House of Wax
HOUSE OF WAX (15)
D: Jaume Collet-Serra
Warner Bros./Village Roadshow/Dark Castle (Joel Silver,
Robert Zemeckis & Susan Levin)
US/Australia 2005
113 mins
Horror
W: Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes [based on the play "The
Wax Museum" by Charles S. Belden]
DP: Stephen Windon
Ed: Joel Negron
Mus: John Ottman
PD: Graham Walker
Elisha Cuthbert (Carly Jones), Chad Michael Murray (Nick
Jones), Brian Van Holt (Bo Sinclair / Vincent Sinclair), Paris Hilton (Paige Edwards), Jared Padalecki (Wade Felton)
Remake of Mystery Of The Wax Museum for the MTV generation
(a previous remake was also released in 1953) produced by Robert Zemeckis, who seemed intent on spending the best part of the early 21st century taking a handful of semi-classic horror movies
from the 50's and turned them into lurid formulaic crap for a braindead audience.
While certain elements of the first of these films (The
House On Haunted Hill) worked, House Of Wax is simply terrible.
A group of irritating, unpleasant teenagers (portrayed by
actors who can't act, and Paris Hilton, who can't act) go through the same old motions as though they'd never seen a horror movie in their old lives, strolling around an eerie ghost town and
choosing to explore the creepiest looking house of the lot. The interior of the house itself looks like a Disneyland ride and the plot amounts to no better than a Scooby Doo episode with a
stupid moral that seems to be "if you live in a house made of wax, do not have a furnace in your basement."
The whole thing was promoted on the tagline "See Paris
Die", but a 113 minute movie really can't be built around a 5 minute murder scene.
House of Wank!
3/10
