Hallowatch 2026 No. 29: Wax Mask (1997)
You ever lose two and three-quarters million dollars so your friend-sometimes-rival can have a little bit of a writing gig after some health issues? Dario Argento has.
I could tell the difference between real life and waxwork. As a scholar once expertly put it: "For me, this would be easy." That even at its most grotesque and life-like, that it would be a trivial task to identify the always-convex seams of wax or encaustic.
This was a movie that starts by alternating between a glacially-paced 60s horror — makes sense, the original House of Wax was a 50s Vincent Price picture — and skinemax softcore. It's not terribly compelling in either modality. I have to wonder how much of that is due to this movie being lit and blocked like an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, with worse effects. The lighting in the second half gets closer to a nice dark chiaroscuro, but it has some color temperature issues. This felt far too long to have been a mere 98 minutes.
This is another case of "I don't want to burn wordcount on a movie I didn't like". Sorry. If you want your horror movie performances operatic, over the top, and enboobled, you'll enjoy this; if you want them lit like UPN at 4pm on a Sunday, that's in here too. I found myself wishing for something a little less ridiculous with maybe a little more time spent on making it look consistently good, make sense.
