directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
screenplay by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes
after a story/play by Charles Belden (1933?)*

A bunch of us were in a hotel room and chose this off the pay-per-view service because something really trashy seemed to be in order. We got what we paid for. I don’t know the original but I’m sure that as a remake this is a horrible embarrassment. Obviously, the filmmakers couldn’t have cared less. Movies like this are dumb on arrival, so they tend to get away with being dumb even within their own dumbness, and I guess I’m going to let this one off the hook too – what would be the point of complaining that the twist at the end was only superficially a twist, or that we got to know way too much about the bad guys too early on for them to remain satisfyingly scary, or that all the “hey it’s Paris Hilton, get it?” attention to Paris Hilton was a drag on the script…? I’m ignoring the “none of them are looking at the road while they’re driving” and “you can’t touch melting wax like that, it’s burning hot” type of problems – I’m just talking about the storytelling problems, the stuff that actually hurts the movie. Does anyone care? I guess not, and I don’t want to be the loser who misses the point. But: just because the target audience is only here for the cheap shocks doesn’t mean they wouldn’t still have more fun if the movie were better thought-out. Even those of us who came in search of trash would have been more satisfied if we’d found, to our surprise, a clever thrill-ride. But we didn’t! We did, however, find some over-the-top gore that we weren’t entirely expecting. A bunch of it was supposed to be goofily horrid, in an Itchy & Scratchy vein, but two slashed Achilles tendons in one movie is just in bad taste. Not to mention the completely gratuitous finger-severing. John Ottman’s score was fun in a junky, unmemorable way. That’s what the whole movie wanted to be, but only parts of it were. But I guess when junk is your stated goal and your audience already expects trash, it’s hard to know what counts as success. For our “hey let’s watch something really dumb” purposes, this was a grand slam.

* I swore I’d review this in one paragraph, so I have to put this stuff down here in a footnote: This movie is based on the 1953 movie House of Wax, which was based on the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was “based on a play by Charles Belden.” I can find no record (online at least) of this “play” ever having been produced or published in an original form. I’m betting it was never performed as a play and Belden sold it directly to the movies. But that’d be quite a play!