Overall Rating
  Awesome: 13.08%
Worth A Look: 24.62%
Average: 3.08%
Pretty Bad: 31.54%
Total Crap: 27.69%
11 reviews, 64 user ratings
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| House of Wax (2005) |
by Doug Bentin
"Most people are giving this film dismissive chuckles."
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Is it any good? Worth seeing? Actually worth going to see, or should I wait for the DVD? Will a film reviewer be able to face himself in the mirror if he writes anything good about it?Is it just a remake of the 1950s Vincent Price flick, which was a remake of the 1933 “Mystery of the Wax Museum”?
No. The original story was credited to Charles Belden, who gets credit again 72 years later, but all that’s carried over is the concept that someone is using the bodies of real people covered in wax to form statues for a museum. Scriptwriters Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes have blended that idea with the currently popular don’t-get-off-the-main-road-or-the-creepy-hillbillies-will-get-you plot device. So, of course, two cars loaded with six college students on their way to a football game take the detour and end up in a sort of psychotic Cloud Coo-Coo Land where they are dispatched one-by-one by two brothers who have created an entire town of wax figures. Actually, the movie borrows as much from a little gem called “Tourist Trap” as it does from previous wax-on-wax offs.
Is it any good or just more same old same old?
Surprisingly, first time feature director Jaume Collet-Serra builds the tension pretty well. If the picture is never really scary, it is consistently creepy, and instead of tacking on an arbitrary ending that shows off the special effects, Collet-Serra sticks to the ending of the first films with a huge fire. In this movie, the entire museum is made of wax—it is literally a house made of wax--so when the place begins to melt from the flames, floors give way, ceilings collapse, and walls turn to liquid. This makes for some nicely surreal moments as hands emerge through walls and people try to run but find their feet sinking into the floor, just like in those dreams you used to have when you were a kid.
Perhaps there’s a little Wes Craven influence at work here. There are certainly less intelligent things that could be borrowed from Craven’s films. It’s also remarkable how often moments in films are described as “surreal” when in fact they aren’t at all. Maybe what critics should be saying is “If this director were more concerned with tapping our unconscious minds and less with creating imagery that is odd without being truly unnerving, this would be surreal.”
There is little logic to anything that happens in the film. The characters are constantly trusting people they have no reason to trust. They make one wrong decision after another. They’ve fallen down a rabbit hole, but don’t have sense enough to realize it even when they pass a white rabbit wearing a vest and holding a pocket watch. It’s all a dream in which the characters react oddly, nothing is what it seems to be on the surface, and the world is made up of doubles.
Now, when I say that the film is a dream I don’t mean that one of the characters wakes up at the end, sits straight up in bed, sweating, and mumbles, “Thank God, it was only a dream.” No “Invaders From Mars” déjà vu, thank you very much. It’s more like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” in which the film is a dream we in the audience are having from which we can’t awaken until we leave the theater. It’s that feeling to which good horror films aspire. Some things on screen don’t make sense when you drag them into the light of day, nor should they. What’s spooky in the dark, we may not bat an eye at when the lights go up. When it’s not only dark but emerging from our unconscious minds, the creep-out content is increased.
What’s most surprising is that I suspect a lot of this is deliberate and not just a lucky accident emerging from bad writing. An active intelligence behind a dead teenager flick? Will wonders never cease?
And finally, is Paris Hilton really as bad as everyone thinks she’ll be?
Not really. She isn’t asked to do any heavy lifting as an actress—she needs to look sexy and then later to look scared, and this she manages. This isn’t a breakout star-is-born performance, but it’s only a distraction to the extent that you’re pulled out of the movie to think “Hey, that’s Paris Hilton” every time she enters the frame. As the second female lead in a genre movie, Hilton is fine, and her character, while more than a little slutty, is decent enough that I didn’t enjoy seeing her spectacularly gory death as much as I thought I would.
The movie also stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, and Brian Van Holt. All are up to what the script asks of them, especially Cuthbert who brings more to the female lead that expected.All in all, “House of Wax” is a better horror flick than I thought it would be. It even evidences a smattering of intelligence. In fact, it’s the best one so far this year. Or is that just damning with faint praise?
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12045&reviewer=405
originally posted: 07/16/05 02:17:17
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Tribeca Film Festival For more in the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival series, click here.
Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
06-May-2005 (R)
DVD: 25-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Jul-2005
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