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'House of Wax': Just another slasher flick
'House of Wax'
Warner Bros.
Stars: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt
MPAA rating: R for horror violence, some sexual content and language
I mean, here we go again ... and again ... and again into the woods in the middle of nowhere with six underwritten college-age nincompoops just to watch them get dismembered one by one.
This is edifying to whom?
Michael Curtiz made a long-forgotten low-budget picture in 1933 called "The Mystery of the Wax Museum."
Andre de Toth directed an updated version of the material entitled "House of Wax" in 1953. It was the second movie released during the 1953-54 blitz of 3-D pictures and by far the most successful of them.
Vincent Price rejuvenated his career with it and was identified primarily with horror films from then on. A then-little-known native Pennsylvanian named Charles Buchinsky (later Bronson) played Igor.
The new "House of Wax" was directed by Jaune Collet-Serra, whose specialties are music videos and commercials.
He works from a screenplay by twins Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes that owes nothing to earlier versions except the title and the notion of human corpses being waxed and costumed.
After the standard 21-years-ago prelude that withholds information -- not that anyone will care -- we pick up the story in present-day Gainesville, La., where six bores set out in two vehicles for a football game in Baton Rouge.
Somehow they detour into Ambrose, which, in dialogue typical of the screenplay, we're told isn't even on the map anywhere and therefore is ignored by police. And they no longer know where it is? Is that what one police officer says? Does no one care who's on the tax rolls here?
Nick (Chad Michael Murray) makes the trip with his twin Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki), her friend Paige (Paris Hilton), Paige's lover Blake (Robert Ri'chard) and tagalong Dalton (Jon Abrahams).
The only folks they encounter in Ambrose proper are twin ghouls Bo and Vincent (Brian Van Holt in a dual role).
Apart from a high quotient of melting wax, "House of Wax" is every teen slasher flick of the past 30-some years.
Now I ask you: How many teenagers have you seen in the past five years without a cell phone attached to his or her ear? Four? Three?
You'd think one of these hipsters would have a working cell phone and use it to call someone, wouldn't you?
I mean, "Hello?" 'n' 'at.
