Waxwork II - Lost in Time

  I must have watched Waxwork a dozen times as a kid/teen, and upon a recent rewatch I discovered I remembered a lot more from it than I thought I did. This sequel... not so much; I don't remember disliking it. But I did not remember a single scene except for a couple of bits at the climax.

 Waxwork II picks up straight after the events of the first; the waxwork is going down in flames, and our heroes Mark (Zach Galligan) and Sarah (Monika Schnarre, replacing Deborah Foreman) catch a cab to take them away.
 Sarah arrives home to her stepfather, and... well, we get some proof that writer/director Anthony Hickox unfortunately hasn't gotten any better at writing dialog or directing actors in the four years since the first one. There's some pretty embarrassing drama between Sarah and her stepdad, interrupted when an animated severed hand kills the stepfather in a homage to evil dead 2 (Waxworks 2 is even more overt in referencing other movies than the first one). The music remains wacky even as the poor guy's face gets hammered to mulch which... you know what? Fair enough; It's really hard to make animated body parts not be ridiculous.

Acting!

 Sarah is accused of the murder, and her defense of 'a dismembered hand did it' is somehow not successful, especially since she ground the proof in the trash compactor. So Mark starts looking for a way to prove her innocence.
 This involves finding a compass that lets him find 'time doors', invisible portals that will take them to other vignette-dimensions across time and space in the same way the Waxwork exhibits did in the first film. So he convinces Sarah to blindly jump into the first one they find, and away they go.

 And so begin Mark and Sarah's further comedic adventures in slightly off-brand familiar stories. The first Frankenstein pastiche isn't a great start, but it quickly gets better with the next ones - a pretty well done (for its budget) sci-fi knock off, and then an excellent black and white piss take on The Haunting that recycles the best joke from the first movie (the guy giving exposition while suffering extreme, graphical torture) to great effect, not the least because the victim is played by Bruce Campbell.

 So far, so good, but then the movie stumbles badly and drops everyone into a pretty damn lame fantasy story that is kind of indistinguishable from any number of the turgid Conan wannabes that came out in droves during the eighties Think Beastmaster, but not as fun. And that's the longest story by far, taking up almost half of the movie.

 The action climax, thank goodness, is excellent (that's where, incidentally, all the bits I remembered were from). Mark faces off against the big bad from the fantasy segment (Alexander Godunov) in a really fun sequence where they have a swashbuckle-y duel across multiple dimensions, going through knock-offs of Dawn of the Dead, Godzilla, Nosferatu (blink and you'll miss a Drew Barrymore cameo) and others. The choreography and swordplay is just passable, but otherwise the execution is excellent and features the best jokes in the movie.

 It's a weird film. Like Waxworks the first (and all of the Hickox movies I've seen except Hell on Earth), it's got an almost childish enthusiasm and a sort of gleeful 'let's see how much I can get away with' attitude. This sequel is a bit more polished than the first one, and I have to say some of the segments are impressively shot. Hickox mimics Robert Wise with a real eye for what makes the Haunting memorable; Notice that the acting, especially Galligan's, gets better as soon as there's a clear direction to follow. The Nosferatu segment, despite an unconvincing vampire, is also a joy to watch, technically well made and with some good comedic timing. The guy could really direct, at least some of the time.

 But that charm-free hour of pseudo-medieval guff really ruined this one for me. I forgot to mention the soundtrack for that bit repeatedly references Enigma's Sadeness Part 1; if that doesn't date the movie...
 Even without that, the whole thing also feels much more muted than the first movie. There's some good gore, but not nearly enough. The comedy is just a little broader, lacking the abrasiveness or plain weirdness of its prequel. There are no interesting, weird, experimental camera placements. And while this one is still pretty horny (there's at least one instance of ex-president Trump's favorite courting method), it fails to top someone being whipped until orgasm - even when the same character is right there. Sarah is downright boring, a major downgrade from her previous incarnation (script-wise, no fault of the actress), and there's no one like the first film's China to perv things up either.

 ...And so on. It's still a likeable movie, but it's a hard one to root for. Having read a couple of interviews with Hickox and his crew, though, I'm happy to say that they apparently had a blast making these, and that the guy absolutely prioritized having fun and doing stuff that he wanted to do even if it didn't fit the material. Can't fault him for that, even if the end result this time around isn't as much fun as they had on the other side of the screen.