? But he just didn't have interest in. In doing that at the. At the time. And yeah, it was a lot more classical in that way.
Cody:Yeah, Fulci, which is interesting because he was making this movie or trying to make this movie while in very poor health, but Fulci also thought of this as like a way to reinvent himself and try and make something a little bit more in the Fantasy edge. That was less hard edge horror.
Mike:Yeah.
Cody:So it's. It's fascinating to me. The guy was basically dying. He's like, nope, still time. I can. I can change this direction.
Jamie:I'm gonna win that Italian Oscar.
Cody:So this film was written by Daniel Stropa and Lucio Fulci. We just kind of discussed how different the writing ended up from the final product. But it's definitely got some Fulci still in it.
Our cast is Romina Mandello. I'm sorry. As Sonia Lafont. Robert Hossain as Boris Volkov.
The rest of the Italian names were going to make me look like a real big dummy, so I have omitted them from my movie.
Mike:Fun facts.
Cody:Our cinematography is by Sergio Salvetti. He was also the DP for City of the Living Dead, the Beyond, the House by the cemetery, and zombie 2. Plus Dr. Jekyll likes them hot.
A movie I didn't know existed until research.
Jamie:Well, I'm ordering that on Amazon now.
Cody:Jamie, you have to report back in and tell us how that one turned out. Oh, God. It's just a murderous row of Italians. Our music is by Maurizo Albani.
Beni, if you're Italian and I have just sworn at you in your native tongue, please write me a note explaining how I've done wrong. This cannot be allowed to stand.
Mike:I mean, you were. You were. You were pretty much wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cody: ,:Granted, it's an Italian film, so the release schedule is probably very different than ours, but it blows my mind when a horror film comes out in, like, April. Right.
million in:It unfortunately didn't do very well at the box office. It made about a quarter of a million dollars. So that probably explains why there's not like, a Wax Mask two or three or four.
But apparently it did fairly well on dvd. Not. Not probably enough to make up for losses and get a sequel or anything, but.
Jamie:Oh, well, before we get away with it, away from it, can I just say a stern voiceover saying Rome 12 years later over an Italian couple. Fucking is the most Italy thing I've ever seen Al before. Real quick, guys, I have to describe to you the poster to Dr. Jekyll likes them hot.
Which is Dr. Jekyll tiptoeing into a young woman's apartment, like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with his slippers in his hand to not make noise. And she's standing on the other side of the door in her nighty with a rolling pin.
Mike:Right on.
Cody:Cinema.
Jamie:This doesn't look Italian. This looks British. What is this? Carry on, Dr. Jekyll.
Mike:And my faith is my bed. It's an amazing line.
Cody:So to. To go back to the subtitle difference here, just because that's fresh on my mind.
That's probably one of the biggest barriers I've had for getting into Italian films because so many. So many of them are. They don't have great, great subtitles and it makes them feel very silly.
And it's hard for me to get into the mood of the picture. That's probably more of a me problem than anything.
But also, it's just kind of fascinating when you go back and watch these things with different subtitles and realize how it impacts the entire film without really changing the plot. Like, sometimes the lines can be different enough where plot points are different or, you know, they.
They put in some exposition that wasn't there before. Sure. But most of the time it's just flavor differences and those add. Yeah, it can make a completely different movie. If the dub is God awful enough.
Jamie:There is a reason anime fans take proper localization very, very seriously. Because you can just ruin a text and not realize it.
Cody:Like, come on, it says the same thing, sort of.
Mike:And this dub is like extra special because they add in things. I mean, my joke at the beginning, I'm gonna puke is. I don't know why they add that to a cop saying that at the beginning of the film.
That's one of the first lines in the movie is, I'm gonna puke. Well, don't do it here. To characters who aren't even on screen. And I think. And someone who kind of.
I. I don't know how true this is necessarily, but this was from somebody.
Cody:Who.
Mike:Knew a little bit more in depth of, like, dubbing, particularly of Euro films, which is when this came out, because of the period it was coming out, most of the stalwart, like, casts that would be involved in the dubbing had either died or retired. So who would usually come in to do a lot of these movies weren't there anymore.
So they were just kind of being thrown to whoever the fuck to do the dubbing. And occasionally you get. I think there are, like, a couple of, like, actual actors, but they play, like, bit characters that have, like, three lines.
Everybody else is just kind of random. And there wasn't a lot of effort, I think, put into the dubbing scripts necessarily. So you get whatever the. Is going on in the dub of this movie.
Jamie:Well, you have. It's like somebody making a parody of an Italian dub. Because no matter the tone, everyone is so gregarious about everything.
Cody:Yes.
Jamie:So, Detective, sit down. Tell me about these terrible murders.
Cody:You.
Jamie:And your wife have been making love lately. Yes.
Cody:Jamie, I appreciate that you're just turning this into some sort of Conan o' Brien sketch.
Mike:And don't get me wrong, I love this movie. Even with the dub.
Jamie:I honestly, if I had to choose, like, when re watching this movie, I probably would go with the dub just for. I don't know. There's something.
This is a very dark movie, but it's dark in a way that's so cartoonish and over the top, it occasionally borders on comedic. And while the dub doesn't make the movie funny, it just kind of adds to the slight dreamlike or like.
Mike:Oh, it makes it very pulpy.
Jamie:Yeah, very pulpy. Yeah.
Mike:Yeah. Because this is like a fantasy horror movie, which I think throws people off whenever they watch it, because that means it has a very different tone.
Cody:It's like if you.
Mike:I'm not comparing Suspiria and the Wax Mask to the other in any way. I just want to make that clear. But if you went into Suspiria and expecting, like, oh, just a normal ass horror movie, you'd be confused.
But if you have fantasy on your minds, you like, okay, I can go with this. This kind of works the same. It is not like a straight classical horror movie. It's more of a fantasy movie that.
Cody:Well, I would interject. It's. It's definitely fantasy, but, like, this whole bit here, very gothic.
Mike:Yeah, it's fantasy intersected with, like, a more classical artsy horror.
Cody:It's very po in a lot of sensibilities.
Mike:Very much, yeah.
Jamie:Which apparently was like, what. What Fulci was going for whenever he was hashing this out with Argento.
Kind of like what you were saying earlier, going for more of a classical horror movie.
Cody:That.
Jamie:Something a bit more like something I could imagine Bava directing rather than Fulci.
Cody:Could you imagine if Bava did this? I am. I am. Like, I. I'd be down for baba. Just remaking some of these. No offense to our current batch of filmmakers.
Jamie:Now, I was talking about this a little bit with Mike while you were preparing your drink. Earlier, I. I don't know what exactly I was expecting from Wax Mask, since I only like, knew.
Cody:Cameo.
Jamie:That's actually his real head. The head he walks around with now is the dummy.
Cody:That's the wax.
Jamie:Not everybody knows that he's a master, but I was not expecting this. It's like, specifically a murder at the Wax Museum story. Walked through a giallo that is also a gory late 90s slasher movie and an extremely.
Like, I'm very. I'm not very familiar with, like.
I don't know if you'd like, call them like Neo Giallos or what, but just like 90s and beyond era Giallos, but this is the first one I've seen that's post A Nightmare on Elm street.
Cody:And it's.
Jamie:To me, it's fascinating seeing what Americans took from giallo in the 80s and seeing that, like, reinterpreted as a 90s film. And considering Sergio wanted Englund for the role initially, I feel like that's very intentional.
There's a lot of Freddy Krueger esque imagery in here.
Cody:Well, it's funny you mentioned that, because I've always kind of stood by the idea that Scream is just American jello, but they took them and kind of filtered it through and went like, let's lose some of the wackier and keep the stuff that works. So it's American ice jello. More so maybe than just a plain old slasher. I think it has more in common with a giallo than it does necessarily.
Even a typical American slasher like Halloween, that it was aping. But that's a discussion for another podcast.
Jamie:Just a quick note, that would be an excellent episode or series. Just what America did with the giallo, like tracking that from Halloween to Nightmare to Scream and everything in between.
Mike:That'd be cool.
Cody: so this came out in April of: Mike:I miss Mad Scientists, Labs and movies.
Cody:Also talking about inspirations and what this movie feels like.
I find it kind of interesting that on the special features for the Blu Ray, they get into it in, like, two different spots where the director Stavelletti mentions that he saw a cure for wellness and thought, oh, this is very much Wax mask. Not necessarily accusing them of, like, stealing his ideas. He mentions, like, I don't know if the director ever saw my movie.
But I feel like he took some of my ideas and stuff I would have put in a sequel, and he made it into that movie.
Mike:So I think that was really interesting. Yeah.
Cody:Yeah. So I guess if you're looking for a comparison, you could maybe go with the kind of tone you got from A Cure for wellness.
Obviously, very, very, very different movies filmed very differently, but some of the mad Science ideas and especially the gothic trappings towards the later end of A cure for wellness are shared in this film.
Jamie:I feel like we're about five years out from the Internet remembering a cure for wellness happened and then discovering it in a big way.
Cody:I mean, I absolutely adore that movie, but it is also very long, so I can see why people would not necessarily revisit it, because you need, like, three hours of your life to revisit it.
