Movie Review: House of Wax (2005) by Stuart Taylor
This movie review is part of the Paris Hilton season
If someone tells you to imagine a horrifying experience in a house of wax, your hand instinctively darts to protect your bikini line, right? This film turns that notion up to eleven, as we will find out. But first, a prologue:
It’s 1974. It’s breakfast time. Some parents are trying to feed their two children. One is as quiet as a mouse, the other screams and fights so much that they feel compelled to tape him down to the high chair. What.
Flashing forward to the present day, Paris Hilton and her friend Carly are going on a road trip up to a big football game somewhere. It doesn’t matter where. Joining them on the adventure is Carly’s brother Nick – a troublemaker, recently out of jail; Dillan, Nick’s camera-toting moron friend; Wade, Carly’s boyfriend and generic good guy; Blake, Paris’s boyfriend. Blake is black, which makes me suspect he’ll be the first to die (that’s movie law, right?). Wait a minute: Blake; Black… Blacke? Coincidence?
Carly and Paris
Like all good road trips, they set off in the dead of night. Blake drives his truck thing, while Wade drives the wademobile in true convoy style. The main road is closed and they are forced to take a detour onto the spooky forest road. They pass by a town with a House of Wax (like in the title!), cross a rickety old bridge and decide to set up camp right there in the dark. They all deserve to die. I’d like to point out at this point, that I hate horror films. I get super scared; during the very tense scenes, my eyes refuse to actually look at the screen. But I do know the main horror tropes, which makes this experience even worse as I get to mix my terror with the furiously-shouting-at-morons emotion I get during The Only Way is Essex.
Paris confides in Carly that she thinks she might be pregnant. Having recently read about The World According to Paris, I suspect it’s just a food baby, Paris. Don’t worry yourself. Nick and Carly have a discussion about how shit Nick is the shit twin and how he needs to buck up his life. Wade just wanders around being the only guy without a character. As the kids hang out in the dark spookiness, a nasty smell wafts over the campsite, sparking this bizarre exchange:
DILLAN: Something’s dead out there.
BLAKE: No, something’s dead up here, I need to drink it back to life – toss me a beer!
Blake, you so crazy. They drink and dance and generally do what teenagers do. Dillan runs around filming everything and all is well. But wait: a spooky truck appears out of the forest. It sits there being all spooky and scary, until Nick – ever the renegade – throws a beer at it. The truck backs away into the forest, never to be seen again. How mysterious.
If I were dirt, that's where I'd be.
In the morning, the smell returns, so Carly and Paris go to investigate – smart thinking, horror film characters: wander off into the woods alone. Carly manages to fall down a hill into a pile of dead deer carcasses, where she meets a friendly deer carcass dumper. In the meantime, Wade’s car has mysteriously stopped working and needs a fan belt. They come up with a great plan: Wade and Carly will go with the freaky carcass guy into town to get a fan belt, everyone else will go to the big game. Nice plan, jerks.
Incredibly, the man who dumps carcasses proves to be a little too freaky for our teen lovers, so they ditch him at the first opportunity and head into town alone. Unfortunately, the town seems abandoned – especially the garage. In fact, the only person they find is in the church, where they accidentally interrupt a funeral – whoops. But, it turns out the funeral attender is the garage owner. What a spooky coincidence (I hope this review isn’t too scary for you guys). Garageman offers to help the teen lovers as soon as he’s done mourning, so in the meantime Wade drags Carly off to the hoouuusee of waaaaax.
So… it’s a house. And the house is actually made of wax. Walls, floor, ceiling… everything. Pretty weird. The house is also populated with wax people: not famous wax people, like in Tussauds; random wax people. It’s all a little… creepy.
Meanwhile, Team Awesome (i.e. the other teens) have got so horrendously stuck in traffic that they’ve missed the big game and head back to the camp. Blake sends Dillon and Nick off to find Carly and Wade so he can stay at camp and fuck Paris. I mean, make love to Paris.
"Welcome to the House of Waaaaax!"
