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grrgoylMy, my, my. I will watch any crap, apparently. This movie proves it. But I DO love tearing them apart.
House of Wax (2005): The beginning of this movie was so generic I got to catch up on some bill-paying while watching. First, a flashback where we see a family strictly from the knees down. The camera centers on a big pot on the stove with the date "1974" unnecessarily superimposed on the screen, as if we couldn't tell the decade from the ghastly brown-and-orange striped motif of the pot. Two infant boys are eating lunch, one perfectly behaved and docile, while the other is being cruelly strapped into his chair while he kicks and screams violently. The pot is spilled and is full of hot wax. Ooooh, get it? House of Wax? I'll bet this is significant.
"Present time." Just in case people forget that car stereos didn't blare annoying hip-hop in the '70s. Teenagers are on a roadtrip to see a...game, or something. Two of them are fraternal twins, and one of the girls in the group may be pregnant, I think. There are a bunch of other Red Shirts that I didn't pay very close attention to. There's some relationship angst thrown in to try to make us care about these people. They make camp in some woods long enough to have a party and remind me that this age group is STILL so obnoxious that it doesn't bother me much in the slightest to watch them get stalked and killed in imaginative ways by the local rednecks. To make matters worse, among the youths is Paris Hilton....oh yeah, I remember now. The reason I didn't really want to see this movie. Fortunately the cast is large enough that her character is of very minor importance (as it should be in real life, if there was any justice in the world).
To add suspense, a big redneck truck pulls up in the middle of the party, blinding them with its headlights and just sitting there silently as they get increasingly agitated. They finally hurl enough testosterone to scare it away and they happily go back to getting drunk. Then they all go to sleep, not a care in the world, not at all as if there was some backwoods weirdo with questionable intentions possibly sitting somewhere just beyond the tree line.
When they wake up their video camera is missing and one of the car's fan belts has been cut. Great. While the guys figure out what to do, Paris Hilton and another girl notice a rotting smell nearby on their pee break. The girl starts to follow her nose and to my dismay, it's Paris who displays the only ounce of common sense in the whole movie: (sarcastically) "Yeah, let's follow the smell." But they do anyway, and discover it ends in a ditch full of dead animal carcasses. Just then another redneck truck pulls up and the driver unloads more offal into the pit. The kids blindly trust the redneck to drive them into town for the fan belt. Sure, he's creepy and makes inappropriate conversation (not helped by his tendency to gesticulate with a foot-long bloodstained Bowie knife), but when the couple gets freaked out enough to demand he drop them off here, right here is fine, he acts insulted and pouts endearingly. See? He wasn't so bad. But they still run away from him.
First stop, a church where they burst in on a funeral, where a guy offers to help them. For some reason he drives them to the House of Wax (I stopped paying attention for awhile in here). The guy disappears, leaving them to wander around the House by themselves. Lots of remarkably life-like wax figures but not the tools the boyfriend needs to fix the car. The guy returns, they all go back outside, and you think they're free and clear until the stupid, stupid boyfriend needs to use the bathroom. Of all times, and of all places, here? Now? This is when I realized the moral of every horror movie is just as simple as survival of the fittest. The boyfriend goes back inside but gets wrapped up in exploring. Even after finding rooms full of grisly trophies and sinister-looking surgical equipment, he has no sense of urgency, just childlike curiosity. The next time we see his girlfriend outside, the sun has set and she's still waiting patiently in the truck. It looks as if hours have passed and she's just now becoming suspicious.
She'll have to wait longer than that, because of course her man has been ambushed and is undergoing the process of becoming the latest addition to the House of Wax. By now the girlfriend FINALLY realizes something's wrong. A very long tussle ensues with the now belligerent guy. She gets away in the least plausible way imaginable...gets the truck stuck hanging over a ditch and, to escape the guy who is standing directly in front of the hood, climbs painfully slowly into the back of the king cab, out through the back windshield, across the lumpy contents of the truck bed and over the tailgate. The guy? Nowhere to be seen. As agonizing as her progress appeared to be, she was still far too nimble for him to get around the side of the truck and meet her at the back in time. He doesn't deserve to win if he can't even manage this, IMO.
