The Unseen Movie Review

House of Wax

This film has two things that should instantly set off warning bells to stay well away. First, it’s yet another remake of a horror classic, following pointless recent retreadings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and The Ring. Second – and most important – it stars Paris Hilton. Actually, “star” is probably too strong a word. She certainly doesn’t feature as prominently as she did in the film for which she is best known, but she is nonetheless relatively high up the billing and is the only member of the cast, bar the chick who played Keifer Sutherland’s daughter in 24, who has any kind of name recognition value.

A spoiled rich-kid accidental porn star and someone off the telly are hardly adequate substitutes for the original 1954 classic’s line-up of Vincent Price and a then unknown Charles Bronson. Although music video director Jaume Serra makes a fair stab at his feature debut, he is also no match for the original movie’s visionary cult director André de Toth. It is also, it must be said, pretty much a travesty to take that classic film’s name and put it to this utterly bog-standard slasher movie.

Quite how anyone thought, after the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream and Scary Movie ripped this kind of formulaic trash to shreds, that a straight take on the old “pretty young people get hunted down like animals by a crazed killer” genre could be taken seriously, it is impossible to tell. They’ve even roped in Jon Abrahams, one of the stars of Scary Movie, as if to underline the point. As such, there is the constant expectation that the whole thing is meant to be a joke, making it impossible to get into the right mindset and impossible to get scared.

It also really doesn’t help that Paris Hilton is nowhere near as pleasant to look at as she and certain sections of the lad mag press seem to think. She is, after all, only here as eye-candy. In fact, the entire cast is only there as eye-candy, so in many ways it’s entirely appropriate that the psycho killer they run across in a deserted town wants to turn them all into waxwork figures once they’ve been despatched. They’re all a bunch of plastic nonentities, so that’s probably the best thing for them.

In short this is both a pointless remake and a pointless revival of a thoroughly ridiculed and outdated subgenre, directed by a first timer and starring a bunch of relative unknowns. It is by no means an interesting addition to the world of the movies.

Having said that, it does what it sets out to do perfectly well. With no apparent pretensions to be more than simply a slasher flick, it’s probably rather mean spirited to be overly critical. But at the same time, if you go expecting a decent horror film, you’ll come away feeling like you’ve wasted both time and money. Stick with the original, and if you want a slasher flick, go for one of the classics like Halloween or Friday the 13th. Don’t bother wasting your money on this kind of nonsense.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM