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House of Wax [Remake]

The joke’s on Paris.

2005

Director: Jaume Serra

Starring: Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Paris Hilton

Up to you.

THE SETUP:

Remake in name only in which a bunch of dumb and despicable teens end up fodder for backwoods psychos who turn people into wax statues.

DISCUSSION:

There’s a lot of good stuff going on here. There’s also a lot of idiotic stuff, and there’s some completely repugnant stuff, most centered around Paris Hilton.

The movie begins with a prelude taking place in 1974, in which we are presented with two twins, one of whom is very calm, the other a wild screaming animal, who has to be strapped and duct-taped into his high chair. The parents make some comment about how one twin is good and the other is evil. Keep this crucial information in mind, kids, it’s going to pay off later. Okay, maybe “pay off” is somewhat of an exaggeration.

We are next presented with our dumb teens du jour. They all have RIDICULOUSLY glamorous hair. There are a pair of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. The boy, played by Chad whatever whatever, has been in jail, and is one tough kitten. There is some talk about how the boy is considered to be the evil one and the girl the good one [twins again!? And one evil, one good? WTF man?!?!]. The teens are all going to “the game.” This is going to be “the best game of the year.” As the movie goes on, there is more and more angst expressed about missing “the game.” This begins to be [and many other things about the story are] unfortunately similar to House of the Dead, in which the teens are desperate to get to “the rave,” with the attendant question in the audience: “What could POSSIBLY be so great about this game that it’s worth this much trouble to get to?” But maybe that’s me. I guess that’s why dumb teens never invite me to go to the game with them.

For some reason or other, the teens get lost in backwoods country [this is apparently Louisiana, where the psycho movie rednecks roam], and decide to camp. [THEY DECIDE TO CAMP?!?!?] And they just happen to have a full complement of tents and sleeping bags with them. Those enterprising teens! They paaaaaar-tay, just like dumb movie teens always do, and soon an eerie pickup truck pulls up and shines its lights on them. They respond with attitude, threats to “whup his ass,” and finally a thrown beer bottle breaks one of the truck’s headlights. The truck goes away but figures in again later. You, audience member, find yourself thinking; “You know, all it did was shine its lights on them.” However, the movie floats the notion that this action alone means that the driver IS a serial killer.

The teens are despicably primitive and narcissistic to a person. They steal. They snoop. They are incredibly disrespectful and nasty to strangers. They destroy property. Some of the stuff they did I thought was so horrible that I didn’t think the ones who did live at the end deserved to live… or at least to undergo the cinematic transformation to “hero” that the movie arranges for them.

In fact, this movie made me think about the convention of the “smart” teen, the one who expresses doubts, and thus becomes the one the audience knows will live at the end. But you know, in a great many recent horror movies, the “smart” one is just as dumb, just as much of a party girl as the others, it’s just that every now and then she undergoes a complete character reversal and nags the other ones. I think this is a result of two impulses on the part of the screenwriter: 1) Having her execute these character reversals means that she can wander into the same idiotic situations as the other teens, whereas if she stayed “smart” the movie would have to work harder to get her into that situation, and 2) It reveals an attitude about women on the part of the filmmakers, that even the “smart” ones are still dumb party sluts, they just NAG a lot more.

There are SPOILERS TO THE END OF THE ARTICLE, but come on, do you really NOT KNOW what’s going to happen in this movie?

Now, various points to ridicule:

