Review of Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum

This was one of the better Charlie Chan movies that starred Sidney Toler. While I am a bigger fan of the earlier films with Warner Oland, these later films following the death of Oland were still pretty good, though they lacked some of the freshness since by then they'd already made a HUGE number of these films. As a result, the films have become a little bit formulaic and predictable. Now this isn't all that bad, though, as there were many devoted fans and they are charming in their own way. PLUS, this film is a huge improvement over the later Chan films starring Mantan Moreland as "Birmingham Brown" and much of it was because the basic formula of the series was changed. Moreland was at times funny as comic relief, but all too often, the humor was based more on the notion of "let's laugh at the scared Black guy"--a cliché widely accepted back then but something that SHOULD make you at least a bit uncomfortable today. Plus, by the time he came to the series, this may have been Monogram Pictures' attempt to "jump the shark"--a reference to a desperate move to change the formula for a series due to lagging ratings or attendance. So, without Moreland, the film is a bit better and sticks with the original tried and true formula.

As for the plot itself, this one has a lot of "red herrings". Despite there initially appearing to be one person with a reason to murder (a convicted criminal wanting to kill Chan), it turns out that practically everyone had reason to murder someone in this film. This definitely kept me guessing, though at times, it also seemed a bit unfair--as the evidence the writers dropped into the script and the direction the film ended up going seemed totally unrelated at times! Not a bad little film, though, and the creepy setting of the wax museum was a big plus.