Carly Jones is going to a football game, together with her boyfriend Wade Felton and their friends, and also her twin brother Nick. They’re going to camp for the night in a wooded area. Some dubious stranger driving a pickup truck arrives, and they all get a little spooked and Nick damages one of the truck’s headlights, making the stranger leave. Well, the next day they discover that Wade’s car has been damaged too: the fan belt has been severed. Hmm…probably not a coincidence. They’re lucky though, as they get a local guy named Lester to drive Wade and Carly to the nearby town of Ambrose. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang will be going to the game…hehe, yeah, right.
When Wade and Carly arrives in Ambrose, they notice it’s pretty much a ghost town. There’s a funeral going on, though, so perhaps this is where everyone’s located for the time being? While they wait for the mechanic, they decide to visit “Trudy’s House of Wax“, where everything is literally made of wax. Everything. But something’s not right, and the eerie lack of life in the whole town makes Carly very suspicious…
House of Wax from 2005 is a slasher horror film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra in his feature debut, and it is a remake of House of Wax from 1953 (which was actually also a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum). It was filmed at Warner Bros. Movie World on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, and the set for the town was constructed nearby Guanaba. Graham Walker was behind the film’s production design, who had also designed the sets for Ghost Ship and Gothika. This one took it some steps further with designing and building an entire town! About 20 tons of wax was used to craft the sets, coated primarily with beeswax. Over hundred detailed wax figures were created by a team of sculptors and mold makers, and all of them were modeled after real people. Jared Padalecki (who got most famous for playing Sam in the Supernatural TV series) has a role here, and he underwent a 3D body scan by KNB EFX Group in Los Angeles to have him moulded into a wax figure.
Just like the other Dark Castle Entertainment remakes, this one does it in a very different way from the original, and while it’s having the schlock vibe all over the place as usual, it just kind of works in its own right. It’s a fairly straight-forward slasher, with some decent yet not over-the-top kill scenes. Yes, it’s a typical teen-slasher horror film, but one with a fairly interesting backstory, good props and practical effects, and some awesome set pieces.
While the original had Vincent Price, this one gives the audience the chance to see Paris Hilton die. Which was actually part of a campaign used to promote the film, I kid you not. Shirts were even created which featured the slogan “See Paris Die“. This was at a time when it was totally pop to hate Paris Hilton, so apparently they decided to take that ball and run with it.
House of Wax received generally negative reviews from critics, but still did well at the box office. With this being the 5th production by Dark Castle Entertainment, people pretty much knew what to expect and lots of people weren’t too fond of it. Anyway, it later garnered a cult following, which seems to be a trend with movies like these. Nowadays, you can kind of understand why…because in a lot of cases, certain “bad“ movies hold up better than you would initially expect. Especially in these days when we live in an era of franchise-sequel-prequel-reboot hell and, even worse, lazy AI slop. The latter has fortunately not infested the horror movie genre too much at this point, and let’s hope it stays that way.
Fun (or perhaps not so fun) fact: just like in House of Wax from 1953, it became obvious that fire is something you definitely should not play with, and something that easily gets out of control. Special effects expert David Fletcher and Wax Productions were sued because of a fire on the set during the production of the film, which ended in a $7 million lawsuit that alleged that they were grossly negligent over the fire, which actually destroyed part of the Warner Bros. Movie World Studios.
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Writers: Chad Hayes, Carey W. Hayes
Country & year: Australia/USA, 2005
Actors: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Robert Ri’chard, Dragicia Debert, Thomas Adamson, Murray Smith, Sam Harkess
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397065/
