House of Wax (2005)

Well, what did I expect? A bunch of teenage rowdies crowds to the opening game of the season, gets stranded in a back country hole and all hell breaks loose. Predictable to the point that my main activity during the movie was hitting fast forward on the remote, and the whole experience shrank down to possibly 30 minutes.

Someone had told me this was the best horror thriller they had seen in years, so I thought it can’t hurt if I watch it. Wrong! I should have read my IMDB before renting it: turns out the whole cast was chosen around the firmament star Paris Hilton. If that wouldn’t have been the clue, then seeing Chad Michael Murray play the bad hero would.

Special effects. Yes, the special effects. Always worth seeing. This time, the director swears he minimized use of CG, especially for the house (of wax) itself. The interview with him on the DVD focuses a lot on the wax portion, including his disappointment to find out that wax, when melted and molten, is actually clear and runs just like water. A real expert, one might say.

People get butchered, heads lopped off, limbs fall to the wayside, people get spray-painted with wax for them to become living wax figures. The movie borrows and steals its visual imagery left and right, to the point where even a film ignorant like me can only yawn bored. Sometimes the movie feels like a runny version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and despite my very underwhelmed reaction to that movie, I see now how it created its own genre.

Not worth seeing.