This is one of the numerous movies from my childhood where perhaps... just maybe, Little Ronnie should have been playing with Hot Wheels in his room instead of partaking in family horror night. This one was jarring, just fucking creepy to the hilt. My dad loved horror movies, and it's a passion he bestowed upon me. I vividly recall conversations with my dad following a night where he stayed up late watching horror, and what he described was some of the most fucked up nonsense I've ever heard or seen.
Tourist Trap came along when my sister and step-sister were living with us, and I'm sure I wanted to feel grown-up and insisted on watching the movie. It stars Chuck Connors which was probably my dad's buy-in, he was after all The Rifleman! My best guess is, Chuck Connors maybe hadn't worked a whole lot in a number of years when he signed on to be a lecherous, creepy weirdo.
The "tourist trap" is a wax museum in decline "since the new highway was put in and the traffic went elsewhere". The mannequins are frighteningly lifelike and the over-sexed, painfully oblivious, group of teenagers with car problems begin to realize why rather quickly. The too-creepy-for-a-ten-year-old pinnacle is the poignant appearance of a 6-foot freakish doll arriving to a choir of screaming, animated mannequins. That moment is etched like scar tissue upon my psyche... so now 30 years later, Hannah and I will look upon Tourist Trap with new, much more jaded and cynical eyes.
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