cult film freak: MICHELLE JOHNSON MELTS 'WAXWORK' WITH DEBORAH FOREMAN

Title: WAXWORK Year: 1988 Rating: ***1/2

British director Anthony Hickox sets up what initially feels like a normal teen-slasher by the eclectic high-school students' contrary personalities: all of them gathered on otherwise empty campus bleachers, deciding what to do for the upcoming night...

Ironically, one couple wants to stay home to watch a horror flick while the others go to the local WAXWORK museum run by British villain-actor David Warner, wielding his usual nefarious charm: and not in the picture enough...

Titles from WAXWORK

Either are the more important kids including model-turned-actress Michelle Johnson, who, beginning with BLAME IT ON RIO, usually reacts to the reactions of her immense beauty... finally given a character to genuinely (at one point literally) sink her teeth into...

She's the token loose wild-girl all the guys want, including central rich kid Zach Galligan, with more an ambiguous edge from his GREMLINS boy-next-door beginnings while VALLEY GIRL/APRIL FOOLS DAY starlet Deborah Foreman is so meek and quiet, it's refreshing when she becomes sadistic and alluring later on...

Dana Ashbrook in WAXWORK

But that's skipping ahead in an extremely creative yet busy horror picture that, only eighteen-minutes in... after the group excepts the invitation to visit the museum after midnight... suddenly/awkwardly morphs genres — from a Modern American Slasher to a Nostalgic Gothic/Victorian-era Terror/Fantasy ala Hammer Films...

Beginning with TWIN PEAKS rebel Dana Ashbook, staring hypnotically into an 1800's-era wax exhibit until (with horribly dated laser-zapping animation) he becomes an actively doomed participant in what resembles Neil Jordan's A COMPANY OF WOLVES' ancient English village: igniting an ongoing precedent for each character, who deserved better than their individual alternate-dimensional deaths...

Michelle Johnson in WAXWORK

Especially Johnson's deliciously-intriguing flirtatious bad-girl turned benignly passive victim to Miles O'Keefe's Dracula castle melodrama... as each gory sequence (each lacking a deserved comeuppance) feels like separate/unconnected vignettes with too many side-characters, leaving the audience more contused than spooked, neglecting the central museum frame-story that predictably results in final-couple Galligan and Foreman, who ultimately seek advice from the token Van Helsing-esque Patrick Macnee: providing the upstart director his family's British-cinema legacy (dad was 1970's action auteur Douglas Hickox while granddad was producing mogul Arthur Rank)...

Sometimes jovially encroaching what could have been a far more intense/edgy body-count horror without all the distractions... that's still an aptly entertaining cult horror favorite — despite suffering from a sometimes exhausting identity crisis.