At some point the question I have to ask myself is, why do I watch this stuff? What am I hoping to get out of it? How could this possibly be anything but throwing away two precious hours of my life? Do I consider myself a 'genre' fan? Well, certainly I used to be. And with the current bumper crop of horror films I guess I have been interested in seeing what's going on, what's new, who's shaking things up.
I saw Saw, or I've seen Saw, which came on like a clarion call to fans of lurid, sadistic, nasty-ass film fans everyone that their favorite genre had just been taken off life-support and given a new lease. Ok, it had an interesting premise involving a killer who does not kill his victims per se, but forces them to kill in order to survive. And by not killing or refusing to kill, they inadvertently set in to motion their own demise. Blah, blah, blah, there is a lot of yelling, screaming, crying, and grotesque set-pieces all leading to one of the most absurd examples of the currently-in-vogue-and-all-too-obligatory-required-expected-device: the twist ending . (you can almost hear the buzzing among horror fans: "Is there a twist?" "What's the twist?" "No twist?" "I'm not going.")
Anyway, House of Wax bears no relationship with the 1953 Vincent Price classic except one of the baddies is named Vincent. Quel homage! The other bad guy is Bo and there's some "back-story" about them having been born Siamese twins and separated by their father, the doctor, employing some "radical procedure" while mom stayed at home and got involved with building wax figures. Yawn! Soooo typical. As for the rest of the plot-points let's go to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre blueprint which requires that six 20-something idiots travel together, get lost on some back roads that only exist in shlock and begin to snoop around when all signs seem to indicate that they should get back in their cars and leave.
In all fairness the titular house of wax, which coincidentally is literally a wax house, is fairly impressive. But why it never apparently suffered from waxus-meltus-ona-hottus-dayus is anyone's guess.
House of Wax, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, rolls along o.k. without really providing anything new to the genre. For me, as soon as the six doofus idiots were introduced I began to moan audibly. I felt forced into playing the "that guy's obviously not going to make it, that guy's toast, Paris Hilton? No way she'll make it" game.
I give this piece of earwax a nearly empty box of Q-Tip swabs.
BTW, there's no twist. And the people you thought would buy it, do.
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