I have a habit of following various cinematic rabbit holes when it suits me. Sometimes I’ll watch a bunch of movies with the same actor in it, or from the same director. Other times I’ll watch movies set in the same city, or that tell similar stories. Those are the most fun to watch. Sometimes that means I’m watching sequels or remakes, or whatever, but other times films will just tell similar stories that have actually nothing to do with one another.

The other night I watched Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and enjoyed it. This afternoon I was flipping through my unwatched horror queue and came across Waxwork. That’s a film I’ve known existed for some time in that I’d probably seen its cover art in some old video store back in the VHS days but had never been all that interested in watching it. But now that I was connecting it with Mystery of the Wax Museum I gave it a go. I’m glad I did.

Waxwork has nothing to do with that old film except that it is a horror film set in a wax museum. This one stars Zach Galligan as Mark a bored, rich kid. He and a few friends get invited to a secret opening of a waxworks by a creepy dude who appears out of nowhere (David Warner).

The waxwork has various displays of classic horror characters (Dracula, a werewolf, the Marquis De Sade, zombies, etc). The thing is if you step inside the display you are transported to a pocket dimension where you are a character in that particular display’s story.

One by one the kids get picked off except for Mark and his friend Sarah (Deborah Foremen). They escape and spend some time figuring out exactly what is going on. I won’t bore you with those details except to say they are pretty boring.

What makes the film worth watching is the adventures inside the displays. The film has a lot of fun playing inside the various horror subgenres and updating them to the 1980s. There are slices of Hammer Horror, Universal Horror, and George A. Romero Horror and they are a treat to watch.

I enjoyed Zach Galligan in the Gremlins films but here he can’t cut it as the leading man (it doesn’t help that he’s sporting an atrociously bad haircut) and the rest of the cast isn’t much better. Everything outside of the display scenes just isn’t that interesting.

But those display scenes really are worth the price of admission.