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The Exotic House of Wax

The Exotic House of Wax

Released Feb 01st, 1998
Running Time 60
Director Sybil Richards
Company Surrender Cinema
Cast Lisa Sutton, Josie Hunter, Jacqueline Lovell, Eric Acsell
Critical Rating Not Yet Rated
Genre Alternative

Rating


Reviews

If Dave Friedman had ever teamed up with Vincent Price, we suspect the results might be something like Exotic House of Wax, which resurrects the good old days of campy Grand Guignol and combines it with frequent doses of T&A.

Paying homage to Price's famous gig as the dreanged sculptor of the 1953 classic House of Wax, we discover college student Josie Hunter (going on thirty, like her companions) becoming the recipient of a rickety old museum of colloidal curiosities bequeathed to her by deark departed "Grandpa Vincent."  Grandpa, it seems, was something of a carnal history buff, and the museum basement houses a collection of posed trysts recreating the hoary dallainces of Cleopatra, Casanova, Romeo and Juliet, etc.  (The fact that all the dummies are "played" by living - and very much breathing - models says something about the film's prop budget, and is even more telling about the sex scenes yet to come.)  Despite the proliferation of heavy drapes and potten plants - i.e., the Ed Wood School of Art Direction - the film, to its credit, manages to cough up a fairly spooky ambience.

After the four horny students pair off into as many soft-core gropes as are mathematically possible without repeating themselves, the viewer begins to suspect that another form of sexual hijinks will be needed to fill out the feature.  Enter darling Lisa Sutton (of Hot Body Video fame), who stalks around in a monk's robe à la Phantom of the Opera, scaring the kids and reanimating the dummies with her magical amulet...for no other reason, apparently, than simply because she can.  The randy mannequins are soon wriggling out of their sequin-studded Halloween costumes, and the results are almost always well worth bringing the tissue-thin plot to a screeching halt.

The dummies, played by a handful of models who frequently double (or triple) for other figuirines, make the best of the situation by engaging in multi-partner marathons, the best of which is a four-way lezberterian session featuring second-billed Jacqueline Lovell (a knockout blonde), redhead Sutton, and a pair of delicious nymphets impersonating Venus and Aphrodite.

With lines like "I'm getting really weird vibes about this place" (apparently in California "getting the creeps" is passé), Josie and company split up to discover the waxen lovers suddenly becoming more lively and amorous.  Why a bunch of college kids stand around gawking at reanimated mannequins doing the horizontal mambo instead of high-tailing it out of there is a question best left to "B" movie buffs who write books like Fred Olen Ray - The Man, The Myth.  In any case, the evil land developer (there's always an evil land developer, isn't there?) who wants to knock down the property is foiled when the kids invite the community to get a gander at their show-stopping, jaw-dropping display of de Sade and his minions playing a bit more than a game of charades.

We all love happy endings, don't we?  At least they roll off the tongue better than "zoning law dispute settled out of court."



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