HOUSE OF WAX
It just melts my heart

  A remake of Mystery Of The Wax Museum (never saw it), this was Vincent Price's first prominent horror role.  Price plays Prof. Jarrod, a master of wax sculpture who, ironically, doesn't want to sell out and do the Chamber Of Horrors stuff that everybody else is making money at.  His business partner, eager to make a return on his investment (not many people want to pay to see a big wax Marie Antoinette just standing there with her head attached), sets the place on fire to collecte the insurance money.  Scarred and unable to work for himself, Jarrod gets himself a couple of assistants (including one named, no kidding, Igor, and he's played by none other than a young Charles Bronson) to give the public the kind of wax museum they want.  Meanwhile, that business partner and his hopelessly ditzy golddigger girlfriend have been murdered and their bodies stolen by a mysterious, facially scarred man.  Could there possibly be a connection?  Could there?

Also along is Sue (an absolutely gorgeous Phyllis Kirk), a friend of that golddigger, although their relationship seems almost more along the lines of a Smithers/Burns thing than it does any friendship I know of.  She's such a cutie that she threatens to almost steal the film from Price himself, though it doesn't go quite that far.  Price is having fun here, but very quietly; it's all fairly tongue-in-cheek, but he doesn't play it hammy, instead opting to be mostly sympathetic.

House Of Wax was filmed in "Natural Vision" 3-D, and I have no idea what that is apart from regular 3-D, but it's fun to watch all the shots that were meant to wow the audience in 3-D but just look kind of goofy on TV. (the more subtle things, like an object hurled toward the camera in an early melee, aren't too distracting.  That guy with the paddleballs, however, was.)  And the director (Andre De Toth) only had one eye, howzzat for irony for ya, especially considering Warner Brothers' claim that this was the first 3-D movie made by a major studio?

One thing I'm wondering about is the nature of full-body wax sculpture; I've been under the impression that only the heads are made of wax, and the bodies out of whatever frames are necessary underneath the clothing.  Here, it's like a full-body mold, and I have no idea if I'm mistaken or the film is.  At any rate, some of these wax figures are astonishingly lifelike; I would've thought they were real people if, for example, one head wasn't being carried around in a box.  Obviously, considering the plot developments going on here, their being lifelike is precisely the point.

House Of Wax might be available on DVD, and if it is, it's probably got the 3-D effect built in there.  Even on VHS, it's worth a look, simply because it's fun.  

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