Jamie:I had to recently rewatch the Batman over the course of a week and a half, so I get that.
Cody:Yeah, that's the thing. I love the Batman too, but, yeah, it is a long one. Died from fright, you say? To shreds, you say.
Also, unfortunately, I don't think the glowing eyes on the Medusa are a wonderful effect.
Mike:Doesn't quite work.
Jamie:It's like we're suddenly in a Harryhausen movie. A little bit.
Cody: Yeah. For something made in:Like, if this were made in the 80s, they would have had to actually make a puppet head that glow with glowing eyes, and that would have been a much, much better effect. Yeah.
Mike:Stivaletti really just wanted to experiment with the.
Cody:The.
Mike:The new effects that were on the market at the time. So he was just kind of, you just excited about and, like, convincing Argento to. To include visual effects like that.
And some actually aren't that bad. I mean, I think actually some of the morphing effects in the third act aren't. Yeah.
Jamie: If you hadn't told me it was: Cody:Oh, yeah. Again, that's the why. Like, the Scream comparison throws me off. It's like, wait, even the same year?
Jamie: uld have been in a movie from: Cody: in the ass right now because: Mike:All right.
Cody:Yep. I. I done goofed. I goofed.
Jamie:And walked out of this. And then Gone to the next theater to see Men in Black.
Mike:Oh, God. Now that's a double.
Jamie:Watching this movie. And just quietly from the next theater, you can hear.
Mike:I want to talk about a. This.
Cody:That.
Mike:The. Something that civility brought to the movie that fascinates me.
And why, like, one of the things I really dug about the first time I watched it, which is the alchemy aspect of it, and making it more of a mad scientist movie instead of a angry artist. Because I want to see more people, more creatives come at a project with, like, this kind of idea of, okay, the thing is unrealistic.
Like turning people into wax statues. You can't actually do that. Like, you can't just cover them in wax and call it a day.
Cody:That's where they drew the line. Like, no, no, no, that's not realistic.
Jamie:What we need is mad Science.
Mike:But no, but here's the thing. What I love, though, is Stivaletti didn't go, now let's figure out how that would work in the real world.
Instead, he went, if we're already going to be doing a fake thing, why don't we do a more fun fake thing on top of it? So alchemy and Mad Science. So he's actually, like, turning them into wax creatures who are then still alive, but they're trapped as wax statues.
Cody:Do you.
Jamie:So creative for a premise that we've seen so many times over the past history of filmmaking that every time really is just. And then they case the body in wax and that's.
Cody:It's been.
Jamie:It's scary.
Cody:Well, it makes me think a little bit about why we don't have so many wax movies anymore. And one of the big things is, well, if you're going to be topical, why would you do a period piece and do wax figures?
If you're trying to do someone making a movie about, you know, playing God or making monsters in their own image, you're going to go with robots and AI. You're going to go for the new topical ideas. The wax figures don't necessarily make as much sense as they used to.
But then you also have the fact that if for a wax museum piece to make any amount of sense, it almost has to be a period piece, which is going to be more expensive.
If you've only got a couple of bucks in a camera, you're going to try and find something that you can film in a contemporary setting because it's going to save you so much on production.
And I think it's unfortunate because you're not going to get things like this anymore unless you have enough money and you can convince a studio to go all in.
Jamie:Look at the Dark castle House of Wax, which has to base its entire premise around what an anachronism that wax museum is.
Cody:Yeah.
Now I shouldn't say there aren't horror movies that are period pieces because obviously we do get a couple of those every single year that are, you know, lower budget. Ones that probably don't even play in more than like two theaters.
But it's, I imagine, a huge uphill battle for those films get made compared to, you know, a contemporary set slasher film or something like that.
Jamie:Yeah, I mean, there's only reason westerns exist.
Mike:Yeah, I, I mean this got lucky because most pretty much the wax museum itself is a place Stivaletti was already renting for his studio and they just turned it into the wax museum. So that's how they were able to keep the budget down because he had two weeks to put this movie together.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:Charles Band style.
Cody:Well, and the whole origin here is kind of fascinating to me too because I don't think Argento and Fulci were particularly close or friends or anything. No, but Argento still saw that Fulci was in poor health and didn't have money to cover his own health care and, and gave him this project.
You know, they collaborated on this so he could help out another guy that he didn't even really like that much.
Jamie:It was fascinated me because I did not know about that until going through Mike's notes. And specifically Argento did not like Fulci because he felt he stole his style.
And the mental image of Dario Argento in a theater playing zombie, shaking his head his fist and coin. That son of a. I was gonna do the eye effect first.
Cody:It's, it's.
Mike:It's a very like sweet story, honestly. Especially when you watch the behind the scenes stuff like they didn't like each other.
But Argento still gets choked up talking about Fulci and Fulci's death in a way that really will surprise you because I just assumed Argento is heartless.
Cody:But yeah, it was a big move. Like, oh, wow, that is. Yeah, that's surprisingly kind.
Mike:And he kind of, he kind of in, I don't want to say invents a story about like how Fulci died, but you could tell he kind of wanted it to be like be poignant in some way. Like he doesn't know if like that's like that folch that Fulci forgot to Take his insulin because he was too wrapped up in watching a movie.
It's like, you can't prove that necessarily. I mean, I guess you could buy some context clues, like looking around, like, what was going on. Yeah, but he just kind of liked that being the story.
And there was something, like, really nice about that.
Cody: it was like back in the early:I can't imagine how a cotton candy kept on.
Mike:I honestly, I think I like cotton candy more if it's. It's cloud like. Like that. I like how it doesn't have any specific shape.
Jamie: nocent day on the town in the: Mike:Dark man locked at night. When everything made sense.
Jamie:We used to be a society.
Mike:But going back to, like, Argento, like, wanting to give Fulci. Fulci something to make him feel better.
The thing that Argento and Fulci wrote before Wax Mask, they wanted to just do a remake of something they both loved as children, essentially, like something that they had, like, some sentimental value to. They wrote them. They wrote a remake of the Mummy?
Cody:Yeah, of all things.
Mike:And they worked really hard, but then dropped it because they couldn't come up with a new twist on the Mummy. I would argue just Fulci and Argento filming a Mummy one day would have been worth it. I'm kind of mad that didn't happen.
That's maybe in a drawer somewhere.
Jamie:It's not like they hashed it out and we're like, ah, we just can't find the hook. You made the movie, you wrote it and then decided that it wasn't good enough. Like, ah, that. That's again, that's somewhere.
That's just in a drawer somewhere.
Cody:Can we just for a second talk about what was going on with the color there for a moment? Like, it just turned into a sepia thing for half a scene and then immediately back to full daylight color, which is fascinating.
Mike:Wax vision.
Cody:Yeah. Like, the first time I was watching it, I was thinking like, oh, okay, maybe it's like they've been out all day and it's a transition to nighttime.
And this is the sun going down. We're getting dusk. No, that's definitely not it. It's just wax vision.
Jamie:My God, the wax. Only see in wax.
Mike:He's more wax than man now.
Jamie:Also, just. Just to return to the The Argento and Fulci thing, again, because again, like this, this is something I didn't re.
I didn't know the slightest thing about until going through the research.
nto was at a film festival in:I hate this person. But no, no, no, he's an Italian horror director. This isn't right. We have to fix this. And I'm fascinated by not. Not to.
Not to upon the good old days as like anything that's any more innocent than. Than Hollywood or movie making in general today. But it kind of feels like filmmakers had a sense of fraternity and.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:Solidarity that they simply do not have anymore. Like, that's not, that's not a moment I could imagine happening between any rivals today.
Cody:It's the nice ending of the Prestige. But there's a bunch of different examples of Argento helping out people that he worked with. Like he would give them movies like, here, use my name.
I'll be a producer. We'll get this made. You can have a film. And you know, it really paints Argento in a much different light when you realize he's.
He's helping out everyone. He's kind of doing the Roger Corman thing for his own group of Italian filmmakers.
Mike:Yeah, he's, he's delightful, surly.
Jamie:It's just all the more evidence that man, movies are made by filmmakers, not movie studios. Movie studios do not create community. Movie studios do not take care of the community. That is all people.
And if there aren't, if there aren't mentor figures, if there aren't elder statesmen to kind of look after people like that, then who the is there to do that?
Cody:Just so everyone at home knows, this was edited for clarity. Jamie then went on a two hour rant about Moana 2.
Mike:And the live action remake of Moana coming out.
Cody:Yeah, within a year.
Jamie:And a live action remake of Moana 2.
Cody:Oh, no, it's a vicious circle.
Mike:Anything to keep the rock busy.
Jamie:He put in that Shazam muscle suit.
Cody:I love that. Every wax movie has to have like a kind of scary disfigured henchman.
Mike:This one has two. Or is it two?
Cody:Od.
Mike:This guy always looks more like a.
Jamie:Better title than Matt Quacks now.
Cody:Also, oh, man, the chemistry between Characters.
Just another thing that kind of turns me off in these movies because again with the dubs and all this, it never really plays the way it should for me. It always just feels like every character.
