House of Wax (Widescreen Edition)

• House of Wax tells the story of a group of friends who fall prey to a sinister plot while passing through a small town on their way to a college football game.Running Time: 113 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: R Age: 085393894528 UPC: 085393894528 Manufacturer No: 38945

Museum fire turns handsome man into human monster who steals bodies from morgue to create lifelike images in wax.House of Wax brought Vincent Price into the horror genre, where he fit as snugly as a scalpel in a mad scientist's hand. A remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, this entertaining Gothic shocker casts Price as a sculptor of wax figures; his unwilling victims--er, "models"--lend their bodies to his lifelike depictions of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. The film was one of the top 10 moneymakers of its year, thanks in part to the 3-D gimmick, which explains why so many thin! gs are aimed at the camera (why else would the paddleball man be there?). Footnote to history: director Andre De Toth was blind in one eye, and thus could not see in three dimensions.

Not at all a musty relic of the early-sound era, the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot in a soft, trial version of Technicolor) is saucy, pre-Code fun. As corpses disappear from the morgue, Lionel Atwill's wax museum adds to its displays. Coincidence, or the work of the hideously deformed fiend stalking the Manhattan night? Most of the snappy dialogue comes courtesy of reporter Glenda Farrell, a vintage wisecracking dame. --Robert HortonHouse of Wax tells the story of a group of friends who fall prey to a sinister plot while passing through a small town on their way to a college football game.You know the one about the group of horny kids who get offed one by one? Yeah, so do director Jaume Collet-Serra and his screenwriters, who have updated an old Vincent Price fli! ck and sandwiched it between hearty slices of The Blair Wit! ch Proje ct and various Friday the 13th films. Lots of WB and Fox network hotties--including 24's Elisha Cuthbert, One Tree Hill's Chad Michael Murray, and, well, Paris Hilton--have car trouble and stumble onto a town populated by real killer personalities. The R-rated result is fairly gruesome and, though no one ever quite looks frightened enough, Collet-Serra knows his way around a jolting suspense sequence or two. Cuthbert and an unintentionally funny Murray (striking ludicrous poses as some kind of real toughie) act more like angry ex-lovers than the fraternal twins they're supposed to be; Hilton acts bored while her real-life video scandal is exploited for ironic kicks; and the film heads shamelessly over-the-top with each new twist. As an exercise in bloody mayhem, it has a few novel touches, but you can easily find better scares. --Steve Wiecking

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