"House of Wax" (1953)
I was surprised at how wrong I got the first half of this film.
I've not seen it for many years and I forgot that Vincent Price is shown disfigured and going around killing people so early on.
I could have sworn the disfigured face was a big finale reveal (under the rather stupidly realistic wax mask that *shock* looks and moves exactly like Price's face) but I was wrong....and sure enough this first half of the film is by far the best.
The film goes from fast paced disfigured psycho flick to slow, achingly obvious, horror drama and the shift in tone is dramatic.
Thankfully Price is in good form here so it makes the obvious plotting more entertaining to sit through and at least the finale ups the macabre, even if Price's demise is rather blink and you miss it.
What really stands out here though is how great the film looks and how genuinely macabre as far as the attitude to corpses goes. Dead bodies are joked over, they're carted, carried, dumped and abused with grotesque abandon and the film does benefit from this macabre playfulness.
So it gets a bit bogged down and obvious later on but it still holds up, still entertains, Price is good and overall it's certainly recommended.
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