So Bad It’s Scary
By Eric Cox

House of Wax

Released by Warner Bros.

Rated R for horror violence, some sexual content, and language

 

For a teen horror movie to work these days, it almost invariably has to be a comedy. After all, in order to get an R-rating, it can’t be as gory as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the most it can do to titillate is to have its hunky male characters take their shirts off and its bosomy female characters run around in tight-fitting tank-tops or bikinis.

 

Rarely do these films resort to good storytelling, so the best they can do to be mildly diverting is to invite the audience to mock how bad they are.

 

A case in point is House of Wax, a remake of the 1953 film of the same name starring Vincent Price, one of the first movies filmed in 3-D. The differences between the two versions is revealing: in those days, one attracted young people to the theater by telling a good story and innovating new technologies; these days, one markets them primarily by casting twenty-something pop-cultural icons willing to take their clothes off.

 

Another difference between horror movies of the past and those today is that it used to be the bad guy who was the principle character: Price and Lon Chaney became major stars on the strength of their horror-movie roles. By contrast, the villain in the new House of Wax is portrayed by Brian Van Holt, a forgettably handsome character actor who usually plays nameless soldiers and cops.

 

Today, the stars of teen horror movies are the teens themselves, with the lamentable result that everyone knows which characters will die according to how famous the actors are who play them. This takes the suspense out of the movie, which is sort of an important component of any horror flick.

 

To make up for the lack of suspense, the thrills come from tired clichés like gory special effects and a lot of false alarms in the first half of the movie—characters being startled by their best friends, that sort of thing.

 

The new House of Wax perfectly encapsulates all of these symptoms of the increasingly sick contemporary horror movie. The plot concerns an entire town made of wax stumbled upon by a group of college students on their way to a football game.

 

Our heroes are Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and Nick Jones (Chad Michael Murray), twins with very different personalities—she is the responsible one, he is the “evil” one, as he jokingly calls himself, because he’s done jail time for stealing a car.

 

The rest of the killer bait includes Carly’s boyfriend, Wade (Jared Padalecki), her best friend, Paige (Paris Hilton), her boyfriend, Blake (Richard Ri’chard), and Nick’s best friend Dalton (Jon Abrahams).

 

The friends decide to spend the night camping in a field before finishing their drive to the game in the morning. When Wade wakes up to find that his car won’t start, he and Carly stay behind and walk into the nearby small town to try and find a spare part to fix the car. While waiting for the owner of the gas station to return, they pay a visit to the abandoned Trudy’s House of Wax, where they encounter a sadistic pair of sadistic fiends (both played by the aforementioned Brian Van Holt) who torture and encase living people in wax.

 

One by one, the lesser characters are killed off in variously bloody ways. However, no one in the audience cares if anything bad happens to any of these characters, because no effort has been made to humanize them. In fact, one can actually feel the audience rooting for Paris Hilton’s character to be murdered almost from the opening credits.

 

The film concludes in a ridiculous scene in which one of the potential victims tries to reason with a sociopathic killer using some generic psychobabble. Even more preposterous is the film’s final moments, a blatant attempt to leave open the possibility for a sequel. There wasn’t enough material here for one movie, let alone two.

 

The film was produced and released by Warner Brothers, the same studio that made the original House of Wax. Warners probably would have done just as well to re-release that classic movie rather than trying to sex it up with young television heartthrobs. No one who’s young enough to see this film is likely to have seen the original, and for them, seeing it would probably be more cool—and certainly would be more entertaining.

 

Eric Cox is a movie columnist for TAEmag.com.