Deja View

Nightmare in Wax (1969)

DIRECTOR: Bud Townsend
COUNTRY: U.S.
WRITER: Rex Carlton
COMPANY: Paragon International Pictures
CAST: Cameron Mitchell, Anne Helm, Berry Kroeger
GENRE: Horror
MISCELLANY: English; color; 91m; VCI Home Video -VHS
AKA: Crimes in the Wax Museum

There were some images here that really bowled me over. One was of Paragon Studio starlet Marie Morgan wearing a bikini and talking on a bulky white telephone. Behind her there is a floral-patterned beach umbrella that encompasses the whole of the frame. She must be poolside as far as logic would have it, but I can't help but think that the shot was an interior. Perhaps it's the way the umbrella filters the light. Perhaps it's an indoor pool; but then why an umbrella at all? Most likely there was a practical reason for the filmmakers to shoot it this way. These questions certainly don't need to be answered. What matters here is the immediate, jaw-dropping, antennae-raising ability of such an image.

Just before this, in a flashback sequence, there is a bit of a "Dark Passage" moment with a face-bandaged Cameron Mitchell as Bogart. But if "Dark Passage" is Hollywood Surrealism, then what corner of cinema niching does "Nightmare in Wax" encompass? Here, there is color, and that really makes this image what it is. Again, as with the floral print umbrella, the color blue is undeniably all over. The wall of the hospital room may be blue, but I doubt the blinds actually are; but they actually are here in this scene, in this print. Throughout the whole film, blue is an overpowering presence. Black exists, and often there are shots in the backroom studio of the wax museum that have just black as background, where over-lit characters stand out trapped in stark zero space, which I am always fond of; like falling through "Heaven and Earth Magic." So I don't think the blue is the print quality or a lab error, I think it's some kind of an aesthetic choice. There are also many cuts-to-black that are cuts-to-blue and always you see the glorious splice.

What stands out here, too, in this hospital scene, is the blocking. At one point, Anne Helm appears to leave the room, out normal stage left, and then she pops up in the foreground, almost Melies-style, and actually appears to startle Mitchell. In the next shot, you see a smashed clay head on the floor and when Mitchell crawls into frame, it has this totally jarring effect. It's something like the hotel hallway in Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet." It's a space you can't quite understand at first glance.

This kind of thing happens throughout. During a second phone conversation between Mitchell and Helm, I had to rewind to figure out to which character a certain closeup was associated with. And I turned out to be wrong in my initial guess. I also had to rewatch a kind of too long sequence of studio head Max Black in his car. First off, the shot outside of the car is great and looks like it was taken with a pinhole camera. Then there is a series of pan shots inside the car of Black sitting in his back seat that is really disorienting. It's as if Black's limo is actually four limos, which face each other, and he is seated in the back seat of them all. All the chase scenes have this effect, too. You never really know where the characters are in the space you initially accept them to inhabit.

Time also is violated often in "Nightmare in Wax." As is the case with the way the Gary Lewis-sounding T-Bones seem to end their song three times. Or the way Max Black responds to the artistry of one of Mitchell's wax heads; "It's fabulous, Vince," and then a few lines later, "It's fabulous, Vince," as if this was an alternate take of that line inserted in the editing process to shape the pacing of the scene.

The theme here might be blue or the theme here might be this is a labyrinth. Either one is probably not true. "Nightmare in Wax" is what you are looking for if you are looking for some unforgettable images and some truly disorienting editing and blocking. I know I often am.

— Carl