• The hero girl falls into a huge canal, 15 feet across, filled with rotting animal corpses. No one questions WHY such a canal would be there, why they need such a large one, or why it would be filled with SO MANY rotting animals.
• During one attack, a woman is trying to reach her cell phone. Now yes, maybe she can call for help, which might arrive in an hour or so [is she knew where she was], but for now, when she’s about to be killed in the next 15 seconds, what is that cell phone going to DO?
• The movie actually has a lot of gadgets given loving coverage and treated as cool, entirely deserving of a great deal of attention and mental energy, and utterly essential. In fact, at the end, one of the characters saves one of the gadgets as a kind of memento, because it “didn’t seem RIGHT to let [the cops] keep it.”
• Speaking of product placement, the ravenous killer takes time out to turn on some thrash metal as he’s pursuing one of his victims.
• Paris and her boyfriend are always keen to run off and have sex. We leave them for a long time, like more than 8 hours, and when we return to them they are JUST ABOUT to have sex. Well, what were they doing until then?
• Paris may be pregnant. She does an erotic striptease for her boyfriend, climbs on top of him, and decides that THIS is the precise best moment to “have a talk.”
• One of the guys finds his friend, still alive, but encased in wax. He also sees that in trying to pull the wax off, the skin and flesh underneath come with it. There is a hilarious bit as he is going “hold on, just a second, we’ll have you out of here, you’ll be fine,” as he continues to RIP his friend’s face off.
• Apparently bodies covered in wax, even when dead only a few hours, become so brittle that their limbs snap off.

Now to Paris. She’s no worse than any of the other actors, but the movie is particularly cruel to her. She seems to be game to laugh at herself, but it becomes a little sad and uncomfortable as it quickly becomes apparent that the movie is very vindictively using her as a target—which seems especially ungrateful, as her presence will probably significantly up the attendance of this movie. She is portrayed as a vacuous slut throughout, possibly pregnant, always sneaking off to make out with her boyfriend, giving him a blow job as he drives, etc. Much of this is covered with a video camera, as a sort of “joke” referring to her inadvertent porn video. The thing is, the attitude that comes across on screen is one of hatred for her, an ugly assumption that the audience will unquestionably participate in the mocking and degradation of her.

Unfortunately during her death scene this attitude takes a turn into the unconscionably repugnant and necrophilic. Paris is impaled through the forehead with what I thought was a broken-off baseball bat. Then the killer crouches near her and VIDEOTAPES her in this state, then PUSHES HER HEAD DOWN onto the bat. There is an extremely sexual shot as the SHAFT of the bat penetrates her head. The implication is that Paris is such a dumb slut it doesn’t matter whether she’s alive or dead when she’s getting it [or in fact gets fucked TO death], and it doesn’t matter how sadistic and brutally she’s treated, because she deserves it for making that videotape. And the movie invites YOU to laugh along. This comes across as more extreme because the movie and its publicity have established that this is not some movie character we’re talking about here, this is PARIS HILTON herself. I left feeling a bit sad that poor Paris doesn’t really understand how she’s being degraded and used.

To add a further repulsive end note, it is this videocamera, presumably with the tape of impaled Paris still in it, that the male twin who was in prison takes with him at the end, because it “wouldn’t be right” to let the cops have it. The viewer’s unconscious is left to imagine him watching Paris’ impaled head at his leisure once he gets home.

The good thing about the movie is that it has a great climax. I think that visceral movies need a good visual climax to act as an “orgasm” at the end of the picture, releasing all the tension. This movie has a good one, as the entire building of the house of wax is MADE of wax, and at the end it catches fire. The movie has a great climax as the final struggle takes place in a melting building, floors collapsing, balconies melting away a few feet behind our heroes, etc. It provides great visual energy and creative permutations of the typical dangers.

Now, you ask, what about that subtext with the twins? Well, dear reader, I’m sure it had occurred to you that the evil and good twin brothers grew up to be the evil and more-respectable-looking-but-still-evil redneck serial killers. They were Siamese twins that were separated, and we all know that THAT SPELLS EVIL. Then don’t forget that the two heroes of the movie are ALSO twins, and there’s talk about one being evil and the other good. ADD TO THAT the fact that the screenwriters of this movie are twin brothers! [no info on whether one is evil and the other good.] Add to THIS the creepy incest vibe that develops between the onscreen bother and sister, and add to THAT the fact that when the last killer twin is finally killed, he falls onto his brother in a position that would allow for anal intercourse. Stir it all up and WHADDYA GOT?

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

With the way this film treats Paris, I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone go see it.

RELATED MOVIES:

BASKET CASE is a totally amusing movie that also explores the bad things that happen when you fuck with those creepy siamese twins.

ESSAYS:

Why not read about the mildly amusing things that happened at a screening of House of Wax?