She escapes into the town where she discovers everyone has been turned to wax figures...the mourners at the funeral, the audience at the theater, even a little old lady rigged to pull back her curtains on cue, just to give the prey some hope. The girl falls briefly into the guy's clutches, is rescued by her twin brother, and they then go straight back to the House to save their friends. Oh, meanwhile back at the camp there's the obligatory teenage horror movie sex scene, and who better to guest star than Paris? Apparently her famous sex tape doubled as her audition tape. The killer comes after them because killers can just SMELL hormones. The unlucky stud gets it first, and then comes a scene I would have paid theater prices to see: Paris Hilton running for her life. Hopeless, of course, but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
Back at the House the twins are making important revelations. The House's owners were Siamese twins separated at birth. They stumble upon newspaper articles, photos and even their high chairs, recognizable from the significant 1974 flashback. Now one of them is the normal-appearing but sadistic guy who can't run the length of a truck in under 5 minutes, and the other is Vincent, who hangs out in the cellar transforming people into living works of art and who himself wears a wax mask over his (predictably hideously deformed) face. The twins come home and the boy and girl intelligently try to make their escape into the sub-basement, which has a dirt floor, dirt walls, and wouldn't be assumed by anyone with half a brain to contain an exit. They are discovered and the two sets of twins go round and round fighting, until ultimately the homicidal brothers die slumped together ironically in their original Siamese configuration, and the entire house melts from the massive fire started in the basement (after the boy and girl undeservedly get out), because the House of Wax is literally made entirely of wax.
But wait! There's a twist! During the police cleanup the girl asks how no one else knew what was going on in the town. She's told it had been abandoned for so long it wasn't on the map, no one knew it existed anymore. Except, ummmm, it was still being supplied with electricity so SOMEONE knew it existed. As the boy and girl ride out of town, they hear over the police radio, "Sir, I ran the Sinclairs through the system and they didn't have two children. They had THREE." Just then they pass the original redneck (Mr. Bowie Knife) hanging out on his tailgate, waving cheerfully and obviously the third Sinclair boy...who understandably went on a homicidal rampage considering he never even HAD a high chair.
2 out of 5. Stupid, but also vaguely entertaining.
House of Wax (2005): The beginning of this movie was so generic I got to catch up on some bill-paying while watching. First, a flashback where we see a family strictly from the knees down. The camera centers on a big pot on the stove with the date "1974" unnecessarily superimposed on the screen, as if we couldn't tell the decade from the ghastly brown-and-orange striped motif of the pot. Two infant boys are eating lunch, one perfectly behaved and docile, while the other is being cruelly strapped into his chair while he kicks and screams violently. The pot is spilled and is full of hot wax. Ooooh, get it? House of Wax? I'll bet this is significant.
"Present time." Just in case people forget that car stereos didn't blare annoying hip-hop in the '70s. Teenagers are on a roadtrip to see a...game, or something. Two of them are fraternal twins, and one of the girls in the group may be pregnant, I think. There are a bunch of other Red Shirts that I didn't pay very close attention to. There's some relationship angst thrown in to try to make us care about these people. They make camp in some woods long enough to have a party and remind me that this age group is STILL so obnoxious that it doesn't bother me much in the slightest to watch them get stalked and killed in imaginative ways by the local rednecks. To make matters worse, among the youths is Paris Hilton....oh yeah, I remember now. The reason I didn't really want to see this movie. Fortunately the cast is large enough that her character is of very minor importance (as it should be in real life, if there was any justice in the world).
To add suspense, a big redneck truck pulls up in the middle of the party, blinding them with its headlights and just sitting there silently as they get increasingly agitated. They finally hurl enough testosterone to scare it away and they happily go back to getting drunk. Then they all go to sleep, not a care in the world, not at all as if there was some backwoods weirdo with questionable intentions possibly sitting somewhere just beyond the tree line.
