Waxwork II: Lost in Time Is, Honestly, Kind of Silly
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I have fuzzy but distinct memories of watching the 1988 horror film Waxworks as part of my ongoing study into which R-rated movies had naked boobs in them and which didn’t.
I don’t remember anything more about it but its Wikipedia summary made its direct to video 1992 sequel sound ingratiatingly bonkers. So I decided to give it a whirl as part of the site’s two months long celebration of Halloween.
Like Maniac Cop, Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a direct-to-video sequel costarring Bruce Campbell that opens with a very expensive scene from the first film. Why bother shooting costly new sequences when you can wow audiences with a little creative recycling?
Waxwork II: Lost in Time opens with the titular evil wax museum from the first film ablaze and heroes Mark Loftmore (Zach Galligan) and Sarah Brightman (Deborah Foreman in the first film, Monika Schnarre here) just barely getting out alive.
The wax museum has burned down but some of its cartoonish evil lives on in the form of a disembodied hand that follows Sarah Brightman home and murders her drunken, abusive stepfather.
When a female lead who distractingly shares the name of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s singer ex-wife tries to explain to the police that a sinister sentient extremity from a monstrous wax museum killed her dad and not her, they are skeptical.
Like its predecessor, Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a shameless thief that purloins ideas and characters from across the pop culture spectrum. It’s Ready Player One-like in its non-stop references and flagrant thievery.
It starts off by purloining the iconic character of Thing from The Addams Family. It’s damn near impossible for a disembodied hand to not feel unmistakably like a rip-off of the small screen scene stealer.
Off-brand Thing may be small. He may be only part of the human body. But that doesn’t keep him from getting around and also murdering a human being roughly twenty times his size.
In this utterly preposterous set-piece Waxwork II: Lost in Time ratchets up the surreal kookiness of its premise to comic effect. The film is never better or stranger than when it is really leaning into the conceptual idiocy of a hand with attitude straight up murdering a dude and framing the female lead for the crime.
Sarah Brightman is put on trial for her stepfather's murder. Mark Loftmore comes up with a real outside the box solution for getting his girlfriend sprung from the Big House. All they have to do is travel through time in a series of self-contained pocket universes and prove to a jury that it’s possible for the dead to rise again and also for disembodied hands to kill people and a bunch of other stuff that, honestly, is a little implausible.
The heroes journeying through time and visiting different universes for the sake of mounting as strong a legal defense as possible reminded me of Bill and Ted becoming time travelers to help prepare for a test.
For a movie called Waxwork II: Lost in Time, this is perversely short on wax museums, wax figures or anything involving wax. The characters are constantly talking about what happened in the previous movie and the fiery destruction of the malevolent museum in a way that made me wish I had seen Waxwork recently as opposed to thirty-five years ago.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time is short on wax but long on convoluted mythology involving a powerful device known as Sherman’s locket and Kartagra, a universe where the eternal battle between good and evil plays in myriad forms.
These forms often take the form of popular figures from legend, myth and literature as well as motion pictures. In one, Mark tangles with Victor Frankenstein (Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet) and Frankenstein’s Monster while rocking a pencil thin mustache that makes him look distractingly like Gomez Addams.
I think it’s safe to say that writer-director Anthony Hickox, who made his film writing and directing debut with the 1988 original is a big fan of The Addams Family. But if imitation is the soul of flattery then Hickox is the greatest flatterer the world has ever known.
Bruce Campbell lends his genius for winking self-parody to the role of a pipe-smoking egghead in a black and white rip-off of the classic fright film The Haunting. For ten minutes or so Waxwork II: Lost in Time turns unexpectedly into a goofball Bruce Campbell comedy full of mischief, monkeyshines and shenanigans.
Campbell spends much of his time onscreen with his chest and torso ripped open and his ribs exposed. He should be dead, or, at the very least, on the verge of death but he seems to be hanging on just fine.
It was during this scene that I realized that Waxwork II: Lost in Time is not really a horror film. If it were a horror film it would, at some point, attempt to scare the audience. I'm not sure it ever does that. Instead of going for horror Waxwork II: Lost in Time goes laughs and weirdness. It's never particularly funny but it is sometimes strange in a borderline interesting way.
Another pastiche finds Sarah Brightman holding down the Sigourney Weaver role in an Alien knock-off as ballsy as it is pointless.
Hickox didn’t get the rights to use many of the famous monsters he’s fascinated by so he offers off-brand variations that are almost, sort of, kind of like the expensive IP Hickox couldn’t begin to afford, like Nosferatu and Godzilla.
This is Waxwork II: Lost in Time, after all, not Ready Player One or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I'm guessing Hollywood power player Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time feels more like a video game than a movie. The pocket universes feel like levels of a game you need to get through in order to face off against the Big Boss.
Here that’s a wizard named Scarabis. He's played by Alexander Godunov in a performance that’s not good enough to be even a little bit scary.
Weirdly enough Waxwork did inspire a video game of the same name but it was not officially licensed. That’s one the many bizarre things about Waxwork. It’s crazy but not quite crazy enough.
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