he biggest game of the year is taking place out of town, so Carly (Cuthbert) and her friends go on a road trip. They include her boyfriend, Wade (Padalecki), her estranged brother, Nick (Murray), and friends Paige (Hilton), Blake (Robert Ri'chard) and Dalton (Jon Abrahams).
But it's already after dark, so the group decides to pull off the road after taking a rural shortcut. While they're setting up camp, the wind kicks up, revealing some awful smell in the dark woods.
That's when a mysterious pickup truck pulls into camp, headlights blazing, then stops. It creeps out Carly, but Nick has a quick response: He hurls a beer bottle, breaking out a headlight. The truck backs out and leaves.
During the night, someone sneaks into camp and borrow's Dalton's video camera, surreptitiously taping the sleeping college kids.
The next morning, they're ready to go. But someone has messed with Wade's vintage muscle car. The fan belt's cut. Meanwhile, Paige and Carly go off into the woods to investigate the source of the nasty smell.
When Carly falls, the others rush to her aid. That's when they meet the driver of a roadkill truck (Damon Herriman). He offers to give Carly and Wade a ride into the nearby town of Ambrose, where they can secure a fan belt. The others decide to head for the game.
In town, Wade and Carly can't find anyone around. But they do find the House of Wax, a peculiar museum of wax figures. And they stumble on Bo (Brian Van Holt), who appears to be the town's only inhabitant. He offers to help them, if they'll just come up to the big house on the hill.
For dummies only
House of Wax is the latest horror update/remake from Joel Silver and Bob Zemeckis' Dark Castle Entertainment company, a reliable source of stylish horror films of varying quality. Wax is modeled on 1953's Vincent Price thriller of the same name, but borrows from it only the title and the premise: corpses covered in wax. Beyond that, House of Wax is a by-the-numbers teen scarefest whose main goal seems to be grossing out its adolescent audience. At that it succeeds admirably, but for the rest of the movie-going public, House of Wax is likely to be a grueling and unpleasant mix of sex, violence and yellowing buildup.
More care has gone into the construction of the movie's town and title museum than into the script, by fledgling film writers the Hayes brothers. The six main characters are interchangeably pretty and paper-thin, though the Hayes have tried to spark some friction among Murray's Nick, Padalecki's Wade and Cuthbert's Carly. The other characters are knife fodder, particularly the blank Hilton, whose first major film role requires the heiress to run around a factory in a scanty costume before being skewered like a steak kabob.
The backstory of the mysterious twins—both played by Van Holt, who is a kind of cut-rate Bill Paxton—is as murky as a boiling pot of wax, which doesn't really matter. As in the worst horror movies, all of the characters behave like idiots before they meet their ultimate, sticky fates, and there's no real sense of suspense, dread or scariness.
On the way, viewers are treated to a pit of rotting animal carcasses, loss of a few body parts, a few tame bow-chicka-bow-wow moments between Hilton and Ri'chard and enough wax to float a ghost cruise ship. The filmmakers—led by tyro director Collet-Serra, a former commercial helmer originally from Spain—seem especially pleased with the wax part, shooting it in every conceivable way. As if wax were an adequate replacement for real humans.
