So when I saw the TV commercial announcing the re-release of the 3D presentation of House Of Wax, I was sold from the very first "Amazing!"... and by the 23rd use of the word "miracle" I would've swiped my dad's car keys and driven down to the theater myself if I'd had a periscope to see over the dash. The ad wasted a lot of time trying to convince me that House Of Wax was already a spine-chilling 2D masterpiece, and that the 3D experience only made it about a thousand times better, almost guaranteeing permanent cardiac damage. They needn't have bothered... just the idea of moving 3D pictures was enough to sell me; I would have gone if they were a hawking a 3D theatrical release of Meet The Press or The David Susskind Show.
We were there to see it at the first Saturday matinee, along with about a million other kids, all there to watch the story of a deranged wax museum proprietor who uses corpses as his exhibits. From today's vantage point, it might seem a bit shocking that they'd let little kids see such lurid material... back then, though, I think our parents were resigned to the fact that all children were deranged and a movie wasn't going to give us any ideas that we hadn't already come up with.
The glasses they handed out at the theater were remarkably similar to the ones in the 3D comic books. They were flimsy little cardboard jobs with colored lenses made out of the same stuff they wrapped my dad's pack of cigarettes in. And when the movie started and we all put them on, it was no longer the typical Saturday matinee.
Critics who lament the advent of home theater because one loses the "communal" experience of seeing a movie in a public arena are obviously not waxing nostalgic over a Saturday matinee in the 60's. It was far from a shared experience. At any given time during the showing of the cartoon, 3 Stooges short, and feature presentation, there were dozens of individual dramas taking place at full volume in the audience. The bottom border of the screen was ragged with the silhouettes of kids who thought they could dive into the picture if they could just get close enough to the screen. The aisles had more pedestrian traffic than downtown Tokyo. No one walked down the aisles; everyone sprinted as if there were a record to be broken, and collisions were frequent and noisy. The air was full of particulates consisting mostly of popcorn and candy wrappers, so it was sort of like watching the movie in a blizzard. The floor beneath the seats was coated in Jujubes, and if you were unfortunate enough to hit a thick patch, you had to leave a sneaker behind. There were ushers, and a theater manager, but they were just there to prevent outright homicide; otherwise they mostly stayed in their bunker.
In other words, the average Saturday matinee was about as orderly as Omaha Beach. But on this Saturday matinee, for the 3D showing of House Of Wax, things were different.
For one thing, we were all wearing the same glasses, which were a great equalizer... every kid in the audience looked equally dumb, and that cut down on some of the customary bullying. And when the movie started, the audience came alarmingly close to silence; so much so that the manager rushed into the auditorium to see if somehow the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. There were a few kids still talking, mostly the ones who had put the glasses on upside down and thought they were being gypped, but the rest of us were engrossed in something we hadn't seen before. It didn't matter that the image wasn't exactly as clear or crisp as what we saw in a regular movie... frankly, the 2D image on the soda-spattered screen wasn't that great to begin with, and we weren't the most discriminating of audiences. But this was different enough to temporarily cure our inherent ADD.
Most of kids who came away from the movie that day couldn't tell you a thing about the plot, whose house it was, or even if it was really made of wax. But they all remembered one scene that did absolutely nothing to advance the plot: there's a carnival barker type guy on the curb outside the wax museum, promoting its grand opening by describing the wonders to be found inside. All during his pitch, he's working a paddle-ball... you know, the wooden paddle that has a rubber band stapled to it with a rubber ball attached to the other end. This guy is an Olympic gold-medal ball-paddler, and he spends all of his brief screen time smacking that ball straight out at the movie audience.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton