Since the evil waxworks is destroyed at the end of the first film, Hickox goes in a different, and somewhat contradictory, direction with WAXWORK II. Because Sarah is accused of a murder because of one of the wax-demons, the teens must brave certain "time doors" beneath the ruined waxwork. Though the idea of time-travel implies staying within one's own cosmos, Hickox explains that the doors actually take the youngsters into the dimension of Cartagra, where evil beings assume the appearance of monsters and devise scenarios to lure their victims to destruction-- all as part of something the Ghost of Sir Wilfred calls "God's Nintendo game."
Behind this confusing rationale lies the likelihood that Hickox simply didn't want to bother with the voodoo-token-calls-up-deceased-evildoers schtick. When Mark and Sarah venture into Cartagra, they start meeting all manner of purely fictional villains, from Doctor Frankenstein to Doctor Jekyll to a version of Ridley Scott's Aliens. In other words, Hickox wanted to write a love-letter to the horror-genre by having his protagonists stumble through a number of tongue-in-cheek battles with famous monsters of filmland. After Mark and Sarah work their way through enough scenarios, this film too concludes with a long battle-sequence-- though, as a slight twist, Mark is temporarily left behind in Cartagra, and the film concludes with Sarah seeking a way to rescue him.
I leaped over the circumstances of Sarah's murder accusation because they seem like a rather piecemeal explanation for the character's sudden masochism in the first film. When Mark and Sarah leave the destroyed waxworks, they're followed by one last wax-demon, an animated severed hand. (No idea what historical entity this was supposed to be linked to.) The hand follows Sarah to her house. There Sarah is greeted by her stepfather, who not only doesn't like her staying out so late, he also doesn't like her wearing one of her deceased mother's dresses. When the exhausted teenager gives him some lip, the stepfather comes close to backhanding Sarah-- but restrains himself. Not long afterward, the animated hand kills the stepfather, and Sarah, though unable to rescue him, destroys the hand-- which, unfortunately, leaves her looking like the only viable culprit in the murder. And if this seems like a wonky set-up, even wonkier is the vague solution Mark and Sarah come up with-- to journey into Cartagra and come back with some magical item that will prove their crazy waxworks story. And even wonkier, Sarah succeeds-- though, as I mentioned, she isn't able to bring Mark with her too.
Did Hickox mean to suggest that Sarah, with both birth-parents dead and being saddled with a maybe-abusive stepfather, had formed some sort of masochistic and/or incestuous tendencies? Maybe not, but it can't entirely be coincidence that her last trial in Cartagra involves her merging with the persona of an innocent girl in a medieval Poe-esque setting. This girl is not only destined to marry an older monarch who is not related to her, she's also menaced by her evil sorcerer-brother, who wants to assume the monarch's form, so that he can conquer both a kingdom and a sister.
Ah, kink!-- Thy name was Hickox.
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