Waxworks

1924 silent film

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A writer is hired by the owner of a wax museum to pen stories inspired his wax figures. The writer immediately gets to work, imagining himself and the owner's daughter (with whom he is quite smitten) in the fantasies he creates for a sultan, Ivan the Terrible, and a Jack the Ripper rip-off.

This is worth seeing if only for the cool expressionist sets that seem right out of Doc Caligari's cabinet. Angular and striking, a lot of the backgrounds look like they could belong in museums on their own. Color is also used well in this black and white movie, and there's some interesting multiple exposure experimentation going on in the dreamy Jack the Snipper sequence. The stories-within-the-stories themselves aren't anything to get overly excited about. Honestly, I wasn't even sure what was going on in the one with Ivan the Terrible. But this is an interesting little film that makes me want to see more of Paul Leni's work.

Me, sporting my new handlebar beard: