Cameron Mitchell shines amid the decay of a flawed but fascinating low-budget oddity.

By the tail end of the 1960s, horror cinema found itself at a strange crossroads — straddling the last gasps of gothic grandeur while cautiously eyeing the burgeoning grit of a new era. Bud Townsend’s Nightmare in Wax (1969) sits awkwardly between these two worlds, offering a sordid yet visually intriguing piece that, for all its flashes of style, ultimately crumbles under the weight of its own limitations.

At its core, Nightmare in Wax is a lurid revenge tale. Cameron Mitchell — always a reliable hand in low-budget horror — lends the film its most convincing element, embodying Vince Renaud, a once-celebrated actor whose face has been horribly disfigured in a freak accident. Swallowed by bitterness and madness, Renaud retreats into the uncanny embrace of a wax museum, where his obsession with preserving beauty takes on an insidious literalness. Mitchell throws himself into the role with a bruised intensity, managing to elevate dialogue that, in lesser hands, would have collapsed into pure melodrama. His performance is a reminder that even within the most wayward productions, a committed actor can carve out something worth watching.

Visually, Nightmare in Wax occasionally brushes against something far more interesting than its narrative suggests. The cinematography, while often rudimentary, occasionally slips into unexpected pockets of stylisation. The flickering, chiaroscuro lighting of the wax museum sequences conjures a greasy, dreamlike atmosphere — a kind of sun-bleached noir sensibility that suggests a more ambitious film trapped inside the one we actually received. Shots linger just a touch too long on the deformed figures and melted visages, a grotesque fascination that, when paired with the film’s threadbare budget, achieves an uncanny, unsettling texture.

However, these moments are fleeting. The broader construction of Nightmare in Wax is messy and unfocused, with a meandering pace that undercuts its own tension. What might have been an incisive study of madness and celebrity decay is instead rendered clumsy by stilted secondary performances, ham-fisted exposition, and an aesthetic that lurches uneasily between pulp thriller and camp horror. Even the gruesome set-pieces, while conceptually fascinating, lack the polish and menace needed to make them truly memorable.

There is, to be fair, a certain tawdry charm in the film’s audacity — its waxen tableaux of frozen horror and its feverish, sun-drenched grotesquerie — but these alone cannot rescue Nightmare in Wax from its fundamental shortcomings. It remains a curious artifact: a film not without merit, but one whose flashes of inspiration are too isolated to coalesce into something enduring.

The Prognosis:

For those willing to sift through the wreckage, Cameron Mitchell’s performance and the occasional visual flourish offer a glimpse into the strange, transitional state of late-1960s horror. It’s a nightmare, yes — but one that flickers, briefly, with the strange, melting beauty of a dying dream.

• 1960s Retrospective review by Saul Muerte