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House of Wax (2005 film)
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Wikipedia article
'House of Wax' is a 2005 slasher film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and written by Chad Hayes and Carey Hayes. The film stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt in a dual role, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, and Robert Ri'chard. It is a loose remake of the 1953 film of the same name, itself a remake of the 1933 film 'Mystery of the Wax Museum', based on the story "The Wax Works" by Charles S. Belden. The film soundtrack features music by Deftones, My Chemical Romance, and Interpol.
'House of Wax' premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released in United States theaters on May 6, 2005, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film grossed over $70 million worldwide and received generally negative reviews from critics, who criticized its lack of originality, screenplay, and characters, but praised the performances and atmosphere.
Plot
Siblings Carly and Nick Jones, with their friends Wade, Paige, Blake, and Dalton Chapman are on their way to a football game in Louisiana. The night before the game, they camp in a field. A stranger in a pickup truck arrives, then leaves when Nick smashes one of his headlights. The next morning, Wade discovers that his car's fan belt is broken and Carly falls into a pit of rotting animal carcasses. After rescuing her, the group meets Lester, who drives Carly and Wade to the nearby town of Ambrose for a new fan belt while the rest head to the football game.
Carly and Wade arrive in Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town. They find a funeral in progress at the church and meet Bo Sinclair, who offers to sell them a fan belt after the funeral. While waiting, they visit "Trudy's House of Wax", a wax museum which is itself made of wax and the central feature of the town. They follow Bo to his house where his twin brother Vincent, whose wax mask covers the facial disfigurement where the twins were once conjoined, cripples Wade and knocks him unconscious. Carly sees Bo's truck has a broken headlight and realizes it was he who visited the campsite. Bo restrains Carly in the gas station cellar and glues her lips shut. Vincent covers Wade's body in molten wax.
Realizing they will not arrive at the game in time, Paige and Blake return to the campsite while Nick and Dalton look for Carly and Wade in the town. When Carly tries to alert Nick, Bo cuts off her finger tip but she tears her lips apart and screams for help. Nick fends off Bo and frees Carly while Dalton finds Wade trapped in his wax coating. Dalton tries to peel the wax from Wade's face, inadvertently removing his skin in the process. Vincent ambushes Dalton as he slashes off a section of Wade's face, causing him to die from shock, before decapitating Dalton. Carly and Nick realize the wax figures are actually the wax-coated corpses of visitors lured into town.
Vincent kills Blake at the campsite and chases Paige into an abandoned sugar mill, where he kills her with a metal pipe through her forehead. Bo and Vincent chase Carly and Nick into the House of Wax. Nick unintentionally starts a fire in the museum workshop, causing it and the figures to start melting. Bo and Nick battle and Nick is stabbed in the leg before Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat. Vincent chases Carly to the top floor where she tries to reason with him over his brother's treachery and, with Nick's help, is able to stab him in the back. Vincent, dead, falls through the floor and lands on top of Bo's corpse, while Carly and Nick escape as the building melts to the ground.
The next morning, the police arrive and report that Ambrose had been abandoned for ten years since the sugar mill shut down. As Nick and Carly are driven away by ambulance, Carly spots the Sinclair's third son, Lester Sinclair, waving them goodbye with the Sinclairs' family dog.
Cast
Filming
'House of Wax' was filmed at Warner Bros. Movie World, Australia. The Town set was constructed a few miles down the road, off Hollindale Road, in the Guanaba area.
Lawsuit
In January 2006, Village Roadshow Studios owners Village Theme Park Management and Warner Brothers Movie World Australia announced they were suing special effects expert David Fletcher and Wax Productions because of a fire on the set during production.
The $7 million lawsuit alleges that Mr. Fletcher and Wax Productions were grossly negligent over the fire, which destroyed part of the Gold Coast's Warner Bros. Movie World studios. The alleged grounds of negligence included not having firefighters on stand-by and using timber props near a naked flame. The set where the fire broke out has now been demolished and is a field kept for Movie World for future projects.
Release
Opening in 3,111 theaters, the film grossed $12 million in its opening weekend. 'House of Wax' earned $70 million worldwide, $32 million of which came from North American receipts. 'House of Wax' also earned $42 million in VHS/DVD rentals. A marketing campaign was launched to promote the film entitled "See Paris Die", to capitalize on the appearance of Paris Hilton in the film, as her casting had been met with disapproval by some horror fans. The campaign promised that viewers would "See Paris Die" in the film in a gruesome fashion and Hilton created shirts featuring the slogan.
On July 13, 2021 a collector's edition Blu-Ray of 'House of Wax' was released by Scream Factory in the US & Canada.
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 27% based on 160 reviews and the average rating is 4.29/10. The site's consensus reads, "Bearing little resemblance to the 1953 original, 'House of Wax' is a formulaic but better-than-average teen slasher flick." On Metacritic, which uses an average of critics' reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 41 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.
'Chicago Sun-Times' film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "'House of Wax' is not a good movie, but it is an efficient one and will deliver most of what anyone attending 'House of Wax' could reasonably expect...assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much." He said of Hilton's performance that "she is no better or worse than the typical Dead Post-Teenager and does exactly what she is required to do in a movie like this, with all the skilladmittedly finitethat is required." Film critic Stephen Hunter of 'The Washington Post', gave the film four out of five stars, calling it a "guilty pleasure" and wrote that it gives horror fans exactly what they want. Mick LaSalle of the 'San Francisco Chronicle' rated it 4/5 stars and wrote, "After a month, no one will talk about this movie again. Still, with a picture like this, there is really only one question: Is it fun? Yes. Lots. Definitely." Bruce Westbrook of the 'Houston Chronicle' called it boring and poorly-acted, though he complimented Cuthbert and Murray. A. O. Scott of 'The New York Times' wrote, "The set design is fairly elaborate by the standards of the genre, and the victims don't die in precisely the order you might expect, but everything else goes pretty much according to formula".
Awards and nominations
Soundtrack
'House of Wax: Music from the Motion Picture' is the soundtrack for 'House of Wax', consisting of commercially recorded songs. A second album was released containing the film score composed by John Ottman, and was simply titled 'House of Wax'.
One song from the film does not appear on the soundtrack: "Roland" by Interpol appears in the scene at the beginning of the film when the group decides to camp overnight. The song that plays during the end credits is "Helena" by My Chemical Romance.
See also
* 2005 in film
* Mystery of the Wax Museum
* Terror in the Wax Museum
* Waxwork (film)
References
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