House of Wax begins with a flashback set in 1974, where we are introduced to a curious family nucleus, formed by a mother who produces wax statues, a doctor father and two very different twin brothers: one is calm and serene; the other, so angry that he has to be tied and immobilized to his child's chair to eat breakfast. Creatively, director Collet-Serra shoots the entire sequence from above, without showing the faces of any of the four actors. The woman is a famous sculptor named Trudy Sinclair, and her husband is a controversial methods surgeon, Dr. Sinclair, who apparently used his own children in some bizarre experiment (which we'll only learn about at the conclusion).

The scene immediately cuts to the present day, when we are introduced to our future victims: a group of young people preparing to travel to another city, where they will follow the finals of a student football championship. In a car ride Blake (Robert Richard) and his girlfriend Paige (insufferable socialite Paris Hilton); in the other are Carly (the beautiful Elisha Cuthbert, who played Kiefer Shuterland's daughter on the series 24 Horas), her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki, from the series Supernatural), and Carly's brother, Nick (Chad Michael Murray, from the series Dawson' s Creek), and his friend Dalton (an unrecognizable Jon Abrahams from Everyone's Panic). On the way they discover that there is a shortcut through a small town and that they can get there much earlier in the game. The little problem is that this city is completely inhabited by wax dolls. So you can see the morbidity that hangs over her: imagine yourself seeing 'people' made of wax, with that "What are you doing here?" look.

As a matter of fact, the script signed by the brothers Chad and Carey Hayes (responsible for an interesting 1990 horror, The Dark Side of the Moon) uses very little of the history of the original House of Wax, in addition to the existence of a wax museum in the plot. . If Vincent Price's film revolved around a disfigured sculptor who kidnapped people to turn them into wax statues, this remake is much more like a great 1979 B movie, David Schmoeller's Trap for Tourists - of which, it even takes inspiration from some scenes. The Hayes brothers still have a lot to learn about how to create fear and tension, but the rookie director works around these shortcomings in the script by using extreme violence and elaborate special effects (never free) to keep fans of the genre's attention.

The script is full of familiar situations, such as when the girl goes to check a strange noise or the moment when the group breaks up to look for a lost friend. It's no surprise the result of these acts, showing just how imbecile the characters are, subjects who seem determined to die. The group of teenagers does everything wrong from the beginning of the film. Take a shortcut they don't know about? Camping in the middle of the forest? Bah, this has been dangerous since Friday the 13th! Wandering through a small town that seems deserted and still entering homes uninvited? Wow, that's stupid! Not realizing the danger lurking in a wax museum? But dammit, haven't they seen movies like The Passage and Wax Museum??? Add to all this the stupidity of a helpless girl leaving her tent in shorts and with a beautiful neckline in the middle of the woods to check out strange noises coming from the forest, the extreme naivety of accepting a ride from a weird hillbilly and completely unknown and the ultimate cliché of, when chased by a psychopath, climbing the stairs to the second floor rather than going out the front door - a cliché relentlessly satirized in the first Scream (1996).

Plus, the script takes nearly an hour to start dispatching its characters. In the meantime, he keeps creating silly situations and "conflicts" between them, in an attempt to make each one of the young people more "interesting", without ever succeeding. The criminal Nick confesses, at one point, that he didn't steal any car, just covered up the theft committed by his friend Dalton. Now what difference does such a revelation make to the plot? Paige, Paris Hilton's character, is since the beginning of the film trying to tell her boyfriend that she is pregnant - another completely unnecessary detail of the story. And what about the never-justified (and totally unnecessary) tantrum of the brothers Carly and Nick??? In the end, all of this only serves to make us even more angry with the characters and hope they all die violently to our sadistic delight.

And that's where director Collet-Serra's imaginative mind kicks in: for each of the script's uninspired nonsense, he strikes back with inspired moments of shock, disgust, or outright violence. This is the case of the scene where Paige and Carly enter the forest to find out where the stench of the place comes from (why not just go away???). Isn't it that Carly falls off a ravine and sinks right in the middle of a disgusting cesspool of dead and rotting animals? And the camera doesn't spare the viewer from nauseating close-ups of the girl's hands sinking into that bloody paste of decaying flesh.

The House of Wax also has a rather nauseating moment where one of the young people is imprisoned and goes through a slow and detailed "preparation" session to become a wax statue. Crazy Vincent, who wears a wax mask himself, neatly stitches the wounds on the boy's body, then painfully plucks the hairs off his face (like eyebrows and eyelashes!), and then immobilizes the future "work of art" in a weird device, after anesthetizing the boy so that he doesn't die of pain. At this point, it's impossible not to feel a shiver of horror as Vincent opens the valves and releases gallons of hot wax on the helpless victim, who can't move or scream in pain, being slowly transformed into a living sculpture!!! By far, one of the most bizarre horror scenes in modern cinema! And the thing has a sequence further on: when one of the victim's friends finds out what happened, he tries to "free" the boy from the wax layer and, in the process, he peels the skin off the "statue", which, alive, but without reaction, only manages to release a few tears of pain.

