Couldn't turn down turn down the opportunity to see this one for the first time in a theater and in 3D which is certainly deployed in all the gimmick-y ways you expect (look no further than the meta-winking paddleball guy) but arguably has one of the greatest textually baked in excuses for it I've ever seen. In that the goofy formal trickery is adopting the exact same kind of artificial showmanship that Vincent Price's wax figure sculptor deploys in his uncannily creepy tableaux art installations, even before he is violently disfigured by his moneyman-turned-arsonist and driven into deranged serial killing madness and gothic horror revenge.

The material itself is quite comically morbid and most of the cast hams it up according (genuinely lol'd at all the fainting patrons of his exploitation exhibit), but credit to André de Toth, art director Stanley Fleischer and regular John Ford/Josef Von Sternberg cinematographer Bert Glennon that they never take it anything less than seriously when it comes to conceiving and composing the all its macabre atmosphere, spooky imagery of the staged corpse shows (the swaying elevator shaft suicide noose maybe the best one), and beautifully intricate sets that are somewhere between a grotesque dollhouse and a paint studio if it was home to mad science body horror experiments. That tub of boiling wax in the dungeon finale looks straight out of one of an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation.

Speaking of which, Price gives the exact same wonderfully theatrical performance you would see him do 100 more times for Roger Corman but there's something to be said about seeing it in its earliest stages (the level of intensity and ion he has about describing his lost Marie Antoinette dummy!), and how strangely spritely he was a decade prior. Had no idea he was ever physically capable of doing the various cobble street chases/fiery fist brawls in the Phantom of the Opera fit and makeup that he does here. The shot of his face being punched and smashing open to reveal the charred skin mask underneath is crazy.

Also, spent about half the movie trying to figure out why his mute strongman assistant Igor looked so familiar only to realize after the fact it was one of the earliest every performances by a younger/thinner than I've ever seen him Charles Bronson. Loved the bit where his head is resting next to all the wax ones before he creepily opens and moves his eyes.