That's not hot! 'House of Wax' is one horrific horror film

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

HOUSE OF WAX (R) One Star (Poor) A silly, dim-witted teen-slasher flick that borrows the title and only barely other ideas from the '53 original. Paris Hilton, Elisha Cuthbert co-star for director Jaume Collet-Serra. Warner Bros., 116 minutes.

And why oh why is this movie nearly two hours long?

In a nutshell: "House of Wax" is pretty darn stupid.

It rips off the title of the semi-classic 1953 3-D movie, and little else. (Well, actually, there is one other thing — one of the villains is named Vincent, homage of sorts to '53 star Vincent Price.) The new film isn't even in 3-D.

As directed by newcomer Jaume Collet-Serra (fresh from ads for beer, PlayStation and cars), and starring the over-exposed Paris Hilton, "House of Wax" follows the sorry template of a zillion other youth-oriented horror flicks: A group of young people stop in the middle of nowhere and are soon targeted by psychotic slashers.

In this case, the slashers are Siamese twin brothers, now physically separated, but psychically joined. They live in a "house of wax" that was supposedly a tourist attraction, but has long ago lost its appeal. Now they stock it with the wax-coated bodies of strangers who wander in.

The writers — a set of twins named Chad and Carey Hayes — also make two of the half-dozen college kids twins (Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert). So, the film has a set of bad twins and a set of good twins. I'm not sure what this says, except some twins are bad and some are good. Alert the media.

And, oh yes, as disseminated in those "See Paris Die" T-shirts, Hilton's character meets an especially messy end, which was greeted by cheers at our preview screening.

Rated R, with gory violence, innuendo, profanity.