House of Wax
Celebutante Paris Hilton, whose cinematic experience includes her infamous sex tape, can now add horror-film victim to her resume. For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of ''House of Wax" will only stoke their schadenfreude. One clothing store in Los Angeles built a ''House of Wax" window display that included the film's opening date and the line ''See Paris die!" But Hilton lends the Warner Bros. movie both snob appeal and street cred.
Hilton plays Paige, an oversexed girl who wears plush sweat suits and seems generally bored, but comes alive to perform sex acts on her African-American boyfriend, Blake, played by Robert Ri'chard. (Mercifully, the film doesn't make an issue of their interracial relationship.)
Along with four other college kids, these two are on their way to Baton Rouge, La., for a big football game when the sporty car belonging to Wade (Jared Padalecki) suddenly needs a part replaced. He and his girlfriend Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) catch a ride with an uncouth backwoodsman to the edge of a deserted town where there's a big, scary museum called the House of Wax for them to meddle around. The two snoops also meet Bo (Brian Van Holt), a handsome local with an ominously unattractive accent.
Bo claims to be the town's mechanic and says he has the missing car part -- back at his house. For reasons that have more to do with brainless screenwriting than common sense, they accompany him there, only to be plunged into a nightmare in which slashing, impaling, raw flesh, Crazy Glue doubling as lip balm, and, yes, waxing are all on the menu. Apparently, Bo and his disfigured twin are always looking for new humans to boost the town's waxen population. Their procedure looks so painful that it makes a Brazilian wax seem like a massage.
While Carly and Wade do and say the obvious (Wade about the museum: ''It is wax, like, literally"), Carly's rebellious twin brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray) and his dim pal Dalton (Jon Abrahams) are looking for them. While they're doing that, Paige and Blake are trying to have sex in a tent, while Bo and his bro are on the loose with sharp objects.
Cuthbert might be annoyed that I've spent so much space going on about her more famous costar when she's the one who spends most of the film in a tank top and splattered with blood. Viewers of the television drama ''24" will remember Cuthbert as Jack Bauer's dumb daughter, Kim. The acting in ''House of Wax" ranges from bad to worse, but Cuthbert, while vaguely appealing, is guilty of looking like a wax-museum-version Kirsten Dunst without having much of Dunst's spunk or grit.
Written by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, ''House of Wax" bears almost no resemblance to Andre de Toth's campy 1953 3-D mystery-chiller. It starred Vincent Price as a sculptor hellbent on rebuilding his collection of life-size wax figures with human cadavers after a fire destroys the originals.
In de Toth's film, Price's sculptor was nuts, but he was almost seductive about his obsession. In a backhanded tribute to Price, Bo's madman twin is named Vincent (also played by Van Holt), but the character is a mute who wears a blank wax mask that makes him a direct descendant of Leatherface from ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." He's not a sculptor. He's a hack.
Collet-Serra's movie revels in viscera, gore, and entrails. But Stephen Windon's night-time photography and Graham Walker's art direction, particularly once the museum starts melting in the film's show-stopping finale, are triumphs of contemporary-art design over the gross and grossly illogical. Like the dreary remake of ''The Amityville Horror," the movie's real star is that house. Sorry, Paris.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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