Mike:Hates the other character pretty much. I don't know why.
Cody:It's.
Mike:That's just a thing with dubs in general. It's really weird. Even good dubs, it just doesn't. I. I guess maybe just because they tend to record it separately.
Like, there just feels like there's something missing.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Look at Boris's robe here, by the way. Spectacular.
Cody:Just gonna mention the robe. He's. He's getting a full Invisible man vibes.
Jamie:Oh, yeah, we were. We were talking about this before recording. Like, there was apparently a.
A bitter back and forth between Sergio and Argento over whether or not this dude should be named Boris. And Argento swore he would win the day when the dub was recorded.
Cody:It's true. I mean, yeah, as a producer, you could get away with that.
Mike:This main villain was almost called Charles. I don't think that quite has the same ring to it as Boris Volkov.
Cody:Right.
Jamie:Apparently, Sergio's big point was Boris is historically accurate. Dario.
Mike:Well, the Frenchman named Charles.
Jamie:So them screaming about historical accuracy in front of the gigantic glowing steampunk alchemy.
Mike:Machines, the giant steampunk hearts in the. In the basement of the wax museum.
Jamie:That they use to reverse life and death. It's so.
Mike:I love this movie.
Cody:How do we feel about the Terminator comparisons at the end of the film when the giant.
Mike:You mean when the Terminator shows up?
Cody:When the Terminator shows up. Because everyone in the movie, like all the interviews and stuff, swears up and down like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Totally. We were not going civil.
Mike:Eddie says it. He felt it was coming from the.
Even though he talks about, like all the visual effects where he wanted to do because of Terminator 2, but he says, like his. Him and James Cameron were coming from the same place, which was automatons, which is technically correct. But also that's just the Terminator.
That doesn't make it less cool. There's a wax cyborg skeleton and it is.
Cody:We'll have more to say. I want to interrupt, though, because I absolutely love these silent movie throwbacks. Silhouettes. Like very. Absolutely Nosferatu kind of stuff.
Mike:Just so robot hand.
Cody:And then it cuts the robot hand. It really jumps.
Jamie:Big fan. Anytime a G turns its slasher into a full on super villain.
Cody:Well, the look here too, you know, he's. It's basically the look from House of Wax, you know, when Vincent Price is running around in his black cloak and black hat, it's. It's kind of that.
I know there's. There's some hints in here that this is House of Wax.
They obviously didn't want to totally remake that movie, but you can't tell me they didn't pull bits and pieces from that film.
Mike:Legally, they're not. I mean, legal. I mean, then they tried doing the. Well, it's actually based on a Gaston Laro story.
Cody:Are we getting into that? Mike, do you want to go into the backstory of.
Mike:We can go into the backstory of that. So Argento and Fulci originally had this. Wait, wait, why is.
Cody:I'm sorry, I'm distracted by this mustache.
Mike:Man, which I think is fake. Actually. I'm not sure which. Which facial hair is more fake, the.
Cody:Giant goatee or the mustache?
Mike:The giant goatee is pretty fucking spectacular, though. I wish I could pull that off. But. And ironically, all of this led to Argento's Phantom of the Opera. But.
Cody:Sorry, I just want to back up because I really. I just pointed that guy out because in my mind, it was like, that's Salvador Dali. What is he doing in this movie?
Mike:Oh, my God.
Cody:It. Sorry, I'll stop interrupting now.
Mike:So they were going to call it Gaston Larose the Wax Mask, because of it would be based on a particular story that was called like, the Wax Museum or something like that. Now, a couple things. One, it that ended up not being called Gaston Larose stuff, it technically still ends up in some credits here and there.
They would eventually say, because. Because there isn't. They. Nobody could find what story they were talking about, that it was just inspired by the writings of Gaston Laro.
Like the tone, which is not inaccurate. I don't know if that's on purpose, but it's not inaccurate.
e Waxwork museum. It's. Yeah.:Gaston Lerose Bedside Companion. Companion. Now, here's the interesting thing now, and.
Cody:A few people have.
Mike:Were kind of able to maybe pinpoint. So it might have been published first in like the twenties or something like that. So did some digging. So that book, particular book is edited by.
Where's his name? Peter Haining.
ade. This is way back in like:And he ended up going. This person ended up going into the Wax. The Waxwork Museum. Thank you to. To Michelle Perry.
Now, when I read his:Intrigued, I did further research and found that Andre Delord had turned his play into a short story with the same title.
Comparing the French text of that story with the Gaston Leroux translation which appeared in Haning's book, I was able to establish they were were indeed the same exact story.
The book's copyright page credits BP Singer Features Inc. A syndication agency supplying fillers to newspapers and magazines for permission to repent reprint the translation of One by One. Alexander Peters is entirely possible that Haning may have been.
May have been convinced by the agency that he was buying bonafide translations of Laureau's stories, but was actually just buying somebody else's story and then sticking Leroux's name on.
Cody:Turns out this was all based on a Goosebumps books and they were just embarrassed to admit it.
Jamie:The Goosebumps books don't wear the wax.
Cody:Mask inspired by the writings of R.L. stine.
Mike:Oh no. This dog's gonna kill me.
Jamie:I just like that. That means technically Wax Mask is the latest in the famous series of Italian knockoff films.
Mike:What I love is this makes it. It's like six levels down of copyright infringement.
Jamie:Technically, this movie is a crime.
Mike:We say over murder.
Cody:That hand rip too. I want to talk about that gag because that was a good one. You don't see hands ripped off like that. And that looks like it was stop motion.
We're getting a little bit everything here.
Jamie:I love the stop motion being unnecessarily stop motion too. It's so unsettling.
Cody:And then the guy just has a heart skewer. Like he's got a kebab going of organs.
Mike:Why we do not know. But he.
Cody:So I can.
I can definitely see the point of like, yeah, violence was inserted into this movie because then you have these Flashbacks where all of a sudden it goes from being this kind of drama to the Terminator ripping people in half and putting their organs on a spike.
Mike:This movie has such an interesting tone that I don't think a lot of other films come close to. Like, this is like there's a certain kind of schlock that I really like that there is isn't a lot of. And that's like artsy schlock.
And this is like artsy schlock.
Cody:I think that's how people described Hannibal season three.
Mike:Yes.
Cody:Which probably actually does take a lot of its influences from the Italian horror genre. So full circle, baby.
Mike:That first half. Definitely.
Cody:And I want to make sure it.
Jamie:Just goes to shocker when I think of prestige Schlock.
Cody:Yes. Is this a sub genre unto itself or is this just aesthetic? It's.
Mike:It's adjacent to the schlock genre. I think schlock is kind of like an umbrella genre and there's little offshoots here and there.
Cody:Well, I'm not just talking schlock itself. Like artistic schlock. Like I want. I want a. Like a fancy theater just doing a month long playlist of artistic schlock and trying.
Jamie:Elevated shock.
Cody:Yeah. Elevated popcorn. A24. Schlock. Schlock 24.
Jamie:We're just playing slice every day.
Cody:Do you think this guy got cast because he kind of looks like Dario Argento when he was younger?
Mike:Probably.
Jamie:I just kept thinking goth Bill Maher.
Mike:He's definitely got the hair these days.
Jamie:That's the best Looky Lou portrait ever.
Cody:It's a little Scooby Doo during the special features. It's hilarious to me because they're so frank compared to the PR pieces you get on most current release movies.
So they're interviewing Dario Argento and he's just talking about like, oh, man. Jesus. The guy. That's how Argento talks.
Mike:Why is he Patrick Warburton?
Cody:Oh, baby. Oh, better, better, better.
Jamie:Uncle Ben.
Cody:But it's talking about, I'm gonna turn.
Mike:You to wax, Uncle Ben and bring.
Cody:You back to life.
Jamie:Then Toby Maguire pulls the cranks.
Cody:Vader, don't turn me into the sad man. Peter, don't do it. No, you.
Jamie:You're using the Vulture's youth.
Mike:The Tablets of Time.
Cody:That's exactly what all the special features are like on the disc. It's amazing now. So they're just very open about all the things that are going on behind the scenes. So the.
The one that stuck out me the most was Robert Hussein. Apparently was having an affair with one of the actresses in the mo. Yes.
And, and the husband found out and Robert Hussein used all, all of his acting skills to convince the husband that they weren't actually, they were training for the movie. And it was, they had to go through their lines without clothes because it's very hard to act naturally while naked.
Mike:Yes, it, it was to free her, so she had to act new. This was incredible, this entire story. And I 100% believe Hussein is that much of a pimp, honestly. Look at him.
Jamie:He looks like a man who has an affair with your wife. That is exactly what he looks like.
Mike:It's just like the most French actor story I've ever heard.
Cody:He came, he saw, he conquered, he immediately went back to France. So they had to rush all of his scenes in like one day he.
Jamie:Stayed around just long enough to sleep with a man's wife.
Cody:I mean, he was, he was there for, you know, the movie proper.
But listening to like the producers and the director talk about it, it's, it's fascinating because the producer's like, yeah, this is Robert Hussein's movie. This is about the villain. And the director is like, no, no, no, it's about the girl. It's. That's, it's her movie.
