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Film

Same old waxy buildup

Let the screaming begin for this uninspired House of Wax remake.

By PHILIP BOOTH
Published May 5, 2005

	[Photos: Warner Bros.]
	Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert make some scary choices in House of Wax.
	Paris Hilton makes a head-splitting appearance in House of Wax.

Did you hear the one about the group of young people, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, who stumble upon a terrible secret and pay an awful price for their faux pas, suffering through a series of horrible deaths?

Sure you did, because that formula has been applied to every slasher film since the genre dragged its bloody corpse into theaters in the 1970s, with the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left.

The storyline rears its ugly head once more with House of Wax, a tepid horror mishmash from Dark Castle Entertainment, the production team responsible for Gothika and two remakes - House on Haunted Hill and Thir13en Ghosts. The new movie, helmed by rookie feature director Jaume Collet-Serra, takes its title but little of its plot from a 1953 3-D flick starring Vincent Price; that film directly lifted from 1933's The Mystery of the Wax Museum.

This version has a half-dozen partying teens and twentysomethings on a road trip to a much-anticipated college football game. An overnight campout in the Louisiana backwoods results in the mysterious disabling of one vehicle, and a visit to a creepy ghost town leads to, well, an endless cycle of nasty complications.

Poor judgment, of course, is the order of the day. The kids' first dopey decision takes place when troubled young lovers Carly (Elisha Cuthbert, 24) and Wade (Jared Padalecki, Gilmore Girls) accept a ride from a fellow with bad teeth and a demented grin. Yes, as a matter of fact, he does look like he walked straight off the set of Deliverance.

Twin screenwriters Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes cram their script with sundry doubles, including two sets of twins, two romantic couples and two misfit best friends, and all for no discernible reason.

Collet-Serra, a former commercial director, does offer one remarkable set piece, detailing the mechanics by which men and women are transformed into wax figures. It's a bizarre, eerie sequence that belongs in a much more frightening and more sophisticated horror film.

House of Wax, instead, is about as scary as the possibility that Paris Hilton, the famous-for-being-famous hotel heiress, will notch a career as a serious actor, based on the acclaim coming for her head-splitting turn here. Boo.

Grade: D-plus

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Ri'chard

Screenplay: Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes

Rating: R; horror violence; sexual situations

Running time: 116 min.

[Last modified May 3, 2005, 14:10:06]