Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Movie review - Chan#22 - "Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum" (1940) **1/2

This is my third Sidney Toler Chan film and I'm really not enjoying him - the make up is distracting and he's got none of the warmth of Warner Oland. I was hoping this would be better than it turned out to be because it has a great trashy 40s Universal horror movie set up: Marc Lawrence is a killer who escapes from a courtroom and is determined to get revenge on Chan so he takes refuge in a wax museum.

There's some creepy museum workers, plastic surgery, a snappy girl reporter who says things like "I've got to get this story filed", a 4F leading man (normally this didn't become prominent until much later), lots of running around the max museum getting confused with dummies. I kept expecting Lionel Atwill to appear - or at least Abbott and Costello. But the result is strangely flat and unexciting, lacking in atmosphere and pace. A real shame.

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