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 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.'
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.
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'