There are also severed heads, severed fingers, arrows piercing bodies and a moment where a man's face is thoroughly disfigured by baseball bat blows, which owes nothing to the "fire extinguisher scene" in the controversial Irreversible. And let's not forget the now classic death of Paris Hilton (not surprisingly, as the movie's marketing said: "Come and see Paris die!"). To top it off, every scene involving death is extremely exaggerated. If a boy appears with a knife in his throat, the director makes a point of showing the psychopath stepping on the knife to bury the blade even more in the victim's throat!!! Is it little or do you want more? Because House of Wax still surprises the viewer by changing the traditional order of deaths in the genre, dispatching first one of the friendliest characters (and precisely the one you think will survive), and lastly the one you hope will go first - yes, Paris Hilton. The script is also surprising because it reserves very painful sufferings for the little girl Carly, who, imprisoned by the lunatic brothers, has everything from her mouth glued with Super Bonder (oh!) to the tip of one of her fingers cut with pliers.

Of course, House of Wax also has its weaknesses and holes. In addition to the bad composition of the characters, the director decided to keep the "Dark Castle quality standard" and throw in the final scene all the digital effects that he didn't use during the projection time. So, get ready to see a CGI overdose, in the scene where the museum catches fire and human statues melt in close-up, while the walls and floor of the house soften and also melt (because it's all wax!).

And the conclusion is pretty flawed, with a reveal that doesn't change the plot at all, although it tries to sound surprising. The very idea that there might be an abandoned small town that doesn't even exist on the map, with people turned into wax statues, is very unlikely, and only reveals the utter stupidity of the American police - even if they didn't know of Ambrose's existence, they could less be having arrived there sooner or later, investigating the huge number of disappearances in the region... And planes, weren't they flying over that area?

House of Wax is very inspired, and much of this quality is due to the art direction. The "wax" settings of the city of Ambrose are fantastic, and the statues are really very realistic and terrifying. From the secret laboratory where the villain builds his statues (filled with tools, rusty pipes and pastels, plus a hallway with dying faces carved out of wax) to the movie theater (which shows What Happened to Baby Jane? To a motionless audience) and the church, the whole scenario seems to convey the idea that escape is impossible. The movie might not be particularly scary (and what recent movie is it, aside from the goodies coming from the East?), but it sure holds some good creeps.

Despite the unoriginal plot, the film works very well as an entertainment for the majority of the teenage audience, which doesn't worry too much about the lack of quality, just want to watch some carnage. For a horror fan, House of Wax is a sight for sore eyes. It has very violent and somewhat original deaths, competent thriller, great chase scenes and a very creative killer like Vincent. As a remake, of course it doesn't work, as there is little left over from the original story, but as a slasher itself, it works a lot!

A remake of the 1953 Vincent Price movie, which is itself a remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum, this is one of the few slashers this month that has moments that bother me, mainly because of the moment when a character nearly falls into the pit where all the highway's roadkill is stacked up high.

It's directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, whose Orphan has equally as upsetting moments. He's also directed Liam Neeson in three movies (Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter), as well as the COVID-19 delayed Disney movie Jungle Cruise and the upcoming Black Adam.



A group of friends - Carly (Elisha Cuthbert, 24), her brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray, One Tree Hill), her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki, Supernatural) and friends Paige (Paris Hilton), Blake (Robert Ri'chard) and Dalton (Jon Abrahams) - are on their way to a football game when they decide to camp overnight. A truck comes to screw with them and leaves when Nick smashes out one of its lights.

The next morning, their truck can't start and they're stuck in the town of Ambrose, which doesn't have much except for Trudy's House of Wax, the home of formerly cojoined twins - and current maniacs - Bo and Vincent Sinclair (Brian Van Holt).

If you know the story of, well, any wax museum movie, you know what's coming next. What the film does have that many of those are missing are incredible art direction and a willingness to fill the screen with gore, including impaling Paris Holton directly through the forehead (Becca said that when this happened during a teenage viewing of this in theater, there was a standing ovation). The end, as the entire museum melts*, is astounding.

Hilton won that year's Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress, which really just feels like an attack on her for even making this movie. She's not all that bad and really all she has to do is show up and get killed. It is a slasher, after all.**

*Village Roadshow Studios and Warner Brothers Movie World Australia sued special effects expert David Fletcher and Wax Productions because of a fire on the set during production, which destroyed part of the Gold Coast's Warner Bros. Movie World studios.

**That said, it has one of the better soundtracks for a slasher this side of Dream Warriors, if you were into the newer metal of 2005. There's "Mineva" by the Deftones, "Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World" by Marilyn Manson and, in defiance of my previous statement, "New Dawn Fades" by Joy Division and "Dirt" by The Stooges.

Horror films are like comedies. If you have a comedy, and you laugh a lot, the film works. With a horror film it's the same. If you're scared a lot, then the film worked. House of Wax scared me a lot, so therefore, I must have liked it. Don't get me wrong. This film isn't anything special and by no means is it not without loads of clichés and problems and stupid teenagers. But it is scary, entertaining, gory, and fun.

I barely remember the original Vincent Price film. I think I saw it when I was 5 or 6 years old on TV. This film has a group of teenagers, one of them being Paris Hilton, on their way to a football game and stops at roadside to camp for the night. The next day they realize that their car has been tampered with and naturally they do everything stupid to try and get it fixed including trusting every creep that tries to help them. They separate and end up in a town that looks like something out of a Twilight Zone episode which includes a house made out of wax. There is a legend behind this town that involves some wax sculptress and her freaky twin boys. Are they still lurking around? You just know that all our teens will find out.

House of Wax has a real creepiness to it. The actors, which many of them are from The WB network and the other from Fox, seems to fit right into this genre. I like these kind of films if done well, and this one is done pretty well. I was scared a lot and if I'm watching a horror film, that's OK with me and therefore i'm recommending the movie despite all it's clichés you've probably seen 100 times before. (**1/2)