Jamie:So I just want to say using stop motion on actual people to replicate the movement of an automaton is brilliant. And I want to see if the directors do that.
Cody:Yeah, I always love it when they do stop motion with an actual human being because you can't make them perfectly still. So it always ends up being like a little twitchy and weird looking. I'm specifically thinking of Ash's hand infection in the Evil Dead.
There's a beautiful shot of the infection just racing through his hand and it's barely even a second long if that. But you can just see Bruce Campbell had to leave his hand fucking on a table for six hours to get the shot.
And I, I love the weird janky effect you get with that kind of stuff. So anyways, I guess everyone in this casting crew just.
Mike:It's a horny movie.
Cody:Just a horny movie. But then you have, you have some of the. They, they had an actress who's being interviewed on the special features.
And it's hilarious because she's just like, didn't enjoy this one at all. It's the aunt they, yeah, they didn't want to cast.
Mike:Like, who is the wife of the producer, by the way.
Cody:Yeah, she's like, they didn't want to cast me because they thought like, you know, I was, I was just getting preferential treatment and all this other stuff, but I still got the movie, and I. They weren't nice to me, and I didn't like them. I didn't like the lead actress.
Right after every other person who's being interviewed has talked about how much they loved working with the lead actress.
Mike:She did not seem like a pleasant woman at all.
Jamie:My favorite thing is, even in the promotional material for this, when the movie was being released, Sergio was like, I don't give a shit about this movie. I'm helping Dario Argento out. My next movie, that's gonna be really good.
Cody:But it's. I laughed every time because before this actress made a comment, she would be like, well, I gotta be honest.
She should have some variation of I gotta tell the truth. Like, no, you don't. But please, please do. And they seem to.
Mike:Whoever was editing that seemed to be enjoying lingering on her sometimes just so you could like, yeah, she was like that.
Cody:I do appreciate Severin. I think it was Severin that put out the special release of this.
Did a ton of interviews, which has got to be a hard sell because the collectors are going to get this and go, oh, it's in Italian. And kind of zone out. Or not pay attention, or not even want them because of the language barrier. But they still put in the extra effort.
They got interviews with the composer, they got interviews with the director. They put a new commentary in. They. They still went for it, even though there was that language gap.
Mike:It's a pretty release.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:I don't know if this is just me, but it was so distracting the first time I was watching it. That's all I can think of now. There is something intangibly modern about this building in a way that's really, like, anachronistic. Right.
I don't know if it's just the way the hallway looked or something, but it's odd seeing someone in period dress walking around this.
Mike:Yeah. I think the handheld also goes a long way of like.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Taking something away from. But not even in a bad way, like, you know, Michael Mann sort of period piece sort of way.
Cody: just like. But. But it's the:What's happening?
Jamie:Didn't they fuck with the frame rate, too, a little bit in Public Enemies?
Mike:Yeah, well, back. Back then, I don't think there. There wasn't really frame rate on digital photography that was the same as film frame rate.
So yeah, just there, there is a lot of extra frames and it just made it look like people were wearing costumes, which is what they were doing.
Cody:So there's just something too like you expect if you're watching a movie about the 30s, it should just be like in black and white or something. You know, it's not. It feels like this is wrong, this isn't the past.
Jamie:And it's weird because I remember American Gangster came out around that time. I believe that was, that was Ridley Scott.
Cody:And yeah, that's a Scott picture.
Jamie:The second you get to like the 70s, it is perfectly okay for it to just look like a modern movie. Like your brain doesn't, doesn't zone out because like American Gangster is like modern Ridley Scott as. And yet that. It's not anachronistic.
Cody:But.
Jamie:But yeah, the second you go. The second the clothes significantly change, you have to change filmmaking.
Cody:I think so.
Mike:I think with like a scene like this, that handheld just makes it feel like you're walking around in the room, which makes it seem less artifice.
Cody:Well, it's, it's such a jump because they use it for that scene. And then we jump back to here and these are all, you know, like static shots of the.
The torture dungeon with the mysteriously colored goo in the background and the electricity effects.
Mike:And civility. Did not want to do handheld, but.
Cody:Well, I think handheld would have been very difficult for the effects. Right.
If you're trying to rotoscope in all the lightning effects that was, you know, even in 97, I mean, digitally drawn in or whatever, that it's still, I'm assuming, much more difficult if you have a free roaming camera compared to something locked down.
Jamie:So why do I feel like either Mike Mignola or Guillermo del Toro had this particular scene in mind when they create. When they were designing Cronin.
Cody:This feels. I mean, obviously there's no giant bugs or anything, but it looks like it could be a set from Mimic.
Mike:Yeah.
Jamie:I am obsessed with how this scene and the similar sequence at the end of the movie look so much like old sci fi covers. Especially the color palette.
Mike:Yes. Oh yeah, they're super old pulp covers.
Cody:Like old.
Mike:Yeah. I love it so much.
Jamie:Basically this looks like something from Heavy Metal.
Cody:I'm just thinking this actually reminds me of not this specific effect going on right now of him waxifying people, but the, the whole torture dungeon just reminds me of something out of like old, old, old school Looney Tunes. Like whenever they would meet a Mad Scientist dude have very similar kind of stuff.
You know, electricity arcing everywhere in vials of mysterious goo bubbling.
Mike:That's what I want. Bring that back. I want more Mad Scientist movies.
Jamie:I never really thought about it, but it's funny to think of how low key the inspirations for those visuals were and like, just. Just old like Universal Sci Fi Monster.
I think how much that was exaggerated in animation to the point where that just became what Mad Science looked like.
Cody:We're kind of talking over this, but I would wager to say this is probably Stivaletti's favorite part of the movie. Like the way it kind of lingers on it. This for him is the big tentpole moment of the film.
And coincidentally it happens at the exact middle of the movie. So this is in my mind, this is what he wanted. This is the whole reason he made the picture, because he wanted this scene.
Mike:There's so much ooky going on.
Cody:And to our earlier points here, this is their new inn on the Wax Museum because we've seen it a dozen times where someone is being covered in wax and being made into a living statue. And this gives it that fresh angle of. Nah, it's not quite that. It's not as simple as dumping them in wax. They're being transmogrified.
Mike:More horror movies really need to pull from alchemy.
Cody:Damn, this high. Bill.
Jamie: a criminal Mastermind in the: Cody:Well, it left all the blood around, but they can't do anything with that.
Mike:Luckily in Italy everyone's always making love, so you can just kind of like bust into places.
Jamie:This has been something that's been on my mind since watching this Mike. And I know very little about Italian filmmaking. So I'm curious if maybe like you could shed a little bit of light on this.
There seems to be a very fascinating parallel between sex and death in Italian cinema, especially G allo.
But it seems very, very different from how American movies tie together sex and death, which is in a very classically Christian death is the punishment for sex. Way like one leads to the other. But in Italian cinema, it seems like death and sex are. Are more like sisters.
More like there's something that's leaked together through sensuality and play off each other rather than one leads to the other.
Cody:Yeah, she's talking about the wax.
Mike:Oh. And it's sexuality is so much more open. I mean in cross Europe in general.
But yeah, in Italy especially is just nudity and sexuality are just not something that's particularly shied away from in and not Even like, where nude bodies sometimes aren't necessarily sexualized. Also, this origin is metal as fuck.
Cody:He's getting the Joker treatment.
Jamie:I'd love to see this happen to Vincent Price.
Cody:No.
Jamie:My Beautiful Face and the.
Mike:And then Skeletor comes out, comes about and says he'll be back.
Cody:Freeze frame.
Mike:But yeah, there's kind of throughout, like, all, like, Italian literature and stuff, there's. And cinema, there's a symbiotic connection between sex and death because they're both. They're both seen as kind of like the opposites of each other.
I mean, besides, like, the pleasure aspect. But there's also the one makes life, one takes life sort of thing. So they're the exact opposites of. Of each other.
And I think, like, that freedom they like playing off of a lot.
Jamie:Yeah. The thing that first got me thinking about that, like, years and years ago was just seeing Milo Menara's art for the first time.
Where the two things that dude draws relentlessly throughout his career is the moment of insertion and people getting their throats cut. Both with equal. Drawn with equal vigor.
Cody:So a while back, we mentioned the idea that this isn't exploring the wax museum as a form of artistry upon the creator. And I definitely agree with that take because this one, it's more focused on kind of a mad science advancement and the Wax museum is more incidental.
But it's almost like, well, why even bother having the wax museum if the guy making the wax figures doesn't really give a shit about the artistry behind his displays? So I guess it's inherently going to be part of the movie that the guy is a little bit of an artist.
But the movie makes zero effort to really expand on that idea for once because it's always kind of percolating in the back or a major key component of a wax movie, but not here, which sets this one up so much. Sets this one so apart from all the other ones.
Mike:Yeah. And I think that actually kind of goes back to the. Honestly, the sex thing in a way, because it's exhibition.
Like, he's kind of owning these people and he's putting them on display. And he is kind of like, churned up in some sort of sensual way about this. So he's doing these experiments, but also this is like his means to an end.
Like he's creating this gallery of them.
