Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.
Early movies from great directors can be really fun. I’d love to say that’s the case with Michael Curtiz and Mystery of the Wax Museum, but Curtiz had dozens of credits before this film. He started directing more than two decades before this film. The man was a directing machine in the early years of talkies; Mystery of the Wax Museum was the first of seven credited films from him for 1933. It’s also an early color film, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to see an early two-strip Technicolor movie.
The truth is that there’s a good chance that you’ve seen a movie a hell of a lot like this one already. If you’ve seen the version of House of Wax starring Vincent Price, you’ve seen a good percentage of this film, or at least the main plot. While the character names are different, many of the beats in the plot are virtually identical and a lot of the details are essentially the same as well.
