Wax Mask

Release Date: April 4, 1997
Directed by: Sergio Stivaletti
Written by: Lucio Fulci and Daniele Stroppa
Runtime: 1 hour 38 minutes

Out of all of the Italian horror films that I've seen, Wax Mask is one where I feel like you have to know some details behind its production to better appreciate what the filmmakers were going for. The genesis of the movie came about after the release of Door into Silence, when Lucio Fulci had basically reached the end of his directing career. Extremely frail from years of health struggles and left to work with ever-shrinking budgets as the Italian genre film market collapsed, the man had pretty much retired with little hope of ever making another quality film again. The story goes that fellow master of horror Dario Argento ran into a wheelchair-bound Fulci at a film festival, and was shocked to see the physical state he was in. After a few meetings together, Argento offered to produce and present a well-budgeted theatrical comeback film for Fulci to write and direct. Argento came up with the story for the project, and Fulci got to work hammering out the script. However, once the script was completed, the film lingered in pre-production hell as Argento worked to finish up his newest movie, The Stendhal Syndrome. During this delay, Fulci would sadly end up passing away in 1996. Still wanting to see the movie realized, Argento passed the script along to special effects technician Sergio Stivaletti, who had it rewritten before it was finally filmed. We'll never know what Fulci's original vision for Wax Mask may have been like, but in its finished form, it stands as a flawed but entertaining tribute to the late Maestro.

The plot of the movie is basically a take on something like House of Wax. As a child, young Sonia witnesses the brutal killing of her parents by a mysterious man in black with a mechanical hand. Twelve years later in Rome, she gets a job working for an eccentric artist who creates disturbingly lifelike sculptures for his wax museum. When a new string of killings starts to unfold across the city, the police begin to investigate why many of the artist's sculptures bear such an uncanny resemblance to many of the recently deceased. On the positive side of things, I do have to compliment the movie for some of its production values. Italian genre films in the 1990s were generally few and far between since the theatrical market for them had largely dried up due to years of oversaturation. Other than works by directors like Argento and Michele Soavi, the ones that were made were largely given miniscule budgets and dumped straight to television or home video. Wax Mask is one of the few movies of its kind from the era that looks like it actually had some money behind it. The setting of early-1900s Rome is shown off in lots of beautifully-decorated interior sets and elegant wardrobe choices for the actors. The lighting and camerawork are also very polished and slick-looking for the type of movie that it is, and in general it's visually on par with Argento's 1990s output. You can tell that he had a good amount of faith in this project and really wanted to give both Fulci and Stivaletti a good sandbox to unleash their talents in.

However, one big thing that almost completely undoes the movie for me is the dubbing of its dialogue. Normally, dubbing is rarely a problem for me in these movies since I tend to take the slightly-off line deliveries as just another part of their charm. Being a 1990s production and not one from the late 70s or early 80s, I guess I expected the dubbing to be of better quality at this point in time. But instead, this movie has some shockingly lazy performances that will immediately take you out of whatever visual moment you may be enjoying onscreen. Most of the main cast members are ok, but when it comes to heavy scenes featuring more emotional moments of fear or sadness, their voices have the inflection and range of a community theatre production. A couple of side characters have voices that are 100% monotone, including the villain's henchman who is so one-note he makes other infamous droners like Ben Stein look multifaceted in comparison. One groan-inducing scene even features a young girl who is obviously dubbed by a grown woman doing a high-pitched squeaky voice. It doesn't ruin the entire movie for me, but this is a rare instance where I would recommend any viewer to watch it in Italian with subtitles instead of its English dub. Sure, the Italian soundtrack is also dubbed, but since I don't speak the language, it's a lot less distracting to me.

On the technical side of things, I find it pretty interesting that Stivaletti put an old-school Fulci veteran behind the camera to try to recapture the look of some of his best productions. Sergio Salvati was the cinematographer here, and he had previously done the camerawork for classics like The Psychic, Zombi 2, The Beyond, and many others. There are a few nods to the lighting and color styles of several of these movies in a handful of scenes. For example, scenes set in the wax museum and the villain's laboratory make use of vibrant red, blue and green lighting that calls to mind the blue-lit zombie climax in The Beyond. A small touch that I loved occurred in another scene where dual shadows fall across a woman's face as she speaks, leaving a narrow shaft of light that emphasizes her eyeballs. If you take still shots or short clips out of many scenes in this movie and compare them with Fulci's best-known works, it definitely looks the part. But taken as a whole, it unfortunately doesn't feel the same.

For me, the missing ingredient here is the handheld camera tricks that gave any Fulci film its rough around the edges feeling, regardless of what era they were from. The camera zooms that I've written about plenty of times before are nowhere to be found, except for one or two moments that are so slow and smooth that they don't look the same at all. In fact, almost every camera movement and shot framing in this thing is professionally smooth and proper, whereas Fulci's frames tended to be a bit more unsteady due to the shaking of the cameraman's hand as he zoomed into the subjects and captured them from far away. The softer focus that added a dreamy feeling to other productions is also gone, replaced with a standard crisp focus that simply looks generic and flat. When you combine this bog-standard camerawork with the style of the costumes and sets, it feels like you're watching a tribute to classic Hammer films instead of Fulci films.

But, if there is one thing that it got right, it's the gore and special effects. The director had previously done the effects work for productions like Argento's Phenomena and the Demons movies, and his techniques here do a pretty good job of replicating what the Maestro did best. The fake blood that's used is a very saturated hue of red, almost Dawn of the Dead-levels of vibrancy. The death scenes really take their time to show it off, including one laughable moment where our mechanical-handed killer rips a person's heart right out of their chest. On the subject of the killer, this is an area where some awesome animatronics are displayed, but I feel like writing too many specifics about him would spoil the fun reveal of his true nature. There are a few parts that have some pretty shoddy CGI in places, but this being a late-90s European movie, I wouldn't expect it to look any better than it does. While it may not deliver anything on par with the intestine-vomiting scene in City of the Living Dead, there are plenty of bits to whet the appetites of gorehounds who appreciate just how bonkers Italian horror films could get.

Wax Mask isn't a perfect movie by any means. Many of the flaws that would became glaringly obvious in Dario Argento's later movies are present here, and it lacks the rough touches that fans of Fulci's work would likely hope to see recreated. Still, I'm glad that it got made. Even though the finished product is likely far from what was originally written, I think it's sweet that Argento pressed on to finally get it filmed and released in dedication to the man he was trying to help. If you're like me and aren't happy with Door into Silence being Fulci's last foray into film, then check out Wax Mask and treat it like a nice little "what if" epilogue to his body of work.