Waxwork

  Anthony Hickox wasn't a great filmmaker. Hell, if I have to be honest I'd have to say I think he probably wasn't a good filmmaker - but at his best he made ridiculously entertaining films; He will be missed.
 Waxwork is not his best-known movie (that'd be Hellraiser 3, unfortunately). But it's an interesting, unique slice of eighties madness; Not a good film, exactly, but certainly fun and memorable.

 It kicks off with some muscular, beefy jazz over the title credits, with exterior shots of a big manor in a dark, stormy night. That's quite the juxtaposition. Inside, two men are fighting; The style is energetic, enthusiastic, and... charmingly inept. The action is stilted and the camera focuses on the man's screaming face to slightly humorous effect as it's pushed into a flaming hearth. But you also get some good shots of a double with his head and shoulders aflame, and, more impressively, later diving head-first into the open fire. I have no idea how they did that. There's some great editing showing the assailant robbing the place as the corpse burns. Meanwhile, the music unfortunately settles down into a more generic, mildly intrusive late-eighties soundtrack.

 The whole movie is a lot like this - a lot of energy and an irrepressible will to put on one hell of a show, missteps be damned.

 Our hero, Mark (Zach Galligan), a rich kid with a mansion, butler, and everything, is introduced having breakfast with his mom. Here's another good example of the sort of directorial choices Hickox tends to take: the table has big, busy flower arrangements along its center, so they keep having to lean over to talk to each other. It's strange, and it doesn't look great, but it's original and kind of funny. Later in the scene Mark starts screaming at his mom that he wants caffeine, goddamn it, which his mom won't provide because he's still a growing boy. It's bizarre. I think maybe it's supposed to show he's got anger issues. Maybe. But it just comes off as off-kilter and makes him look a bit toxic. I am actually all for it; The weirdness and miscalculation make otherwise boring scenes interesting.

 In the next scene Sarah (Deborah Forman) and China (Michelle Johnson) walk across suburbia talking about boys, and they are surprised to find a wax museum has opened in their neighbourhood. Then the owner (David Warner) appears out of nowhere and invites them and some friends for a special exhibition at midnight.
 I mean, just about everything in that situation should be setting off all sorts of alarms - Take your pick: David Warner, the fact that he's dressed like fucking Willy Wonka, a wax museum (which everyone refers to as Waxwork)... But because this is a very horny movie and one of the girls likes the look of David Warner, they decide to accept the invitation.

 There's some more (weird, stilted) drama later at school as Mark gets possessive of China. Meanwhile, her way to say "it's not you, it's me" is to get in bed with a jock and then bring up how good their sex was as much as possible. I'd like to say it's sex- positive, since the film seems to have some sympathy for her, but her sluttiness later gets her killed. I don't think it's sex-negative, either; I just think that whoever wrote the script doesn't really - Oh, wait, it's by Anthony Hickox, too. That explains a lot.
 In any case, most of the dialog is supposed to be smart-ass and quippy but it ends up sounding kind of abrasive, making most of the characters hard to root for.

 Mark, Sarah, China, and three more friends end up attending the not-at-all suspicious private waxworks function, where they're greeted by two butlers - one very very small, the other obscenely tall, and are left to wander the exhibition floor. It's your typical wax museum, with creepy exhibits whose subjects are supposed to be made of wax but are conspicuously not, and include such celebrities as weirdo putting a gasoline hose in a flapper's mouth. That old standard.
 And here's where things get interesting; As they gawk, two of the kids walk into the exhibits, right into a sort a scene that's presided over by classical monsters - one with a werewolf, one with vampires. Things don't work out well for the kids, though China puts up one hell of a fight until her horniness gets the better of her. The scenes themselves are silly little shorts that get pretty damn bloody and entertaining: someone gets torn in half lengthwise, there's an extended scene with a guy with his leg eaten to the bone as a centerpiece, a cross makes a vampire's head explode like a melon, and another undead gets impaled by champagne bottles - of course the corks pop afterwards. Lots of fun, very gory mayhem.
 There are other movie references like these; Whole scenes with the wax dimension vignettes, and shorter visual gags later. Rosemary's Baby features as a full-on demon tot.

 You'd expect that to be the whole movie - each kid gets their own death scene until the last survivor or two get the upper hand. But you're forgetting that this is an Anthony Hickox film, so there's still a lot of craziness ahead. There's an bizarre plot about some stolen relics that seems to come straight out of some ambitious teen's D&D campaign, a lot more weirdness, some comical (and 'comical') relationship drama (poor Mark has terrible luck with women; I wouldn't blame the women), weird psychosexual shit... it's wild. And the whole finale turns into a giant brawl where everything is just thrown together as if in a blender.

 It's clearly meant to be a comedy first - one that's actually funny at points, thought not often enough - and a lot of the weirdness is definitely intentional. That does wonders to pave over some of the more iffy elements. But the movie's strongest asset is that it's desperate to put as much cool stuff on the screen as possible; It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, if there's one more monster or gimmick that can be added, you can be sure it'll be thrown in.
 The effects are great (team led by the legendary Bob Keen) and there are tons and tons of them; The sets are varied and often pretty cool. The cinematography (DP: Gerry Lively) is decent, and the film switches styles casually depending on the scene. There are some attempts to shoot some of the scenes from non-traditional angles, such as one seen from behind a ceiling fan, or from the top of an impossibly tall hallway. It doesn't always work, but the visual variety adds to the film's goofy appeal.

 So what if some of the actors don't seem to have any idea about what they're supposed to be doing, or if the werewolf looks silly, or if the plot doesn't make sense? There'll soon be some bit of madness- a memorably bad line, a cool monster, some random gore, or a bizarre twist. Waxworks often feels like it's being made up as it goes along by people who're not sure about how to do things... but are willing to do them with panache if not taste.
 It's a mess, but an interesting, entertaining, and entirely loveable mess.