The House of Wax

Horror is no stranger to lifeless replicas these days – you can barely swing an axe without hitting a dead-eyed knock-off of one of the genre’s established titles – but this agreeably daft chop-’em-up has a smidge more vim than many recent remakes. Nominally modelled on the 1953 Vincent Price shocker (itself based on a 1933 picture), it takes the central conceit of wax-encased murder victims and yokes it to an off-the-peg teens-in-peril-in-redneck-backwater slasher plot that offers not one but two sets of twins – the killers and the last kids standing (Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert, best known as ‘24’s’ own Penelope Pitstop, Kim Bauer). Although glibly sadistic and wholly predictable, it’s played tongue-in-cheek and offers some relishably macabre flourishes: an embalmed movie audience, Paris Hilton being gruesomely impaled (again), apparatus resembling a spray-on tan machine designed by Heath Robinson, plus an almost surrealist climax demonstrating why people who live in wax houses shouldn’t have basement furnaces.