My take: If you’ve seen Vincent Price’s House of Wax, you know this story. And the Vincent Price version was better.
The 16th movie in Studies in Terror left me unsatisfied. I started watching it, and everything seemed familiar. I had seen this plot before.
Ad for Mystery of the Wax Museum
An artist runs a wax museum and creates beautiful representations of famous historical scenes. His business partner is only in it for the money, however, and sets fire to the precious wax figures for the insurance money. The artist, Ivan Igor played by Lionel Atwill, is struck down by his business partner while trying to stop the fire and falls victim to the flames.
But he survives. While he is no longer able to sculpt, he runs a new museum in New York. Around the same time, a famous actress is killed and her body goes missing. A new wax figure who looks surprisingly like her appears in the museum.
It’s actually not a bad story, but I have seen the Vincent Price version of this same movie. In my opinion, nearly anything with Vincent Price is going to be better.
Additionally, the main protagonist in Mystery of the Wax Museum, who discovers the actress’s visage in the museum, is a fast-talking newspaper gal. Her overly-quick banter and witty zingers become too much as the movie goes on, and I was tempted to mute the TV every time she came on the screen.
I would only recommend this movie to people who like the wax museum horror subgenre. It seems niche, but there must be an audience because there seem to be a lot of these movies (Waxworks (1924), House of Wax (1953 and 2005), Waxwork (1988)).
I watched this movie via youtube:
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