Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992)

The sequel to Waxwork again had its special effects supervised by Bob Keen's Image Animation. Among Keen's team was Paul Jones and Stephen Norrington. Keen's duties alternated between the various pastiche monsters and the copious gore effects.

Keen recounted about why he took the sequels gig so soon after having worked on Clive Barker's Nightbreed; 'The attraction of doing a Waxwork film is the range of things you get to do as an effects person. You get everything from aliens to Godzilla to Jekyll and Hyde. Usually, you never get all that in one movie.'

In another interview, Keen said how he was eager to return to Waxwork thanks to the experience gained since the first film. 'It's been four years since the last one, so the audience is more sophisticated as a group. This movie is strong on the monster elements. Nearly every sequence has at least one, so it's another parade of creatures like Nightbreed.'

Much like the first Waxwork, Waxwork II was a love letter to horror cinema and Gothic literature, with its first 'segment' being a pastiche of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Bob Keen was delighted at the chance for his team to pay tribute to the classic monsters they loved, while doing something new at the same time. Keen said to Fangoria;

'I love doing classic creatures like Frankenstein. When you're a kid trying to get into makeup effects, all you ever want to do is Frankenstein and werewolves. The nice thing about the Waxwork movies is that I have the chance to reinvent them. (...) The fact is that I don't want to do the wonderful Universal classics because one, they're copyrighted and two, there's no fun in just duplicating someone else's work.'

Waxwork II's second segment, a homage to 1963's The Haunting, also featured the film's most gruesome scene where Bruce Campbell has his chest torn open. There was other grisly gags as Keen explained. 'His chest is peeled back for the entire sequence and hawks are pecking out the flesh - it's very impressive. Then there's this other guy who gets his jaw knocked off by a falling beam and has to spend the rest of the scene with it hanging there. Oh, and Baron Frankenstein gets his head squeezed so much, his eyes, teeth and brain pop out.'

Hickox explained how even the gored torso scene, like most of Waxwork II's gore, was intended to be a little jokey. 'It's kind of asking, 'What can you do to the human body and still keep somebody standing there?'. It's very Monty Pythonesque, and it's certainly the most graphic scene, but it doesn't play that way because it's shot in black and white.'

The gored ribcage appliance on Bruce Campbell.

The crushing dummy head and brain prop.

The film's third segment was a parody of the Alien filmss, with a monster heavily inspired by H.R. Giger's iconic xenomorph. However, one element of the parody monster - the worm-like creature operating it - was actually inspired by Doctor Who's Daleks according to Hickox.

'(The Daleks) had this protective shell that was mean & inside were actually these small slime monsters. So imagine that inside this alien shell is a kind of weaselly little slug controlling it all.'

It wouldn't be an Alien homage (or even a Dalek homage) without a scene of a small slimy creature getting up close and personal, which Waxwork II's homage naturally included!

A bulging mouth prosthetic and dummy alien were applied on Billy Kane as the unlucky crewman, while the infant creature was realized as a puppet with animatronic mechanisms.

The last of Waxwork II's main segments is a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe's writings, set in a medieval castle. This segment's monster was the panther woman, whose transformation was achieved first with air bladder prosthetics, and then a detailed face appliance.

Keen was very pleased with the panther woman's final stage - a mechanized head on a performer - in particular! 'She's absolutely incredible. We have this five-stage transformation and end up with this beautiful mechanical head. It's very sexy.'

Towards the film's finale is a quick sequence with several short vignettes parodying even more horror films; most notable among them being a Godzilla parody.

Keen was fairly happy with the work he did on both Waxwork films. 'The most frustrating part of this job is when you work on something for months and it never gets seen. The nice thing about Waxwork is that you get to see everything.'

Sources:

• Fangoria #108 'Waxwork II: Time for Terror'
  
• Fangoria Horror Spectacular #5 ''Another Stab at Classic Creatures'
   

Waxwork (1988)

The special effects of Anthony Hickox's Waxwork were supervised by Bob Keen, who under the banner of Image Animation amassed a team of British effects artists; Paul Jones, Neill Gorton and Dave Elsey being some of the names among them. Hickox gave Keen the job due to them previously collaborating on a project 'Death Star' that, as far as I know, never got made.

Hickox conceived Waxwork as a 'monster mash' type film, but was quick to explain how different the design process for the monsters would be compared to the earlier Monster Squad, which he was quick to distance himself from;

'Remember, I've had a steady diet of Hammer horror films since I was 8 years old. That's been the main inspiration for Waxwork, although Dario Argento's Suspiria is still my biggest influence in life. So, although the creatures ae not based on any one movie, they are true to their legends. I've always felt that vampires are absolutely human-looking except for their teeth. I'm not a fan of the Nosferatu vampire at all. I wanted a very aristocratic, Christopher Lee vampire. I wanted Dracula's son to be based on Roman Polanski's Fearless Vampire Killers. For the werewolf, we used The Howling type, not the Lon Chaney Jr. version.'

Bob Keen and his team had a particularly heavy workload, as not only did they have all the various monster makeups to realize but then the myriad gore effects! Keen spoke about the Waxwork experience;

'We had a partnership in designing the creatures. Tony asked me what could be done and like a fool I said, 'The world'. Really, the restrictions from Universal were a golden oppurtunity to do it our own way. Tony was already in the States rewriting the script, so I'd fax him designs and drawings. He'd call and generally just say, 'Cast them up'. Because we were shooting in the States, we had to have everything finished here in England and shipped over before the cameras started rolling. Consequently, we worked 18-hour days for about 8 weeks before we could leave.'

'Once in the States, the first scene we shot required the mummy to stamp on someone's head and squash it. Then the werewolf literally tears someone open from the top of his head to the base of his spin - just tears the guy in half and eats what's inside. It's a lovely family movie, you know? The zombie scene was a toughie, requiring about 20 effect gags including a mechanical hand, and it had to be shot all in one day.'

The various monsters were mostly realized as prosthetic makeups and rubber masks, with rubber sculpted gloves made for the alien as well. As the effects were all made in England, this meant they couldn't do life-casts of the American cast, so Keen worked around it;

'We didn't have the luxury of knowing who was going inside each creature. We had to make them in a wide as possible range. As we built the creatures in England, when we came to America, we then auditioned the parts and found who could wear each thing. It's very important that you can work with the people inside these costumes, cos if someone is not happy in there, you're not gonna get a performance out of them'.

The Mummy

The Frankenstein's Monster

The Golem

The deformed mad scientist

The alien

Mr Hyde and the witch were both realized as cable-controlled animatronic masks, with behind the scenes clips showing the facial movements better.

Mr Hyde

The witch

The snakeman (homaging 1966's The Reptile or 1973's Sssssss) was realized as a performer in prosthetic appliances over the torso and arms, as well as a cable-controlled animatronic head.

The snakeman head behind Bob Keen.

Two werewolves were made for Waxwork, the first being the more minimal design Dana Ashbrook transforms into. Judging by Hickox's love for Hammer horror, the makeup could have been inspired by makeup applied on Oliver Reed for Curse of the Werewolf. Air bladder prosthetics were also applied on Ashbrook's face for the transformation shot, homaging The Howling.

The Howling-inspired 'fully grown' werewolf was realized as a hair-punched rubber suit and a cable-controlled animatronic head with movable ears and face. Wearing the suit was animatronics engineer Steve Hardie, who did not enjoy the sequences in which he was almost burned by the flames during the shooting of the finale!

Sources:

• Fangoria #78 'Making the Waxwork' by Larry Barsky
  
• Assorted behind the scenes featurettes.