Arriving in Ambrose, where the only attraction is a building whose walls, floors and residents are made of wax, five teenagers in a van encounter Bo, who they rely on for help even though his home is filled with creepy wax masks and foetus-in-formaldehyde jars. Being a cliche villain, he has a windowless lair with secret tunnels, chases our danger-prone heroine through a theatre as the movie plays and is fooled by her cunning ruse of disguising herself as one of his mannequins. Nobody comes up with a plan to capture him, though, unless whimpering Please dont kill me and running upstairs as the wax house melts around them constitutes a masterstroke. This is the kind of film where characters wander off by themselves, the screaming Damsel In Distress says things like "it wasnt a wax thing it was moving and it was freaky looking" and you know who's going to die horribly the first time you lay eyes on them. If you believe that Paris Hilton's bitchy slut and Robert Richard's token African-American are going to make it to the end credits, you should turn the Mystery Machine around and go home. Besides, how does Bo get away with running a town where all the inhabitants are wax dummies? What does he do for money? How does he spend Thanksgiving? Some horror movies can only exist in the Scooby universe, and this is one of them.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
