(Re) Making a Monster - Day 23

House of Wax (1953)

House of Wax concerns a brilliant wax sculptor, Henry Jerrod (Vincent Price), whose greedy business partner decides to burn down his wax museum to collect the insurance money. Unfortunately Jerrod sees his wax sculptures as real people so he violently reacts to this act and ends up burning with the museum. He’s presumed dead but merely horribly disfigured, but now he’s started a new museum that celebrates the lurid and macabre and his wax figures look better than ever. His secret? Why he’s using the corpses of real people to make his new sculptures of course.

House of Wax is famous mainly as one of the few 3D movies that actually uses the gimmick sparingly and to great effect. Many think this is due to the fact that the director had only one eye and couldn’t see in 3D so he wasn’t too concerned with the gimmick, whatever the case it worked because for a time it was the highest grossing 3D film ever made.

I was not aware of a few things going into this movie. First off, I didn’t know that it’s already a remake of a 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum, secondly I didn’t realize that it had already basically been remade in 1990’s Darkman. Sam Raimi essentially just traded out wax figures for a sci-fi fake skin substitue, traded an unscrupulous business partner for a gangster, and turned the lead from a villainous phantom of the opera into a vigilante superhero type. Darkman even wears the same coat and hat that Price wears in this movie in his burnt-faced persona.

The movie hasn’t aged terribly well, the plot seems positively pedestrian now due to so many imitators (most notably the no-budget Roger Corman film Bucket of Blood and Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red) However, Vincent Price elevates everything he’s in; the movie may no longer be novel but it is well-made, and a supporting turn from a 30-something Charles Bronson as Price’s taciturn and weirdly high-energy sidekick Igor makes this worth a watch.

House of Wax (2005)

The 2005 remake of House of Wax is a pretty standard slasher/backwoods brutality movie. Kids go to the woods, kids get dead. The kids in question are Carly (Elisha Cuthburt), her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki), Carly’s troubled twin brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray), weird pervert friend with a camera Dalton (Jon Abrahams), and tertiary characters who get too much screen time Blake (Robert Ri’chard) and Paige (Paris Hilton).

After parking in a random field on the way to the big sportsball game in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (I do not recall if the sport in question is ever even mentioned) they run afoul of murderous gas station attendant Bo (Brian Van Holt) and his deformed wax figure artist Vincent (also Brian Van Holt.)

The brothers have been working on making a ghost town in the woods into a living wax museum and they’ve been doing it by luring people off the highway, killing them, and then turning them into wax sculptures that populate the town. Most of the figures are contained in the titular House of Wax, which is literally a giant mansion made entirely out of wax: floors, ceiling, walls, furniture, plates, etc.

Is it a good remake?

This movie rivals Mother’s Day in the “remakes that have nothing to do with the movie they’re supposedly remaking” category. It does feature a deformed psychopath making dead bodies into wax sculptures for a macabre museum and there is a scene where we watch the wax museum go up in flames, though they wisely hold that for the climax in the remake rather than the opening minutes as in the original.

Let me be the one millionth person to say that House of Wax ‘05 is less a remake of House of Wax ‘53 and more of a remake of David Schmoeller’s Tourist Trap, though without the telekinesis angle. I’m guessing this started out as a Tourist Trap remake and they either couldn’t get the rights for a good price or didn’t want to do business with Charles Band, so they just made sure it was dissimilar enough and did it anyway. It’s the kind of grift I think Chuck would appreciate if he had thought of it himself.

Does it stand on its own?

Oh lord, does it. I mean, this is still a slasher/backwoods brutality film from 2005 so there are some issues. The music is, of course, awful. The subplot with Robert Ri’chard and Paris Hilton is a big time waster and goes nowhere, also it grossly kind of uses Paris Hilton’s then white hot sex appeal for a gratuitous scene of her doing a striptease (it’s puritanically tame, her Carl’s Jr. commercial was more racy) but then plays up how much people hated her at the time by giving her easily the most graphic and brutal death of the film. I have no particularly love for Paris Hilton but the way she’s handled here feels exploitative and gross even if she was and is probably an awful person.

Those few issues aside, House of Wax is a really creative and entertaining movie that begs for rediscovery. Brian Van Holt really plays a good villain here and the movie really puts its leads through the ring with both Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray’s characters taking some serious punishment. This is Jaume Collet-Serra’s first feature film and it’s a strong showing from a filmmaker who’s not in the business of making masterpieces but never makes movies that are any less than entertaining.

And then of course the final act, where our hero twins battle the evil villain twins in the House of Wax as it literally melts around them is an unforgettably great set-piece. Watching the whole place ooze and melt like buttery caramel is so weirdly satisfying to watch, it may be the only time that the climax of a horror film has doubled as an ASMR video.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Buy this!