So far, you might be thinking this all a jolly woodland romp, but you’d be wrong my friend – and here’s why: Garageman takes Carly and Wade up to his spooky mansion, where he mysteriously keeps all his fanbelts. Danger, danger, Will Robinson! Of course, disaster strikes! The lights go out in Maison du Garage while Wade is inside. I hate the dark. I don’t care what Dumbledore says, the dark is fucking scary as shit. And so it should be – Wade gets a jolly good stabbing! Carly manages to escape from evil Garageman and hides in the church. But the church is full of wax worshippers – even the priest is made of wax. But, when she accidentally breaks off the arm of a wax granny, she realises the terrible truth – there are real bodies under the wax! Zut Alors!
Back at Maison de Garage, Wade is still alive, but now he’ll strapped to an operating table. A creepy guy in a Wax Mask is sewing up his stab wounds. Seems like a pretty nice guy, right? Wrong. Once his wounds are all nice and tidy, Waxface straps Wade to a brace and sprays him with boiling hot wax! Looks like those who can, dle. Amiright?
*high five*
….
Don’t leave me hanging!
…
So, er… the film, right. Garageman finds Carly, discovering her ingenious hiding place – under a wax priest. He drags her into his garage and tied her to a dentist chair. Weird. Where the hell is Paris? Well, she’s not here but Nick and Dillan are! Hooray! But they… decide to split up! Are they idiots? Garageman – who is totally the evil baby from the prologue, by the way – waxes Carly’s mouth shut to keep her quiet. I guess she won’t be waxing lyrical anytime soon. Right?
OK, so Carly figures out that wax actually itsn’t very strong, so she opens her mouth and screams for help. Nick rescues her using the power of brute force and they escape from Garageman. The details aren’t important; they escape, just trust me. What is important is that
Um... whoops?
Dillon has crept into the Hooouuuse of Waaaaax, looking for his lost friends. And boy does he find Wade: he’s sitting at the piano. At first, Dillon thinks it’s the real Wade; at second, he thinks it’s an uncanny wax doppleganger of Wade; finally he realises it’s the living Wade trapped inside a wax coating! Is there anything worse than being trapped alive inside your own waxwork? What if he gets an itchy nose? Dillon tries to peel off the wax, but ends up accidentally peeling off his face somehow. That wax sure is on tight. Ladies, is this something you have to worry about at the beauty parlour? We don’t have time to answer that, ladies, because Waxface is back! He swings his knife of doom at Dillon but misses and cuts off a big chunk of Wade’s jaw! I’m just going to remind you that Wade is still alive, because this is the last time the film gives him any consideration. So just remember that Wade is held fast, alive, with a big chunk of his face ripped off. Forever. Dillon is the idiot teen, so he immediately dies, as is movie law.
Speaking of movie law, where’s Blake? Wasn’t he meant to die first? I’m glad you asked – Blake is making out with Paris Hilton back at the camp, remember. They are ready for some sexy lovemaking. Paris does a sexy striptease, and that can only mean she’s about to die. If I remember movie law: when girls get sexy, murderers get murderous*. Blake leaves the tent to put on some sexy music, but the man who returns is not Blake – he’s Waxface! Blake is dead!
Paris runs like only a “sexy” blonde in a horror movie knows how: in her underwear and into a dark dead end. She grabs a sharpened pipe as a weapon and sneaks around trying to make some kind of escape. Quietly, she gets into an abandoned car and waits. And waits. Where is Waxface? Oh, there he is – walking past like it ain’t no thang. I think she’s safe. Oh no wait, he’s spotted her! She bashes him with her sharpened pipe, right in his waxy face! But then he grabs the pipe and shoves it right through her head. Oops. You lose at pipe, Paris.
That’s not what I heard!
*high five*
…
So, Nick and Carly are sneaking around the town, Nick with a crossbow he stole from a hunting shop. The entire population of the town is wax: every building is full of wax people. So I’m wondering – did Garageman and Waxface managed to wax the entire town? Didn’t anyone suspect something weird was going on? How did they manage such a feat? Carly has figured out (from old newspaper cuttings and other random clues) that Garageman and Waxface are twins – previously conjoined, now separated. Waxface was joined to Garageman by the face, hence why he wears a wax mask to cover his disfigured visage. And have you noticed that the film is now twins vs twins? This whole film makes so much sense now! Except… who’s paying for all the electricity?