When they wake up their video camera is missing and one of the car's fan belts has been cut. Great. While the guys figure out what to do, Paris Hilton and another girl notice a rotting smell nearby on their pee break. The girl starts to follow her nose and to my dismay, it's Paris who displays the only ounce of common sense in the whole movie: (sarcastically) "Yeah, let's follow the smell." But they do anyway, and discover it ends in a ditch full of dead animal carcasses. Just then another redneck truck pulls up and the driver unloads more offal into the pit. The kids blindly trust the redneck to drive them into town for the fan belt. Sure, he's creepy and makes inappropriate conversation (not helped by his tendency to gesticulate with a foot-long bloodstained Bowie knife), but when the couple gets freaked out enough to demand he drop them off here, right here is fine, he acts insulted and pouts endearingly. See? He wasn't so bad. But they still run away from him.
First stop, a church where they burst in on a funeral, where a guy offers to help them. For some reason he drives them to the House of Wax (I stopped paying attention for awhile in here). The guy disappears, leaving them to wander around the House by themselves. Lots of remarkably life-like wax figures but not the tools the boyfriend needs to fix the car. The guy returns, they all go back outside, and you think they're free and clear until the stupid, stupid boyfriend needs to use the bathroom. Of all times, and of all places, here? Now? This is when I realized the moral of every horror movie is just as simple as survival of the fittest. The boyfriend goes back inside but gets wrapped up in exploring. Even after finding rooms full of grisly trophies and sinister-looking surgical equipment, he has no sense of urgency, just childlike curiosity. The next time we see his girlfriend outside, the sun has set and she's still waiting patiently in the truck. It looks as if hours have passed and she's just now becoming suspicious.
She'll have to wait longer than that, because of course her man has been ambushed and is undergoing the process of becoming the latest addition to the House of Wax. By now the girlfriend FINALLY realizes something's wrong. A very long tussle ensues with the now belligerent guy. She gets away in the least plausible way imaginable...gets the truck stuck hanging over a ditch and, to escape the guy who is standing directly in front of the hood, climbs painfully slowly into the back of the king cab, out through the back windshield, across the lumpy contents of the truck bed and over the tailgate. The guy? Nowhere to be seen. As agonizing as her progress appeared to be, she was still far too nimble for him to get around the side of the truck and meet her at the back in time. He doesn't deserve to win if he can't even manage this, IMO.
She escapes into the town where she discovers everyone has been turned to wax figures...the mourners at the funeral, the audience at the theater, even a little old lady rigged to pull back her curtains on cue, just to give the prey some hope. The girl falls briefly into the guy's clutches, is rescued by her twin brother, and they then go straight back to the House to save their friends. Oh, meanwhile back at the camp there's the obligatory teenage horror movie sex scene, and who better to guest star than Paris? Apparently her famous sex tape doubled as her audition tape. The killer comes after them because killers can just SMELL hormones. The unlucky stud gets it first, and then comes a scene I would have paid theater prices to see: Paris Hilton running for her life. Hopeless, of course, but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
Back at the House the twins are making important revelations. The House's owners were Siamese twins separated at birth. They stumble upon newspaper articles, photos and even their high chairs, recognizable from the significant 1974 flashback. Now one of them is the normal-appearing but sadistic guy who can't run the length of a truck in under 5 minutes, and the other is Vincent, who hangs out in the cellar transforming people into living works of art and who himself wears a wax mask over his (predictably hideously deformed) face. The twins come home and the boy and girl intelligently try to make their escape into the sub-basement, which has a dirt floor, dirt walls, and wouldn't be assumed by anyone with half a brain to contain an exit. They are discovered and the two sets of twins go round and round fighting, until ultimately the homicidal brothers die slumped together ironically in their original Siamese configuration, and the entire house melts from the massive fire started in the basement (after the boy and girl undeservedly get out), because the House of Wax is literally made entirely of wax.
But wait! There's a twist! During the police cleanup the girl asks how no one else knew what was going on in the town. She's told it had been abandoned for so long it wasn't on the map, no one knew it existed anymore. Except, ummmm, it was still being supplied with electricity so SOMEONE knew it existed. As the boy and girl ride out of town, they hear over the police radio, "Sir, I ran the Sinclairs through the system and they didn't have two children. They had THREE." Just then they pass the original redneck (Mr. Bowie Knife) hanging out on his tailgate, waving cheerfully and obviously the third Sinclair boy...who understandably went on a homicidal rampage considering he never even HAD a high chair.
2 out of 5. Stupid, but also vaguely entertaining.
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Date: 2006-05-10 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-11 03:20 pm (UTC)