HOUSE OF WAX Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Warner Bros./ Village Roadshow
Grade: B
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Written by: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes
Cast: Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton, Jared
Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Richard
Screened at: Loews Lincoln Sq., NYC, 5/2/05 When kids of college age say, “This town is dead,” you take this comment with a grain of salt. This is what young people are supposed to say when they live; in the ‘burbs or in small towns with their parents. In the case of this reinventing of the 1953 slasher film, “House of Wax,” the 3-D job that starred Vincent Price under Andre de Toth’s direction, the young people are absolutely right. The town of Ambrose, Louisiana is so deserted that it’s not even on any map–not with AAA and not with the computerized dashboard toy on the car that’s taking some hormone-riddled kids to a football game. In truth, though, the population is two; the living population, that is, because everyone else is a dummy–a wax one that is. The two people who are alive, if not in control of their wits, are a long-haired creep and a dude who looks pretty regular, twins Bo and Vincent, who in Jaume Collet-Serra’s film are played by the same Brian Van Holt. One of the good things working for this pic is that Collet-Serra, working with a script by twin scripters Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes (who must be giving away something of their own lives when a character in the story calls one twin good and the other evil), is that “House of Wax” is not 3-D. You don’t need those awful cardboard goggles and the actors who populate the screen aren’t constantly trying to push your buttons by lobbing paddle-balls at you to make you duck under your seat. The tale, which runs for almost two hours but is nicely paced throughout–relaxed in the beginning, then increasingly frantic up to its Gotterdammerung-like conclusion--focuses on six people out for a weekend to a college football game in Baton Rouge. Though it’s not a dark and stormy night ,John Ottman’s music helps to alert us that these folks will have more to worry about then whether they bet on the right team. The principal characters are Nick (Chad Michael Murray) and his twin sister Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), while the cast of naive kids is rounded out by Carly’s boyfriend, Wade (Jared Padalecki), Blake (Robert Richard), his girlfriend Paige (Paris Hilton), and Nick’s friend Dalton (Jon Abrahams). When one of their two cars breaks down, Wade and Carly despite their intuition accept a ride with a weird trucker to a gas station fifteen miles down the road to get a fan belt. Since the gas station does not have the right size, the station’s owner is nice enough to give Wade and Carly a lift to his own home in the dead town of Ambrose, where they discover a house of wax that should be a big tourist attraction, considering how lifelike the figures are plus the fact that the house itself is built entirely of wax. But how could tourists know about the place when it’s not on the map? When all six kids wind up in the town, they are introduced to the strange place, but as is the convention in slasher/horror pictures, only some will live to tell Eugene Fodor and Arthur Frommer to list the place in their guidebook on the American South. You don’t expect particularly witty dialogue in this type of pic, except perhaps for movies that spoof the genre, and “House of Wax” will not be an exception. Yet the visuals shot by photographer Stephen Windon mostly on the set in Queensland, Australia, are striking, the violence and gore enough to make some in the audience squirm while others laugh nervously or cheer each time a human being is pummeled repeatedly on the head with a bat, stabbed in the neck, drilled through the head with a lance, shot with an arrow from a crossbow, stabbed in the leg, or burned alive. The most frightening image is that of one of the fellows, caught by an evil sculptor, injected with a serum that paralyzes him (such drugs do exist), and still alive while moving his eyes frantically, is sprayed about the body with hot wax. To add to the gore, when his friend discovers him, thinking he’s in time to rescue the guy, he peels the wax from his face to uncover nothing but blood, as the skin has been shorn away. The evil twins are classy enough to play opera when they work and, in fact, there’s a scene reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera when a chandelier falls to the ground amid a molten mass. “House of Wax” delivers what its audience comes for. Rated R. 116 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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