SANTO IN THE WAX MUSEUM (1963)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Though the mad sculptor is devoted to his image of beauty-- even if it's supplemented by real dead bodies-- the film is aesthetically aligned to the aesthetic of the villainous Burke; that of giving viewers constant shocks.-- from my review of the 1953 HOUSE OF WAX.

I'm not sure why Alfonso Corona Blake's last Santo film (and his last horror film, so far as I can tell) is so much better than SANTO VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN. Blake does have a screenplay credit on MUSEUM, so maybe he was able to get a little more involved with the story for the latter film. Yet it's also worthwhile to remember that wax-museum horror movies were in 1963 much less common than vampire films. Possibly Blake or one of his collaborators just found it interesting to riff on the idea of a wax-museum maniac, since the film's villain seems in many ways a response to the character of Professor Henry Jarrod in the 1953 HOUSE OF WAX. In any case, that villain is nearly the only reason I deem MUSEUM mythic, since the titular hero and his support cast are fairly dull. 

A series of kidnappings have transpired in the vicinity of a wax museum run by the mysterious Doctor Karol (Claudio Brook). One kidnap victim is a reporter working on the story, and his disappearance inspires young photographer Susan to join a guided tour of the museum. She approaches Karol and asks him various questions about his profession. He proves quite the philosopher, extolling his statues, both heroic and horrific, as part of "everything that has been invented through the imagination," which has its own reality, because it "has existed or will exist later on." This remark prefigures Karol's master plan, though Susan has yet to realize the depths of his involvement. She does ask him an odd, almost modern-sounding question as to why she doesn't none of his statues are female. Karol responds that when he tried female attractions, his patrons didn't like them, and yet he has plans to try again with an effigy of a "panther woman." (Since some of his creations are based on fictional characters like Mister Hyde and the Frankenstein Monster, one wonders if this was a reference to the female puma from Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, which was later transformed into the "Panther Woman" of the 1932 film ISLAND OF LOST SOULS.)

The police investigate Karol, but he claims that he has an enemy who's attempting to frame him for dastardly crimes, and when Santo joins the investigation, Karol even tries to use the heroic wrestler to give himself an alibi. The police have some ambivalent records on Karol, who suffered sadistic experiments in the Dachau concentration camp, but that Karol ought to be older and deformed of face. This seems to be a setup for a revelation in which Karol's hiding deformed looks beneath a mask, but this plot-thread gets summarily dropped even though Karol shows a cop evidence of the mutilation he suffered elsewhere on his body.

Despite Karol's protestations of innocence, no viewer will doubt his guilt due to his crazy antipathy for what he calls the "vainglorious" nature of human beings. And soon enough it's revealed that the men doing Karol's kidnappings for him are not wax statues-- indeed, the idea of statues concealing corpses never appears at all-- but are kidnap victims who have been turned into mindless monsters by Karol's weird science. Eventually he lures Susan into his clutches and reveals that he plans to make her into his "panther woman." Indeed, Karol's suffering at the camp has caused him to have a psychopathic hatred of beauty, and he aspires to some sort of apocalyptic plan to turn all of humanity into monsters.

In contrast to Santo's poor showing at the climax of VAMPIRE WOMEN, here the hero distinguishes himself well by fighting about four of the mutated men, and finally killing them and Karol by dumping a vat of wax on them. (Guess we're supposed to assume that the hideous kidnap victims were damaged beyond hope of recovery.) And so ends what I suspect will be the Silver Mask's only encounter with a legitimately mythic menace.