House Of Wax

In the world of the remake there are two different animals. There's the 're-imagining' which roughly translates into english as 'we're stealing your story'. Then there's the 're-invention' which translates into 'we're taking your title to make people think our movie is as good as yours, but our movie is gonna suck...HARD'. House Of Wax is of the 're-invention' mold!!!

This movie is so bad that it took me three sittings to get through it! And I'm the BAD Movie Guy for God's Sake!!! This movie is one of the worst things I've seen since I sat through Cabin Fever. The basic story here isn't that complex. Teenagers on the way to a college football game, take a shortcut through rural America, end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, become stalked by weird rural psychos, most die, some survive for a sequel! We've seen this about a thousand and one times, and most of those are better than this one!

House Of Wax's claim to fame is Paris Hilton. I heard all last summer when this was out, 'Paris Hilton gets killed', 'You gotta see it, it's the best death ever'. Well, I'm no fan of Paris Hilton, but neither do I hate her so much that seeing a dummy that looks like her getting murdered is a huge thrill. Was it the best death ever? Not really, it was really something that I'd seen in several incarnations of Friday The 13th movies.

Here's your story, such as it is. When a group of teenagers get lost on the way to a football game, they decide to camp out for the night in the woods. Unfortunately for them, they're close to a small rural town that's the home of two brothers who are slightly disturbed. So slightly, in fact, that they've killed everyone in town and made them into wax figures of themselves and put them back in their homes, in the church, in the movie theatre, basically populated the town with wax dummies. Well, when there's car trouble, two of the teens hitch a ride with the local road kill cleaner (and you guessed it, he's a weirdo!) to the nearest town...the town of wax! Once there, things get weirder and weirder until they start dying.

If you don't see the twists and turns coming in this movie then you, like me, must've been fast asleep from the sheer boredom of this movie. The killings are very imaginative, but it takes more than that to make a good horror movie. One of the brothers is even a monster who wears a wax mask to cover is 'freakish' face, but even that is revealed too late in the movie and it's not that big a shock when we get to see it! Then, there's the tacked on set up for a sequel that's so contrived that I'm sure the on-set conversation went a little something like this:

Director: 'Hey, if this crap is successful, what do we do for a sequel?'
Writer: 'Uh, we could have someone in town be a relative to the evil brothers, but
that's never mentioned in the script, so it might seem a little forced'
Director: 'I couldn't care less! Nothing else in this horrible movie makes sense
why does that have to?'

Alright, that's probably not how it really happened, but after watching this movie, you'll find that version believable! So, if you hate Paris Hilton with a white hot hatred, then you might enjoy about five minutes of this movie, but if you, like me, are completely indifferent to her, then you might also find yourself sleeping through most of this stinker, that's why I give this a half burning, mostlt stubbed out cigar, because no cigars isn't an option! So, until next we meet when I'll read to you from my own script for the sequel to House Of Wax...I'm calling it, House Of The Brazillian Wax, and I think it may get an R rating! Until then remember, the best movies are bad movies!