Cody:Yeah. As compared to Vincent Price in the House of Wax, where he is in love with his creations.
Vincent Price wants those statues because he is in love with them. So it is obviously Possessive.
But a lot of it is sad in a different way, where he's maybe not trying to control them, but to try and make companionship for himself.
Mike:Yeah.
Jamie:Here's a question I've been mulling over. I'm curious what you guys think. Would you consider, if not entirely informed and in function, a Bucket of Blood to technically be a wax movie?
Cody:I rewatched it recently, and that was on my mind too, because obviously it's not the exact same thing, but it's hitting pretty close. Right. He covers his victims in a thick layer of modeling clay and turns them into art.
Mike:Yeah. And it's doing a very. It's playing on some similar themes. I mean, the Mystery of the Max Museum and Wax Museum are definitely doing the.
Like, they're more meta in it, I think. I don't think people appreciate, like, those are, like, early meta films about, like, violence and stuff.
Particularly, like, having the wax figures be specifically of, like, executions and things like that. Things that were attended by large galleries of people. Like it was entertainment.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:And in a way, Bucket of Blood's kind of doing a similar thing of, like, using violence as a way to show art and create community and building an audience, because people crave that in some way, even if they're not consciously aware of it.
Cody:I very much see most wax movies being about the relationship of a creator. Like, they're about making art and they want to make art, and that's the whole thing they're after.
Whereas A Bucket of Blood, yeah, Dick Miller wants to make art, but to your point, Mike, he's doing it for the community. He wants to be part of the artist community and he wants to be famous.
So to me, that's kind of the line in the sand for A Bucket of Blood compared to House of Wax. He's not doing this necessarily because he loves art itself.
He's doing this because he would like to become famous and he thinks he might have some sort of skill in the movie.
Lampoons that whole community and how silly it is he'd want to blend in with these people because most of them are, you know, very goofy, beatnik kind of guys.
Mike:Lousy beatniks.
Jamie:I love that. Douchebag. Cool people have always plagued America, no matter what the generation. I found that very comforting when I first watched that movie.
There's another. Another thought. We're talking about, like. Like, themes in these wax movies and, like, how, like, the desires of the artist play a part in that.
Do you think that. And maybe this is more so prevalent in, like, the.
Like really older wax movies, there's maybe kind of a, a vaguely Christian thread or just a vaguely anti human arrogance thread to these movies of, look at this jackass trying to essentially plagiarize God's creation. Look at, look at somebody trying to turn something that is already in its idealized form into art, because now a person with it.
Mike:That's where I think alchemy being used is so interesting. Because what, you know, what is. What were alchemists trying to do? They were essentially trying to be God.
You know, that was kind of beyond science and that was just creating out of thin air, essentially morphing the. More morphing the world to what they wanted.
So kind of like extending that to something like creating like wax statues that recreates the human form, but in the way that, you know, Boris Wanset is definitely playing with those kind of ideas.
Cody:We've always seen the, the wax museum being an offshoot of the Frankenstein kind of story too. You know, making the body controlling the body.
And then Frankenstein takes a different jag because it starts talking about like, oh, I'm terrified and regretful of what I've done. Normally in the wax movies, it's like, no, this is fucking great. I want to make more wax people. More wax. More wax.
And in that line too, you can maybe even lump in stories about the golem. You know, anytime where a man has made a humanoid monster something, something in his image, but perverted.
Mike:Golem, which ironically, I think that was an actual real Gaston Laro story that I think they did all they did actually borrow from for this a little bit.
Cody:I think the, the major differentiation between a golem story and a wax story would be wax stories are all typically about science. And the golem is going to be a religious story. So they, they can be shaped very similarly, but there's very different machinery under the hood.
Mike:I think there's also like, golem stories are more like direct vengeance. There's something more. The, the wax stories seem to be more about punishment. Then it's like straight vengeance.
Like there's a point trying to be proven. Not even directed at anyone specific, just the world at large.
Cody:I mean, well, with golem, right, it's always justified. To begin, the Jewish community needs a protector and they're given one. And then it goes too far and they lose control over that power.
So it's almost like the original nuclear power story, right? Like, oh, no, we made nukes. We've won World War II. Oh God, everything's very bad now, as.
Jamie:I feel like with the Wax museum stories. There's. What is a wax museum horror movie, if not a movie about the horror of desecrating the dead?
I mean, in every wax museum movie, what are the exhibits if not tainted grave sites, essentially?
Mike:I think a lot of those kind of fears probably started popping up when grave robbing was so in vogue.
I mean, going back to some of the inspiration for this movie, like and the Alchemist, some of the alchemists that inspired Stability's take on Boris, that was stuff that they were infamous for or at least rumored to have done, which was grave Rob and steel bodies to do their experiments on. And that is most likely true. And I think grave desecration and body desecration is something that is like kind of a. Like it's in all of our.
Like, in everybody's mind, but is also sort of a taboo subject. Almost. Like, it's just. It's unfathomable for some people to. To grasp. And it's a. It's a horrifying idea.
And that's why I really like how it's, you know, you don't see grave robbing or anything in, like, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it's talked about like, this is something that's.
That sets up the horror that's going to take place, is mentioning that there's grave desecration going on, that people are stealing bodies for some reason.
Cody:Yeah. On top of that, it's fascinating to me when you go Back to the 30s, the 40s, how many movies were made about grave robbing? That was a hot topic.
And I think you can get away with those because you're not showing anything too explicit, but you're still bringing up taboo ideas that would be terrifying to an audience. So you can get around the Hays Code very easily and still have something disturbing.
So you're gonna end up with a ton of movie like the Flesh and the Fiends, where it's like, okay, cool, let's get a couple of good actors and just have them hauling around dummy corpses.
Mike:There's something very harsh about when something's horrible is happening to you when you're alive. Like, yeah, that's. That's terrifying to imagine, but it's the. I don't know what happens to me after death, and I can still be fucked with.
I think it's something like really eats at people when that idea comes up.
Jamie:Well, also, in his book Wasteland, Scott Poole puts forth a really interesting theory for why so much of people's macabre interests went to. In the direction of, you Know, grave robbing, the display of bodies for sport, the desecration of grapes.
And it is explanation for that is just world with.
With the horrors of World War I and a lot of people in Europe and America dealing with their very first exposure to mass death and just seeing disfigurement and just, you know, mass graves and things like that, a very suppressed desire for playing with dead bodies kind of arose in the.
In the subconscious of people, as he puts it, wanting your own death doll to explore the macabre feelings that all of this death that's surrounding you is bringing up. And I think there's. I think there's a lot of truth in there. I mean, after World War I, there was a brief resurgence in wax museums around America.
Like, why else would that be going on? I mean, the. The poppy, like I remember correctly, like, even like Turing.
Companies of Frankenstein received a splurge in popularity after World War I. Like, leading into the film being made is. People got really, really interested in. Yeah, but what.
What would it look like if somebody died and like you. You just dug them out of their grave? What would it look like if you. With a dead body? Are there stories about that? Is that okay to talk about.
Mike:Curiosity about death? The thing we don't talk about, but we all have.
Cody: scinating ones there from the:So people were dying of tuberculosis and they didn't quite understand it. They didn't know what was causing it.
So whole families might catch it and people would die maybe slowly, or some people would get the disease and die within months. So they didn't even quite understand how the disease worked or what its scale would be.
And so people would turn to folk medicine in some cases, to try and deal with these things. So one of the ideas was, okay, someone in this family is a vampire, and they are draining the life essence from their family from the grave.
And the only way to deal with this is to go dig up the graves of everyone in the family who has died of consumption over the years, check the corpse to see if it had, you know, unusual signs of decay, like the body wasn't decaying fast enough or at all. Check the organs to see if they still had fresh blood in them.
And then if they found one they thought was suspicious, they would cut out the heart, burn it, and then mix the ashes into water or some other kind of liquid and make it into a medicine for the remaining afflicted members of the family to drink and cure themselves.
Jamie:Which.
Cody:That's bonkers. That was obviously. Obviously there weren't thousands of cases of this, but it happened several times.
It wasn't like one isolated incident where there was one person that got dug up and, you know, had their. Their corpse mutilated, essentially.
It was a thing Americans actually did at some point because they just didn't have the science to help them figure out how to get around these issues.
Jamie:I just like the idea of that being proposed to the family and them just going, I know exactly who that motherfucker is. I don't even have to look. We're going to Dave's grave.
Cody:Well, all the cases in the book, it would be like they would dig up, you know, like five or six family members that died over a period, like 10 years or something. I'd be like, no, this one's fine, this one's fine, this one's fine. There's something about Mary, take her heart out.
But even then, like, these are legends essentially at this point, right? Because they happened several hundred years ago. So the stories that get passed down would be stuff like, oh, and the corpse was turned in the grave.
That's how we knew it was the vampire.
Jamie:But it's somehow gotten less fat after dying.
Cody:There. There was one piece in there where the. The folklorist was talking about, like, he.
in, like, the. The very late:So it still was a thing that could happen relatively recently, like a couple generations back, that there was a living memory of these kind of events. And then, you know, he talked to people in these towns and try to get opinions from them.
