Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
A wax sculptor opens a new museum years after he is severely injured during a fire that destroyed his original collection. The disappearance of both people and corpses coincides with this grand reopening and leads a reporter to start investigating.
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What critics compared Mystery of the Wax Museum to
The film itself was a fairly loose remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum (which is, ironically, most significant for being a last: it was the final major studio feature shot in 2-color Technicolor), which means basically that the opening sequence, climax, and narrative hook are all the same, but the mix of characters is completely different.
“House of Wax” is a remake of the 1933 thriller “Mystery of the Wax Museum,” and it’s one of the rare remakes that improves on the original.
A remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), the superior House of Wax stars Vincent Price as the master sculptor and owner of a wax museum in turn-of-the-century New York.
The abovementioned chillers hit DVD in conjunction with 1963's The Haunting and Andre De Toth's remake of Michael Curtiz's Mystery of the Wax Museum, House of Wax, a 3-D ("Natural Vision") production presented in 2-D for home viewing to surprisingly undiminished effectiveness.
However, “House of Wax” tells a compelling story as a remake of the 1933 classic “Mystery of the Wax Museum.”
Because we’re intimately aware of Jarrod’s cadaver-fueled waxadermic activities, de Toth doesn’t generate much suspense from his scenario (based on 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum).
Likewise, it effortlessly tops Michael Curtiz's static, two-strip Technicolor original, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).
Just as Marcus Nispel reworked Tobe Hopper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the MTV generation, Serra similarly tricks-out André de Toth's 1953 classic (it's doubtful he's seen Michael Curtiz's 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum), except the film more accurately brings to mind the groove of David Schmoeller's underrated 1979 chiller Tourist Trap, in which a bunch of teenagers stumble upon a mannequin museum operated by two brothers, one a mysteriously-masked freakazoid.
Make no mistake, the script by Justin Haythe and director Gore Verbinski is a total crock and doesn’t make sense even on its own wacky terms; Haythe and Verbinski came up with only half a story, finally resorting to visual echoes of movies from Hitchcock’s Spellbound to Last Year at Marienbad and Mystery of the Wax Museum.