LH was obviously impressed by this ingenious mixture of horror and investigative journalism:

‘The newsroom scenes are the best record we have, after The Front Page, of that hazy early talkie era when newsmen always wore pale hats and were better at crime-solving than the police… the whole curiosity was dipped in two-colour Technicolor, which added a bizarre tinge by making everything orange or turquoise.’

However, typically, he gripes about something:

‘Director Michael Curtiz does not pace the film very well, and his famous infatuation with shadows is seen to better effect elsewhere.’

LH also singled out Polish art director Anton Grot for specific praise on this feature:

‘The art direction shows Anton Grot near his best, with an unerring sense of the sinister in every design and a breathtaking, girdered, subterranean set for the last reel, approached by crooked stairs and unexpected upward-sliding doors.’

Halliwell also contributed to the film’s revival:

‘In the early fifties it was discovered that the negative… had deteriorated and that all known prints were lost.  In my then capacity as programme buyer for ITV, it delighted me to direct the copyright owners to an interesting if faded print from which new copies could be made.’

LH concludes:

‘To sum up giddily – and you will be giddy after sitting through this hectic ride on a funfair ghost train – Mystery of the Wax Museum is a no-holds barred exploitation thriller of its day, decorated with every kind of interesting detail, and I am delighted to have played some small part in preserving [it] for prosperity.’

LH describes the picture house where he first encountered the trailer for this horror classic:

‘…the Bolton Hippodrome was economy-minded and normally advertised its forthcoming attractions on crudely coloured slides; for the management to spend four and sixpence on a talking trailer, albeit in black-and-white, must surely presage an event of monumental importance.’

It is unclear whether he saw it on first issue, as he would have been only five at the time, but he certainly saw it at this cinema:

‘The only American film I specifically remember seeing at the Hippodrome is Mystery of the Wax Museum, a shocker in the literal sense.  Based on the ingenious though unconvincing idea of a crippled wax sculptor who carries on his trade by giving real corpses a wax coating… it played as an amalgam of Gothic horror with a standard Warner Brothers crime reporter yarn.’