And it doesn't connect that neatly to the idea of corpse robbing, but it's in there because they still had to convince family members and community members that it was okay to dig up the grave of the dead and fuck with the body. Which led to some other interesting techniques too.
Like if you had a suspected vampire, some of them, they would decapitate the head and put it by the feet as a way to tell the vampire, no, you're dead. You got. You gotta. You gotta move on. Your head doesn't belong here. You know this.
Mike:You gotta accept that you're dead.
Cody:Yeah. Or they would turn the corpse around. So it'd be facing the dirt instead of the sky.
So that way if the vampire's soul left its body, it would go the wrong direction. Never, never reach its family members to torture them.
Jamie:I love how stupid some people think the universe is. Oh, you just have to fool that eternal spirit.
Cody:Getting even further away from the point of this movie. I love thinking about this. When a lot of these legends formed, this was well before Dracula was written, well before the movie version came out.
vampire was to someone in the:So the old folk legends of vampires, they might as well be talking about aliens instead of vampires. Like, these are totally different creatures than what you would think.
It wasn't a guy who popped out of the grave when the sun went down and started sucking blood.
It was like some sort of corrupted soul that would leak out of the grave and go find family members and drain them of essence before returning back to its own grave site.
Jamie:Which honestly means it makes way more sense to see like as inorganic superstition, to look at it that way than to imagine our modern interpretation of vampires as just a race of monsters. Yeah, like folklore is a lot less Dungeons and Dragons than you might think from the modern era.
Cody:This is one of the best parts about reading through anything from Mike Mignola, like when he's making Hellboy Story. He has done a lot of the folklore reading himself.
So he's coming up with weird ass versions of monsters where it's like, hey, history said that's how it happened. They were just a bunch of entrails connected to a throat.
Mike:That's why that's what I love about.
Cody:His stories are always very fun because they're so different from like what you would expect a werewolf or a vampire should be.
Mike:Oh yeah. And so I want to see more projects take like, go back to like the old folkloric versions of things.
So I love about the movie Vampir since that came before. No, you know, before Dracula for Nosferatu and all that. The vampires in in that are super, like region specific. And I love that so much.
Like all the rules have nothing to do with any kind of vampire lore that would take over. It's all just very specific to like one area in the world of how these things operate.
And like the whole like you have to stab them to the ground with like a steel pole. To trap their soul to the earth and all that. And like the. Ah, it's.
Cody:I'm going to interrupt for a second because I. This is probably my favorite kill scene. And this was full on Fulci. They took this from the script and didn't mess around with it much.
The blood on the record player, the man next to his own face.
Mike:It's a very fulcy scene. The only thing that's missing is eye.
Cody:Gouging, which I thought is where it was going when the guy initially pulled out, you know, the. The ice pick.
Mike:I still can't believe they didn't put eye gouging in as like an ode to Fulci. It.
Cody:It was very surprising. I really. You know, he just kind of stabs him.
You get the spurt of blood, but would have made 100 more sense to me if he just gets him right in the eyeball. No.
Mike:So I love that wax beautiful back there, by the way.
Cody:Yeah. The melting face. Very Ooky. We got another one, boys. Oh, well.
Mike:We can still open though, right?
Cody:It's fine, it's fine.
Jamie:Just the bobbies from the abominable Dr. Fives are there. Oh, it's all this them model.
Mike:You know, Fives is like five points away from being wax museum movie.
Cody:I can. Yeah, I can. I can kind of see that. I mean, it's. It's like a Six degrees is Kevin Bacon kind of deal.
You can probably make anything a wax movie if you reach far enough.
Mike:Grant. I guess a lot of Vincent Price movies kind of just become waxwork movies eventually, but without wax.
Cody:He had a decent number of movies too, where he was like some sort of tortured artist. And yes, his motivation was the Corman.
Mike:One where he was an actor. It wasn't Corman, but was it Theater of Blood?
Cody:Theater of Blood, Yes, Theater of Blood.
Mike:He's having so much fun in that movie.
Cody:What was. What's the other one? Oh, there's the mad magician.
Mike:Yes.
Cody:So an artist of a different type, you know, more of a performer. But I think Price made a good number of those kind of movies where he's. He's playing some sort of insane artist.
Mike:Why didn't they ever have him play like an insane cook?
Cody:I'm scratching my head. I'm trying to think like, oh, wait, did he ever have one of those? I don't. He just had the TV shows where he'd show you how to cook.
Mike:Yeah. The only time he played a chef was in Theater of Blood.
Cody:Yep. I mean, it could have been worse, right?
of like aggrieved, you know,: Jamie:Oh, God speaking. Did you guys see that the Vincent Price cooking video is getting a prestigious Blu Ray release?
Cody:It is. I saw that a while back.
Mike:That's awesome.
Jamie:But I thought just the. I'm pretty sure I saw that just the other day, like with the date and everything.
Cody:Hopefully. Hopefully you're seeing a different one than I was seeing because the one I saw was Region Locked. Ooh.
Jamie:It's possible. I'm just amazed that that exists in general. Someone lovingly restored that.
Cody:I would buy it if it was region free or.
Mike:I'm sorry.
Cody:But yeah, the only one I'd seen was a release that was coming out that was going to be specifically for Europe.
Mike:Can we do a watch along with that of that?
Jamie:I think that'd be delightful.
Cody:Just making the food as it goes. Yeah. Right now you can buy the book cooking price wise for $17.
Jamie:By the way, taking us back like eight minutes into the conversation, we were talking about how much weirder actual folklore is compared to like the Hollywood version of folklore. I had to dig out multiple folklore books from the bookshelf next to me because I googled this and couldn't find documentation on it, but.
You guys ever heard of the Sticky Dog of East Tennessee?
Cody:I have not. Tell me more.
Jamie:The Sticky Dog is a. Oh, no. The God hand is after her. I'm sorry.
Mike:Berserk.
Jamie:The Sticky Dog is a dog that's sticky checks.
Cody:Yep.
Jamie:And once you touch it, you cannot become unstuck from it as though it is covered in tar and it just runs across the town dragging you behind it. And if people touch you, they get stuck as well. So.
Cody:Yeah, like a human centipede of sticky dog.
Jamie:Yeah. So there's just the mental image of just a tiny little yappy dog running across a dirt road in Tennessee with like a building, being drug minded.
It was also unrelated to the Tennessee long dog, which is just. Which is a really long dog that has no ass.
Like it just keeps going and going and going and going, which to someone in Appalachia would be the scariest thing they've ever seen in their lives.
Cody:That dog ain't got no wind.
Mike:I. I'm really glad a Sticky Dog wasn't what I thought you were going, which was whenever you ejaculate and it just kind of runs down and you don't clean it up. That's what a sticky dog is.
Cody:That's the urban dictionary version of a sticky dog.
Mike:I hope people who are listening to this commentary were expecting that kind of visual.
Cody:This is, this is the kind of thing that drives people out of Tennessee. They don't want to live anywhere near a sticky dog of either variety.
Mike:So I like how that's, that was the joke being made over the visual effect of flying into someone's wax DNA.
Cody:All waxed up and nowhere to go.
Jamie:I'm sorry.
There have been instances in the past of a large, strong, sticky dog hightailing it through the woods, around and over rocks in search of water, with as many as six or seven screaming children stuck to its back, never seen alive by their parents again. I love the sticky dog.
Cody:I, I the best part of the sticky dog to me is that it means that you are on the sticky dog forever. So there's just a dog covered in.
Jamie:Goo and skeletons, skeletons, child skeletons just.
Cody:Decorate for Halloween year round. Run around with like eight skulls stuck on its back.
Mike:It's just the critter's.
Cody:My God, I look awful in this photo. Put it together, put it together. Come on.
Jamie:I love this. So this is how he's found out. This is when it brings it all crumbling down. The veins and the photography.
Mike:The amount of mad sciences that have been taken down by photography enthusiasts.
Cody:That's why, like it's a wax museum. You just put up a sign up front that's like, no photography, guys. Sorry, no God.
Jamie:What do you think the over under is on? How many actual honest to God crimes have been solved inside of dark rooms.
Cody:In the world of movies or in.
Jamie:Real life actually got been able to go, it was him and then just blow the case wide open. That has to have happened at least once.
Cody: or maybe actually in like the: Jamie:Like, God, pop culture did not prepare me for how little dark rooms would factor into adult life.
Mike:Pop culture doesn't prepare you that dark rooms are actually dark?
Jamie:Oh, they're not. They don't just have a red bulb in there.
Mike:It turns out a dark room, you know, is dark and can't have light in it.
Cody:I mean, it's got to have enough where you can operate slightly. There's the red light thing. Makes a small amount of sense to me.
Obviously it's not glaring like in the movies, but I feel like they probably have a little bit of light in there, right?
Mike:I mean, I would imagine they have to have a little Bit of something that's an exaggerated a ton. But yeah, yeah. A lot of photographers have said, like, yeah, we just operate in the dark when we're in there.
All of the light that is usually in movies and TV in regards to a dark room would destroy all the photographs.
