My take: Don’t bother watching this movie. It’s downright silly and not even the least bit frightening.
The fourth movie listed in Studies in Terror is Waxworks (aka Das Wachfigurenkabinett), and I did not like it one bit. The premise involves a poet looking for work. He stumbles across an ad for a writer at a wax works museum. At the museum, the owner informs him that he is looking for someone to create exciting tales about the various figures in the museum.
The poet and his girl in Waxworks.
It’s an oddly small museum, for as far as the film shows, there appear to be only three figures: some caliph from Baghdad, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper (which the film mistakenly refers to as Spring Heeled Jack, a completely different person).
The poet jumps right in and starts creating stories about each character. These stories feature him and the girl he loves, who happens to be with him as he applies for the job. How do I know they are in love? Well, that would be the sappy and dopey way he looks at her every 30 seconds.
I could provide more detail into each of the stories but, frankly, I kept getting distracted by anything other than the film.
What I did see was hokey and dull. It was not nearly what I would expect from a book about terror. In Studies in Terror, the author focuses on the story of Ivan the Terrible and that the actor who played Jack the Ripper was the same man who played Dr. Caligari. Unfortunately, by the time I got through the first story of the caliph, I was utterly bored.
Here is the film on youtube:
Want to convince me to give this another try? Leave a comment.
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