Posted: 05/10/2005

House of Wax

(2005)

by Clint Fletcher

I’ve been waiting for months to use this line- they must’ve named this movie after the writer’s brain. Ha ha ha—yeah I’m a dork. Anyway… I never expected House of Wax to get any Oscars, but I did think that maybe it would be a nice popcorn flick while watching the little WB kiddies get slaughtered.

Sadly, the only redeeming quality about House of Wax IS the slaughtering.

First off, you don’t name a movie House of Wax unless the movie’s actually going to take place there. Out of its nearly two-hour running time, I’d say maybe ten minutes of the flick was honestly spent in the actual house referred to in the title. On top of this, there’s a solid 45 minutes before anything remotely interesting happens at all. Six teenagers camp out in the woods and encounter car troubles. They then run into some freaky, imbred-looking hillbillies and figure—what the hell? They look nice enough to help us, right? Then they do the smartest thing they know how to do: split up. Two of them are lead to a small town down the road that appears crowded, when indeed just about everyone is made of wax and rigged to look like humans (very original yet still a dumb idea). The only two people that are alive are a pair of psycho Siamese twins that were physically separated later in life. Its explained in the lame-ass opening that they were abused by their mothers and this is the only explanation we get for why they kill. And how do they kill? They bury you in hot, molded wax alive. Why do they do this? Because there wouldn’t be a movie without it.

Let’s move on to the few things that I liked about the flick. Despite the script sucking harder than **insert Paris joke here** I did manage to align myself with Elisha Cuthbert. Now don’t worry, I’m not only saying these things because I’m madly in love with her. She really did do a decent job with the plot that was handed to her, unlike some of her numerous dumbass co-stars. Another aspect I liked which was a big surprise for me was Chad Michael Murray. I’ve never watched One Tree Hill (no thanks, I’m straight) or any of those Hilary Duff movies (no thanks, I’m smart), so it took me a while to get behind him in the movie. He first started off with his character trying to be such the little rebel. Speaking of which, did anyone else burst out laughing in the scene where he took his shirt off on purpose? Whatever gets Elisha in a tank-top I guess is fine with me. But by the end of the movie, I was rooting for the dude to beat some major hill-billy ass. He really came through in the acting department and made me believe he knew what he was doing. This also could be because he played the only character that had any brains. And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Paris Hilton’s performance. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t much of a performance. She plays a stupid-ass skank in the movie so obviously she was typecast to play herself. But her death scene may be one of the greatest kills in horror history. Its definitely in my Top Ten, even if it wasn’t Paris biting the bullet. Kudos go out to the special effects team too for making almost all the kills unique, effective and downright cool (you go with that bat, Elisha!).

As far as the story goes, there are just too many ridiculous moments that make you roll your eyes, such as people deciding to split up when killers are after them and someone accidentally falling in deer carcass. Some scenes were just downright absurd on the intelligence meter. Take a Paris scene for example. She does a strip-tease in her underwear for this dude, and then right when she’s finished she wants to have a serious talk with him. Say what??? Then they get interrupted by a noise and while the boyfriend goes to inspect, she just decides to go to sleep. Sometimes I felt that the writer(s) had just picked a couple of really old 80’s horror movies and thought it would be cool if their characters were unable to process rational thought.

House of Wax is living proof that an original idea doesn’t always equal a good idea. Although there were some memorable moments, in the end it was just too stupid to recommend to anyone. Recently horror movie dvds have contained this new feature called “straight to kills” where you just bypass the movie and watch the kills on a separate and much more entertaining entity. Now with this, it takes me five minutes to watch Freddy Vs. Jason. When House of Wax heads to your local video store, this new feature will be your best friend and only hope of enjoying this mess.

Clint Fletcher is a writer, critic, filmmaker and action film fan from Chicago.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com