Waxwork

Some movies are distinctly products of their era.

Waxwork is a quintessentially eighties movie, almost a horror version of a John Hughes film.

Six college classmates are invited to a private showing at a waxworks and are transported into the tableaus. Among the scenarios are zombies, a werewolf, and Dracula's castle.

It's a light hearted horror movie and the Dracula portion is ghoulishly hilarious.

The girl, Chyna, experiencing the Dracula scene isn't particularly nice, so she gets what's coming to her. She get's dinner with Dracula and family, where she's served raw meat.

"I haven't had steak tartar in a long time," she tells him.

It turns out the meat is the fiancee of the girl she's supposed to be within the waxwork. He's restrained in the basement, as food for the vampires, parceled out a bit at a time, his left leg sliced off under the knee.

She dispatches several vampires but eventually falls victim to Dracula, played by Miles O'Keefe, previously seen in Tarzan with Bo Derek and Ator, the Blade Master.

It's a silly little movie that's a delightful tribute to classic horror- to the degree that the Mummy sequence has Swan Lake as the soundtrack, the same piece of music that that introduced the opening credits of Boris Karloff's The Mummy.

I hadn't seen this movie in over a decade, and it's just as much dumb fun now as it was back in '88, which isn't that big a surprise since the director, Anthony Hickox, was the son of Douglas Hickox, director of Vincent Price's Theatre of Blood.