House of Wax (2005 film)

Carly, her boyfriend Wade, her brother Nick, her best friend Paige, Paige's boyfriend Blake, and Nick's friend Dalton are on their way to a football game in Louisiana. The night before the game they camp in a field. A stranger in a pickup truck arrives, then leaves when Nick smashes one of his headlights. The next morning, Wade discovers that his car's fan belt is broken and Carly falls into a pit of rotting animal carcasses. After rescuing her, the group meet Lester, who drives Carly and Wade to the nearby town of Ambrose for a new fan belt while the rest head to the football game.

Carly and Wade arrive in Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town. At the church they find a funeral in progress and meet Bo, a mechanic, who offers to sell them a fan belt after the funeral. While they wait, they visit "Trudy's House of Wax", a wax museum which itself is made of wax and is the central feature of the town.

They follow Bo to his house to get the right size fan belt, where Wade is knocked unconscious by Bo's twin brother Vincent. Vincent wears a wax mask to cover his face, disfigured from where the twins were once conjoined. Outside, Carly notices a broken headlight on Bo's truck and realizes he is the man who visited the campsite. Bo captures Carly and restrains her in the cellar of the gas station, gluing her lips shut. Meanwhile, Vincent strips Wade naked and straps him to a chair, where his body is covered in molten wax.

Nick, Dalton, Paige and Blake realize they will not arrive at the game in time. Paige and Blake return to the campsite while Nick and Dalton arrive in town looking for Carly and Wade. Nick asks Bo about Carly's whereabouts. When she tries to gain Nick's attention, Bo cuts off the tip of Carly's finger, but she manages to tear her lips apart and screams for help. Nick fends off Bo and frees Carly while Dalton finds Wade, who is unable to move in his wax coating. Dalton attempts to peel off the wax from Wade's face, but inadvertently removes his skin in the process. Dalton is then ambushed by Vincent, who corners and decapitates him with a pair of hedge trimmers. Nick and Carly realize that the wax figures are actually the wax-coated corpses of Bo and Vincent's victims and that they have been luring people in and using their likenesses to make the figures realistic.

Back at the campsite, Vincent arrives and kills Blake, then chases Paige to an abandoned sugar mill, where he throws a metal pipe through her forehead. Bo and Vincent return to chase Carly and Nick into the House of Wax. Nick unintentionally sets the house on fire and the figures start to melt, as does the entire museum. Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat. Vincent chases Carly to the top floor where she stabs him. His body falls through the floor, landing on top of his brother's corpse. Carly and Nick escape from the house as it melts to the ground.

The next day, the police arrive and report that Ambrose has been abandoned for ten years since the local sugar mill was shut down. As Nick and Carly are taken to a hospital, the Sheriff learns that Bo and Vincent had a third brother. From inside the ambulance, Carly spots Lester with his dog, waving them goodbye as they are driven out of town.

• Elisha Cuthbert as Carly Jones
• Chad Michael Murray as Nick Jones
• Brian Van Holt as Bo and Vincent Sinclair
• Paris Hilton as Paige Edwards
• Jared Padalecki as Wade Felton
• Jon Abrahams as Dalton Chapman
• Robert Ri'chard as Blake Johnson
• Damon Herriman as Lester Sinclair
• Andy Anderson as Sheriff
• Dragicia Debert as Trudy Sinclair
• Murray Smith as Dr. Victor Sinclair
• Emma Lung as Jennifer (uncredited)

In January 2006, Village Roadshow Studios owners Village Theme Park Management and Warner Brothers Movie World Australia announced they were suing special effects expert David Fletcher and Wax Productions because of a fire on the set during production.

The $7 million lawsuit alleges that Mr. Fletcher and Wax Productions were grossly negligent over the fire, which destroyed part of the Gold Coast's Warner Bros. Movie World studios. The alleged grounds of negligence included not having firefighters on stand-by and using timber props near a naked flame. The set where the fire broke out has now been demolished and is a field kept for Movie World for future projects.[5]

Opening in 3,111 theaters, the film grossed $12 million in its opening weekend. House of Wax earned $70 million worldwide,[3] $32 million of which came from North American receipts.[2] House of Wax also earned $42 million in VHS/DVD rentals.[6]

On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 26% based on 157 reviews, and the average rating is 4.29/10. The site's consensus reads, "Bearing little resemblance to the 1953 original, House of Wax is a formulaic but better-than-average teen slasher flick."[7] On Metacritic, which uses an average of critics' reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 41 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.[9]

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "House of Wax is not a good movie, but it is an efficient one and will deliver most of what anyone attending House of Wax could reasonably expect...assuming it would be unreasonable to expect very much." He said of Hilton's performance that "she is no better or worse than the typical Dead Post-Teenager and does exactly what she is required to do in a movie like this, with all the skill—admittedly finite—that is required."[10] Film critic Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post, gave the film four out of five stars, calling it a "guilty pleasure" and wrote that it gives horror fans exactly what they want.[11] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle rated it 4/5 stars and wrote, "After a month, no one will talk about this movie again. Still, with a picture like this, there is really only one question: Is it fun? Yes. Lots. Definitely."[12] [13] Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle called it boring and poorly-acted, though he complimented Cuthbert and Murray.[14] A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, "The set design is fairly elaborate by the standards of the genre, and the victims don't die in precisely the order you might expect, but everything else goes pretty much according to formula".[15]

House of Wax: Music from the Motion Picture is the title of a publicly released soundtrack used for House of Wax, consisting of commercially recorded songs.[22] A second album, simply titled House of Wax, was released containing the film score, composed by John Ottman.[23]

There is a song appearing in the film which is not integrated in the soundtrack. It is "Roland" by Interpol, and appears in the scene when the group decides to camp over the night at the beginning of the film. The song that plays during the end credits is "Helena" by My Chemical Romance.

• 2005 in film
• Mystery of the Wax Museum

• Official website
• House of Wax on IMDb
• House of Wax at Box Office Mojo
• House of Wax at Rotten Tomatoes
• House of Wax at Metacritic