Cody:But look, I'm okay with that. I want to see what's happening in there. I don't want like a two minute scene where it's all black. I'm gonna have.
I'm gonna have my werewolves experience where they're gonna be like, oh, I guess the movie's done. And they're just like, it's dark. It's over.
Mike:The audience was not there for that story, Cody. It's before the recorder was on.
Jamie:And it's because. And because it's about the. It's about the movie Werewolves. They'll never hear that story because we.
Mike:Won'T talk you on werewolves some more and piss off Frank Grill all over again.
Cody:Yeah, I'll do it again. I heard. And this was on IMDb, so it has to be true.
In del Toro's first Hellboy, there's a scene where Agent Myers gets knocked out and screen goes to black and then Elsa starts talking to him. So the screen is still black, but you're still getting some exposition, dialogue, that kind of stuff.
And it's like a 40 second scene where it's like slowly coming back to color.
I have heard that theaters would often cut prints because they thought there was just some sort of printing error and there was just 40 seconds of blackness in there, so they would just chop that scene down. Again, it came from IMDb as a fun fact, so it must be true. And theaters definitely did this back in the day.
Mike:I believe theaters would do that. Theaters are terrible.
Jamie:Well, specifically theaters in our lifetime seem to have gotten extremely weird about silence and darkness.
Cody:And I should say too, this was early enough where there were still film prints instead of just like a digital file you were playing. So you theoretically did have to have as a projectioner, Projectioner, projectionist, some.
Some knowledge of splicing film together in case it ever broke or tore. So it could have happened. It seems sound enough in that sense. I still really don't know if I believe it or not. But it's a fun story.
Mike:Theaters hate movies.
Cody:Sharing it with you.
Mike:I don't care if heartbreak feels real in a place like that.
Jamie:It was.
I feel like people are going, like years from now are going to be clowning on the fact that those Nicole Kidman intros became a meme because people thought they were stupid. And AMC interpreted that as, oh, people really like these. Let's air them forever.
Mike:Why don't people go to the theater anymore?
Cody:I mean, we tricked them into putting Morbius back in theaters. People. People don't understand you.
Jamie:Do not blame the Internet.
Mike:It's really hard to take this character seriously when none of his clothes fit. Just bugs me.
Cody:This is. It's been driving me insane the whole movie.
Because there's an Italian film from, like, the 60s that's very reminiscent, I would say, the start of this film, where the guy is just kind of taking the bet to hide in the wax house for a night. It's essentially the same setup, but the guy makes a bet with Edgar Allan Poe to, like, stay in a haunted house for one night and meets ghosts.
And it's because I can't think of the title of that movie. And it's like, oh, man, this is this. Like, come on, Somebody saw that thing before they made this.
Jamie:I like mischievous scamp Poe there.
Mike:This is the worst blind acting I've ever seen, by the way. I just want to point that out.
Jamie:I'm very amused that this director went on to do the effects for dark glasses a couple of years ago. Italian blindness.
Cody:I keep expecting her to just walk right into a big hole.
Mike:Wax faces.
Cody:Anyways, this was the actress on the special features that had all the dirt, which. It's a bummer, too, because she's like, oh, I can't. That's all I want to say after, like, bringing up three, like, nasty stories.
Like, no, you've got more. Give it to us. Also, no one really had anything nice.
Mike:To say about her either.
Cody:No. The director's like, I think she did a very fine job. I think she was excellent at being blind. And then it cuts to her being like, my performance was.
I didn't like it. She didn't even think her own performance was good.
Jamie:I appreciate the consistency.
Cody:She's very honest. Yeah, Abrasive maybe, but honest. So you have to appreciate that.
Mike:It's called being maximum battalion. I can say that because it's my people. You can't say that.
Cody:Or I feel like Germans are allowed to hate Italians.
Mike:Germans aren't allowed to hate anybody anymore. They lost that ability.
Jamie:But America has done such a good job with our hatred since then. Look, it's a rule. Only one country gets to be hateful. Period of man.
Cody:Finland, it's your turn now. Hold on. Are we trying to say the French are nice to all their neighbors? Because I don't believe that.
I think they probably are mean to their neighbors.
Jamie:Higher quality of life than everybody. So they're protective of it.
Cody:Oh.
Mike:I mean, aren't the French under fascist rule again?
Jamie:Oh, yeah.
Mike:Keep track of these things.
Jamie:To be fair, everybody else. I was gonna say, you can say that about most major countries now. Italy is checked about that. There was a coup.
Cody:Ah. I think France just had a vote of no confidence in their government. So they're, I think, currently going into a new election or something.
I don't know. I don't.
Mike:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Prime minister was removed.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:France, this is Bob Talks World Politics now.
Cody:Get used to it. This is the new Bill Maher.
Mike:Yeah.
Jamie:Because the old one dies in this film.
I've always been fascinated by how France does seem to have an objectively better standard of living and an objectively better, like, understanding of a lot of things, especially, like, labor relations, but is also terrifyingly on the brink of fascism at all times. I don't know how you can be both.
Cody:Jamie, you've been lied to by Big Baguette. I do.
Mike:I do appreciate Boris's villain speech here in the third act. Like, no, no, no, no, no. I just pose them in the moment of death because that makes them immortal there.
Cody:It's not weird at all. You're weird.
Mike:I'm the good guy.
Cody:Now we're put on my super villain mask.
Mike:I love that mask so fucking much.
Cody:That seems like one trick or treat. Studio should be making. They should get the rights to this dirt cheap and start putting that out for Halloween.
Jamie:That can't be expensive. It's rubber and a screen.
Mike:So we're getting close to when Hossein actually leaves the movie because he didn't like makeup. So it's somebody wearing a mask of his own face, which actually has a cool Uncanny Valley quality to it. That really works.
Cody:That is a point we haven't gotten into too much about, really, at these movies. It's the early version of the Uncanny Valley, all of them. Right. The wax of it's Close to man. But early off.
I think I mentioned it earlier, though, but the actor here had his own project he had to do, and the producer's like, I get his point. So they jammed all of his scenes together to try and film them in, like.
Well, not all of the scenes, but his remaining scenes together in, like, a day. So I'm sure that probably influenced some of the idea to, like. Yeah, can we just make him a Terminator fully?
Jamie: ave been a lot less awkward. T: Mike:Oh, God.
Jamie:He's not gonna be here next season.
Cody:I just imagine. I love imagining him emerging from, like, he just busts out.
Jamie:Jeff Garland falls into a vat of molten wax, and a robot comes out the Curb Enthusiasm theme place.
Cody:Boy, there have been, like, nine murders here. We just can't get a clue. This is tough.
Jamie:You think in designing the makeup or the application process or filming or. At any point when making this movie, one person on set said, looks like Darth Vader without the helmet. Right.
Cody:There's a little bit of that. It really does remind me of Vincent Price from Although in the shot. Definitely more Vader. It does.
It reminds me so much of Vincent Price, especially with the cloak and all that. It's like, clearly they're just trying to make Vincent Price again.
Mike:Mystery of the Wax Museum had the best monster face.
Cody:That was pretty good, though.
Mike:This one also has the Terminator, so it's.
Cody:It's up in the air. Which one's better?
Mike:Really?
Jamie:Light me on fire. You. I light you on fire. I love that so much. Being attacked by a man who's on fire, who you just lit on fire is so amazing.
Cody:That's how I play video games. If someone hits you with a flamethrower, you got to run into them and burn them before your character dies. Also a staple of any good wax movie.
The whole place has to burn down.
Mike:Yes.
Cody:You just gotta. It's. It's. If you don't do this in your wax movie, what's the point?
Mike:It's such a staple that I think burning down a wax museum is technically public domain as far as storytelling goes. Oh, it's so gnarly looking. I love it.
Cody:And every wax movie has the same problem of wax just doesn't melt like you think it will. So they have to use all sorts of little tricks and speed up the footage and all this kind of junk to. To get what you expect to see.
Jamie:And they have to do something different in every single movie.
Cody:I mean, this one gets bonus points because, again, it's melting the flesh off of a Terminator that still's got, like, some organ stuff going on there. It's like a general grievous deal. Yeah.
Jamie: heater and this happens. It's: Mike:I do like Stoveletti's point. Like, no, it's not a robot. It's actually a skeleton.
Cody:That's true.
Mike:Fair enough.
Cody:Yeah. It's Powered by magic goo and hatred.
Mike:They're just not enough of the Terminator. The wax Terminator. Yeah.
Cody:It's. It's very brief. Although so weird because there's five minutes left of this movie.
Mike:Dude.
Cody:Come on now. Now or never. Oh, right. Yes. The bill. The burning building.
Jamie:And RoboCops comes out and steps on his brain.
Mike:Dragging Ray Weiss.
Cody:Bro. Bro. Wrong way. No. No. You're going in the smoke. No. Mysterious stranger. Get back out here.
Jamie:No. You can be loved now. The nightmare is over.
Cody: ustrating to me that this was:So you get those not great fire effects coming out the windows. I love a good model being burnt down or exploded.
Mike:So. And it's just so weird looking like it's organic inside but not like guts and whatnot.
