PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 05/06/05)


Wherein socialite non-talent Paris Hilton makes a dry-run attempt at costarring in a movie more humiliating than her accidental hit porno 1 Night in Paris, which at least offered a few spasms of amusement, if not better fleshed-out characters. Under the oil-slick supervision of producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis, Warner Bros. has formulated a win-win cash cow by casting Hilton as one-sixth of the House of Wax body count: the target audience's younger half genuinely wants to see a movie starring the inexplicably chosen role model, while older crowds will line up with dunk-tank fantasies of her gruesome movie death. Cha-ching!

Showing modest restraint by keeping her lacey underwear on, the acting-impaired It-Tramp is the perfect postergirl for this amazingly stupid and lazy retread of the 1953 Vincent Price vintage House of Wax, itself a fine remake of the 1933 Technicolor two-strip The Mystery of the House of Wax. Both horror-kitsch classics and the new deadwood share their trademark setpiece, a killer's passion for displaying human waxidermy, and said museum set ablaze; music-video director Jaume Collet-Serra's 2005 edition borrows nothing else, melting its gothic-thriller origins into a ponderous slab of slasher trash, rife with road-trippin' college-age hedonists who take a Louisiana Wrong Turn and the run-of-the-mill redneck murderers who love them. Tendon-slicing, face-ripping, head-impaling and more, undemanding gorehounds may appreciate that most of the brutal realism has been left to on-set effects wizards instead of lame-looking computer renderings, yet House of Wax is a sadistically bland entertainment that oversells its reveals and lets its suspense drip so long that it would be nice if something (anything!) happened.

Either too sincere or too embarrassed to embrace its camp (even with winky sex-tape references and a villain who looks like the goofy metalhead cousin to Halloween's Michael Myers), House of Wax definitely doesn't have the balls to follow through on its most subversive tease, in which twins Carly and Nick (Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray) subtly exhibit a sexual tension that vaguely eggs audiences into wanting them to make out. Not that taboo equals innovation—or that this movie has any proactive idea of what it's doing—but beyond the over-homaged '70s sun flares, cheesy backlot sets and comically wooden dialogue (i.e. "Hey, look. Wax museum."), maybe the left-field sensationalism of incestuous undertones could have kept an interest in Wax from waning.

—Aaron Hillis

Related Links:
• Elisha in Wonderland 
The star of House of Wax talks about hickeys, a Hilton, and what it feels like to really get waxed.