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.

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.