The Truth About The Worst Wax Museum In The World

It is the responsibility of every individual to seek out and experience the best life has to offer. Few go to their graves wishing that they'd spent less time lying on silk sheets in a Las Vegas penthouse while trained scentless flamingos poured sweet champagne into their mouths. Life is lived on the periphery, and its gold leaf edges aren't going to admire themselves.

Equally important is the quest to take in the opposite end of the spectrum — the empirically awful. One cannot truly relish a fine scotch sipped on the balcony of the Burj Khalifa unless they have also swigged Monarch 151 while hiding under a parked panel van. In the niche world of celebrity wax sculptures, Madame Tussaud's is unquestionably the scotch, and Louis Tussaud's is covered in engine grease with a mouth full of rot gut.

Yes, there was another Tussaud in the pantheon of wax figure entrepreneurs, and according to popular opinion, his museums are just the worst.

The story goes as follows: Marie Tussaud started making wax sculptures of the famous and infamous during the latter half of the 18th century. She eventually made her way to Great Britain, where she opened an exhibition, which would come to be known as Madame Tussaud's wax museum.

The business stayed in the family, but a rift formed some three generations later when two of Marie's great-grandsons were both in the running for the position of "chief artist." John Theodore Tussaud was picked, and his brother Louis decided it was time to make his own way in the world.

And so it was that the Zeppo Marx of the family started Louis Tussaud's, a series of slightly smaller, notably worse wax museums. Their representations of celebrity call to mind those Mad Magazine caricatures that you could tell the artist didn't put a lot of time into. Imagine if all of your favorite movie stars secretly had malnourished vestigial twins whose heads were surgically grafted to mannequin bodies on their 50th birthday. That's the Louis Tussaud's brand. Traveller describes the Niagara Falls location's Tom Cruise as "James McEvoy after eating cheese for three days straight and suffering the cheese-sweat consequences."

And if that doesn't sound like it's worth the price of admission, then maybe you just don't know what art is.