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Bookmark this pageThe House of Wax (2005)
Director: Jaume Serra
Movie review
From Time Out London
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.Author: BW
Time Out London Issue 1814: May 25-June 1 2005
User reviews of this film
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- BRYAN said...
- Posted on Aug 03 2009 06:34 its amazing film!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Report as inappropriate
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- Blaire said...
- Posted on May 30 2009 21:58 It's...funny :D Not really scary. I was laughing all the time. Very unrealistic. Still good enough to watch it with friends :P
- Report as inappropriate
Cast & crew
Director: Jaume Serra
Producer: Joel Silva, Robert Zemeckis, Susan Levin
Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams, Damon Herriman, Paris Hilton, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Robert Ri'chard full cast
Genre(s): Horror
Rated: 15
Duration: 110 mins
UK Release: May 27 2005
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