Garageman finds our heroes and chases them into a cinema, which is playing an old movie for a wax audience using the mysterious electricity (perhaps they have some kind of wax-powered generator?). They play the ol’ Scooby Doo trick and hide among the wax audience, super still. It works surprisingly well, and just when Garageman spots them, Nick gives him the old one-two. ‘The old one-two’ is when you shoot someone twice with a crossbow, right? Consider yourself crossbowed!
Believing Garageman to be dead and thus peace to have been restored (don’t forget, Nick and Carly haven’t seen Waxface yet), they head to the House of Wax to find Carly’s lost mobile phone (to call Paris, who has a pipe in her face – and not for the first time, amiright?). Unfortunately, both Garageman, suffering from the two arrows stuck in him, and Waxface, dragging the bodies of Paris and Blake, arrive home while our heroes are inside. Wah-oh!
The best movie twins since Schwarzenegger/DeVito
Nick and Carly sneak down to the basement to try and find a way out. Instead they find the waxing room, where they see Dillon strapped to the brace, recently waxed. Nick tries to save him, but accidentally pulls his head off. Oh well, you tried. Just when all seems hopeless and waxy, Waxface appears in the basement with his knife of doom! Nick can think of only one solution: set the whole fucking room on fire and cheese it the hell outta there! They run back upstairs but are intercepted by Garageman, who turns out to be excellent at hand-to-hand combat all of a sudden! He fights Carly and Nick simultaneously, but he’s no match for Nick’s secret move: grabbing the arrow in his chest and wiggling it about! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!
Another revelation dawns on them. They set fire to the basement of a house that is made out of wax. Wax is a substance which catches fire and burns. That is to say, the whole bloody house is on fire and melting! They haven’t got much time to worry about that though, as Garageman is countering the arrow-wiggle by stabbing Nick in the leg. Carly still has one move up her sleeve: beating his face in with a baseball bat. Wow, that girl sure… wax quite a punch. But Waxface appears from the flame and chases Carly upstairs (Nick, stabbed, can only hobble slowly after them) where she locks herself in a bedroom. Unfortunately, the door is made of wax, so Waxface just cuts through it with his knife of doom! All Carly can do now is appeal to Waxface’s better nature. She tells him that evil Garageman tricked him into waxing everyone up – that deep down he’s not really a killer. Will this work? We’ll never know, because Nick bursts in and stabs Waxface to death. He falls through the floor and lands on Garageman, right in the position in which they were conjoined as babies. Poetic.
So the house burns and/or melts to the ground and Nick and Carly escape. Wait, wasn’t Wade in the house, still alive? Oh well!
The police rescue the two surviving kids, having seen the smoke from miles away. As Nick and Carly are taken away, the sheriff reveals that there weren’t two brothers… there were three! And we end as the ambulance carrying Nick and Carly passes by the creepy carcass dumper man… Spooky.
Actually, not spooky. Is that a twist? Is it a big reveal? Seems a bit irrelevant. Like, the sheriff could have said, ‘Hmmmm, turns out the house wasn’t made of beeswax, it was made of Montan Wax. DUN DUN DUUNNNNNNN
——–
Chainbear’s final thought: Is it just coincidence that Paris was about to have sex with her black boyfriend, but instead got impaled with a massive black pipe? Is that really coincidence?
———-
*if you’re reading this review out loud to someone, make sure you annunciate the difference between ‘murderers’ and ‘murderous’, otherwise it might sounds like ‘murderers get murderers’ which sounds ridiculous.
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This was easily the worst movie I have ever seen. I have tried hard to find something worse. Not even Lohan’s “I know who killed me” is as bad as this one. When a movie has a hottie like Elisha Cuthbert, and looking at her is not even worth it, you know you have a terrible piece in your hands.
Do yourself a favour and never ever even speak of this movie again! hehehehe