That old chestnut, the creepy wax museum, is the setting for this preposterous Gothic movie written by two of Italian horror's most renowned directors, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, and helmed by talented FX make-up man Sergio Stivaletti.
A remake (of sorts) of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, in which a disfigured lunatic populates his museum with the wax-coated corpses of his victims, Stivaletti's debut as director is atmospheric, gory, looks great (proving that he has been paying attention whilst providing the splatter for others), and features a couple of very hot actresses who are happy to flip out their breasts; however, the acting is poor and the story nonsensical, and, ultimately, the film fails to impress as much as it might have, given the pedigree of its creators.
Stivaletti does manage to conjure up a few memorable scenes (including a creepy attack on a sleeping girl, and a brutal and bloody murder sequence which sees a hand being snapped off, a throat cut and a heart being torn out), but for every good moment, there is an equally bad one. The film ends in a particularly dreadful manner, with one character becoming a seemingly indestructible Terminator-style monster, and the wax museum being burnt to the ground by some really cheap looking CGI.
5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.
