The mile high opening credits come at you like protruding brick work. There is no doubt, even without the benefit of the obligatory slipshod glasses, that this, the original House of Wax, is a 3-D movie.
Of course, I use the word "original" loosely; as loose as the rapidly thinning neck from which droops the head of a flaming icon of history, as Vincent Price's precious wax works is burns brightly at the hands of an unscrupulous business partner.
Price, in a gruesome reconfiguration that surely inspired latter day Hall of Horror Famer Freddie Krueger, exacts a gruesome revenge - then spends the rest of the film (a tight 88 minutes) playing cat and mouse with a lovely female witness.
Warner Bros., in one of its odd forays into horror (Universal held the monopoly), first produced this now thrice told tale a few years earlier, as Murder In The Wax Museum. And recently, of course, we were all subjected to yet another remake, a forgettable addition to the genre starring Paris Hilton.
But the Price version, released in 1953, remains the best - and one of the best examples of use of that periodic cinematic plaything, 3-D, currently enjoying its umpteenth comeback with the jazzed-up re-release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Xmas.
With 3-D, foreground is the filmmaker's fun house, and here, helmsman Andre De Toth (ironically, a man with only one eye) and the scenarists have a grand, cheeky time of it, with endless objects popping up, being thrown or falling forward in the forefront of the frame. This playful paraphernalia includes a bolo bat, a guillotine, and a frilly line of Lautrecian dancers' behinds.
But - true test here! - does the film stand up without the knowledge that this was once an exercise in cinematic trickery? Of course - largely due to the performances of Vincent Price, who plays the lead role of the betrayed and vengeful artist with his usual unashamed functionality and lispy flair, and a young Charles Bronson, as a gaunt, flat-topped deaf-mute named - I swear! - Igor.
One does wish, however, that the nostalgia quotient in today's money-loving producers' hearts reached back a little further than a mere few years, and that it was this film, and not Burton's, that was currently enjoying the glare of all those tinted lenses.
