| |
House of Wax
|
|
| Year: |
2005
|
|
Director: |
Jaume Collet-Serra
|
| Stars: |
Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Ri'chard, Damon Herriman, Andy Anderson
|
| Genre: |
Horror |
| Rating: |
  3 (from 3 votes) |
| Review: |
In 1974, a wax sculptor mother and doctor father were having trouble controlling one of their two offspring - "Why can't you be more like your brother?" asks the mother to the violent child who has to be strapped into his chair. Fast forward to the present day, and six young people are on a road trip through the countryside to see a football game, and will be camping overnight when they find a place to stay. Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) is accompanied by her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki), and her brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray) is along for the ride too, even though they've fallen out over a car he stole that she let on about to the police. But these concerns will soon fall away...
...because this is a remake of the nineteen-fifties House of Wax (one of the villains is named after Vincent Price), which itself was a remake of the thirties Mystery of the Wax Museum. It was scripted by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes, but instead of taking the familiar storyline of the mad but tragic sculptor driven to kill for his art, this version starts out, and indeed continues, like a new Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In fact the whole operation is very reminiscent of seventies-era horror (is it any coincidence that the prologue is set there?) with its young cast running up against something terrible in the back of beyond.
The first sign we get that there is anything amiss with the youngsters camping trip is when they detect a foul smell on the breeze near the location of their tents, and when a truck emerges from the night to shine its headlights at them and then drive away when Nick throws something at it, breaking one of the lights. They think little of this, and turn in for the evening, but not before we have a reference to The Blair Witch Project as one of the characters carries a camera which we get a point of view from. Or it could equally be a reference to co-star Paris Hilton's sex tape, which is spoofed knowingly in one sequence.
The sun comes up and someone might have been investigating their camp during the night, as the camera is missing and the fan belt on one of the cars is broken. Carly gets a chance to get up close to the source of the smell when she practically falls headfirst into a pit of rotting deer corpses, which is where a sinister hillbilly makes his entrance, dispelling fears that a human hand in the pit is anything but a wax hand. He gives Wade and Carly a lift into the nearest smalltown to buy a new belt, but it appears there is nobody about. This being a Dark Castle horror, there is a "bad place" to contend with, in this case the town's wax museum, which on examination is made of wax as well as containing wax figures - logic presumably having flown out of the window when it was built.
And this being a Dark Castle production, you'd expect it to be pretty substandard when it came to its hackneyed thrills, yet this is one of their better efforts. Too much distracting detail has gone into building up the backstory, but the result is an efficient shocker that gets back to basics elsewhere - with the mayhem. The wax statues on display aren't only in the museum, but everywhere in the town and to add a touch of the macabre, they contain real bodies (wouldn't at least one person have noticed their friends or relatives going missing?). The cast fill their roles amicably enough, with Cuthbert a solid final girl, although Hilton's fans (assuming she has any left at this point in time) will be let down to see her only briefly present to get killed off; maybe the producers had no faith in her abilities? All in all, House of Wax is none too shoddy for a routine Hollywood chiller, though the missing fingers element seems unnecessarily cruel. Music by John Ottman.
|
| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
|
| |
|
|