Cody:It doesn't. I mean, the building itself burning down too just doesn't feel that exciting.
Mike:No, I mean, you can tell it's just a building is not falling into itself.
Cody:Yeah, it's. It loses out on like the really high energy you need to end the film.
Mike:I still don't really understand how any of this works here at the end. Like, oh, I thought it was that.
Cody:That was one of like five. I guess he just had hanging around.
Mike:I guess he just copied himself and had robots.
Cody:Yeah. I mean, I don't quite understand this either because that guy was revealed to like not be evil. So he could have just walked out with everybody else.
But he's like, I gotta go back and get the face I like the most. Considering you're like a wanted murderer. Maybe just stick with the face that's been proven innocent.
Mike:No, he has to go with the beautiful French man face. His fake hands.
Jamie:I just think this all that this means is unrelated. This guy was a robot. Complete coincidence.
Cody:How does she get that fireball? A good question. I do feel like it should be. Do you remember the Terminator 2 toys that let you inject goo onto the Terminator skeleton?
He should have a setup like that. Just based him his top hat.
Mike:I always like it when the evil scientist gets away to kill more people later.
Cody:Oh, and on that one, he gets away with a fourth wall break. That little smirk at the camera. So smarmy, that motherfucker.
Mike:Turns out we were the wax mask all along.
Cody:So there you have it, folks. We've actually managed to get two wax movies in the can. God, how many more of these do we have? How many were we doing? We're doing wax.
The Wax Works, doing Waxworks, Mystery of.
Jamie:The Mat, Wax Museum and House of Wax, I believe was the agenda.
Cody:I think we're the amazing. We were grabbing. Yeah, yeah.
Mike:There was.
Cody:There's many, many others, folks.
Mike:There's a lot.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:I don't think we've really gone through the and made a definitive list yet.
Cody:Wikipedia does in fact have a list of wax based horror movies. I don't know if that's all encompassing, but it does have a decent number.
Jamie:We're doing wax work too. We're doing these in reverse order. So we'd be doing Wax Work 2 first.
Cody:That's true. That'd be confusing. Nobody's watched Wax Work 2 now. Now it came out in a two pack when they put it on Blu Ray. So you got both movies.
People probably put the second one in.
Mike:It's about time.
Jamie:I feel like that's also the only rate. The only reason anyone has seen the Wishmaster movies after two is or just in combo packs.
Mike:I refuse to watch Wishmaster 3 and 4.
Jamie:Refuse. I found out Andrew Deevoff is the surgeon in Neon Maniacs the other day and that blew my mind.
Mike:He is?
Jamie:Yeah.
Cody:That's his.
Jamie:I think that's his first screen appearance too.
Mike:How the did I never know that? I love Neon Maniacs.
Jamie:He was the person from that movie who did something later. That's a weird thought.
Mike:Who didn't disappear under strange circumstances.
Cody: seek out chamber of horrors.:I think you guys will too. Plus the killer has like a Go Go Gadget replaceable hand that he can put in like a meat cleaver or a gun.
Jamie:Oh, so he's like this one.
Cody:Yeah, yeah, but in the 60s. What was the gimmick for that one too? Isn't there like a.
Like, hey, we're gonna play a loud warning siren every time horror is about to happen, if I'm remembering correctly.
Mike:Anyways.
Cody:So there you have it. Dedicated to Lucio Fulci. It's nice.
Mike:It is. It's nice.
Cody:Just a nice little story. Okay, I'm officially out of things to say about Wax Max. Oh no, we can't.
Mike:No, it doesn't have a name anymore.
Cody:I got so close to saying it correctly to finish things.
Jamie:Guys, lately I've been following a lot of TikTok accounts that have been telling me I've really got to get into wax.
Cody:Maxing wax. Max, you gotta Max the wax.
Mike:You got back in asmr. Yeah, sure.
Cody:Did you say it sound like you said mass. You gotta give him the mass. The wax mass.
Mike:Oh, also, we can do commentary for Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum.
Jamie:Oh, boy.
Cody:Let's not actually.
Jamie:Boris Karloff. How does that even work?
Cody:I watched the Boris Karloff Fu Manchu movie, and you know it's bad when WB has to put in, like, the giant, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, look. That was some other dudes who made that one that's just been sitting in the basement.
Jamie:The ones they put in front of the Warner brothers. World War II cartoons are hilarious.
Cody:Like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Jamie:We have never even seen these before.
Cody:We just bought the building.
Jamie:We're as mad about these cartoons as you are, ma'.
Mike:Am.
Cody:We're gonna sell them, but we're ashamed.
Jamie:Gambling this establishment.
Cody:Yeah, prohibited. So maybe let's not do that wax movie.
Mike:We'll do the Frozen ghosts, though.
Cody:Oh, shit. Have I seen that one? Yes. Yeah, I have, and I remember almost nothing about it.
Jamie:Can we do commentary for the Tiny Toons episode? That's a parody of Bucket of Blood.
Cody:Ooh, that does sound fun.
Jamie:That was in the Night Gallery parody.
Cody:That was a fun episode.
Mike:Okay, I think I found something we definitely have to do. You can buy it right now in Full Moon Direct. It is called the Exotic House of Wax. Oh, Legacy of. This is the description. Legacy of lust.
Most wax museums are boring, but there's a new one in town. In this house of Wax, when the heat turns up, the statues turn on. Instead of meltdown, they strip down.
The most beautiful, most most powerful people in the history of the world immortalized in wax are about to come back to life for an extravaganza of ecstasy. 85 minutes.
Cody:Well, okay. After that, I gotta go take care of some personal business. So let's wrap this up, folks.
If you've enjoyed box office Bulb, we'll be back with more wax coverage eventually. In our prolonged season of wax, you can find more box office pulp. Wherever you get your podcasts, we've got boxofficepulp.com if you like.
Going to our website. Makes me sound special being able to say that we have one. So check us out. Leave us ratings, reviews.
Don't tell Frank Grillo I made fun of him in his new movie Werewolves, or he will beat me up. I don't want that. I got enough problems in my life. Yeah, I think that's about it. Let's wrap it up and get the hell out of here.
You get more out of life when you go out to a movie.
Jamie:Now playing Dr. Jekyll likes them. Huff.
Cody:I have been looking at this poster and it's incredible. I especially love the. The. The Italian daughter. Jekyll E. I don't know why.
Jamie:Gentile. Senor, Senor. Again, the most British poster I've ever seen.
Cody:Big Ben is in the background. There's a gas lamp. There's a man in a very bad looking toupee who's making like a werewolf transformation face while holding sandals.
Jamie:He appears.
Mike:He took off his shoes.
Cody:His.
Jamie:His toe going through it like a hobo.
Mike:Also, I like how Big Ben is clear behind him.
Cody:Yeah. And this woman waiting behind the door with a gigantic rolling pin. She could make so much lasagna with that thing.
Jamie:Judging by the extensive motion lines, she's shivering too. So she doesn't want to kill a man tonight, but she will.
Cody:No, I think it's just because she's wearing sheer lace. So she's probably chilly from the draft coming in from Big Ben.
Or possibly she is like waving that thing, the rolling pin around like Babe Ruth and she is about to knock this man's head 400ft into the River Thames.
Mike:This movie was distributed by Medusa. So that's what. That's what Medusa's up to.
Cody:Are we going to have to track this thing down? Yeah. Is this straight up just a softcore porn or is this like.
Mike:Actually it's hard to tell. Right? I don't know. God damn European films. I never know what you are.
Jamie:We do a triple feature with this. Then Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, then Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, and then we never speak to each other again.
Cody:The. The hammer. Dr. Jekyll, like the. The one where he changes sex is actually kind of good.
Jamie:I've always heard that's actually fun.
Cody:Like that one is worth watching, surprisingly considering. Like, oh boy. Just from the title alone, this is going to be one that didn't age well.
Jamie:Ironically aged better than Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. Which. Holy.
Mike:And better than the new one.
Jamie:We have so many gender bending Dr. Jekyll movies, none of them that good.
Cody:Wait, wait. The movie was originally titled Jekyll Jr.
Mike:Oh, that sounds like a sex euphemism. That's. That is a softcore porn movie. Oh, you want to see my Jekyll Jr.
Cody:The Evil Genius Dr. Jekyll, Director of the powerful multinational food company Pantak which has flooded the world with a large number of pollutants and harmful products, accidentally drinks the serum of good, turning into a good natured and placid Mr. Hyde. Ellipses. That's where the plot description ends. They gave up writing the plot description.
Mike:Whatever. You figure out the idea.
Cody:So the plot of this one is Dr. Jekyll's a piece of shit and he accidentally takes his serum, which makes him not a piece of shit.
Jamie: that would star Doris Day in: Mike:So it's Joker, White Knight.
Cody:There's a character named Barbara Wimply and a Jeeves and a Pretorius.
Mike:Of course there's a Pretorius. There's always a Pretorius.
Cody:Okay, where can. Can I see this? This seems silly. Are we still recording? Go home. Quit listening to us.
Jamie:This is for us. Now go fuck off.
Cody:This is Willie's private time. Please remember to replace the speaker on.
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