Zach Galligan of course starred as Billy Peltzer in both Gremlins films.ĭana Ashbrook you’ll recognize as Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks or Tom from Return of the Living Dead II (1988). He also played Sallah, good friend to Indiana Jones in all but Crystal Skull. John Rhys-Davies who plays the Werewolf that haunted me for years played the heroic dwarf Gimli in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Marquis de Sade in this film is also the visual reference for me when I read “120 days of Sodom”, which gives it a whole other level of depth within my psyche. Get high school teens into peril and deliver. The gore and make up aside, the story didn’t suffer. Usually there’s a single monster that keeps a team of artists occupied, but here they had to work on everything from Dracula and his Brides - and one of the bloodiest sets I’ve ever seen - to Zombies that were shot in Black and White yet still were able to display the grit and gristle of any comparable modern makeup.

It’s a gesture of reverence for the herculean effort put forth by effects Technician Bob Keen and the whole make up team. That is not a knock on the rest of the film. The lion’s share of the $3.5 million budget must have been spent on the special effects. It’s with this nostalgia that I hope to introduce Waxwork to some of you who may have never come across it.

In the early 2000s, when I was building up my DVD collection funded by working three minimum wage jobs, I was lucky enough to rediscover a childhood favorite with the bonus of it being packaged with the sequel of whose existence I was unaware. All I knew was Billy from Gremlins was in it, and there was a Werewolf that scared the shit out of me. Before I discovered IMDb, this film eluded me for years.

Waxworks werewolf