Word: waxed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HOUSE OF WAX...
...glasses for this revival is an instant time trip. Back you go to the advent of 3-D in the early '50s, when Bwana Devil had a lion jumping out from the screen and It Came from Outer Space landed a meteor right in your lap. House of Wax, which combined the pop-out tricks with the grue of the traditional horror movie, seemed the best of them...
...still does. Originally released in 1953, it stars Vincent Price in his first horror role. He is in splendidly clammy form as a sculptor of meticulously realistic wax figures who is presumed dead in a fire that destroys his waxworks. He mysteriously reappears, however, to open a hall of waxen horrors that quickly becomes the talk of turn-of-the-century New York City. Meanwhile, corpses start disappearing from the city morgue. A horribly deformed figure in a black cape is stalking the streets, terrorizing the likes of Phyllis Kirk and Carolyn Jones. There are several suspicious deaths...
...when things wax serious, as they often do, that Chayefsky and Hiller choke on their own message: moral responsibility is needed not only to guide lives but to save them as well. Anyway, George C. Scott is on hand to make things bearable, and sometimes more than that. He is such a consummate actor that he can even handle Chayefsky's dialogue, which rightfully should be engraved for posterity on a plaque made of chicken...
...makeup, a paradoxical austerity which he traces directly to his father." It is no accident that so many of Bacon's most compelling images are at root father-figures: the shrieking Pope, the dictator mouthing before the mikes, the worsted-sheathed executive with the expression of a wax shark...