Funny review from Slate:
How dispiriting that the old Vincent Price 3-D potboiler House of Wax—itself a remake of an early '30s Lionel Atwill/Fay Wray melodrama, The Mystery of the Wax Museum—should be remade as another grisly variation on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Highly sexualized young people on a road trip stumble into a remote backwoods area full of inbred, sadistic freaks and get themselves hideously mutilated, tortured, and killed while the camera lingers.
The new House of Wax (Warner Bros.), directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, isn't bad as these things go, although these things go nowhere a healthy individual should want to. Having never claimed to be a healthy individual, I found it tolerable. It's nowhere near as punishing as Rob Zombie's House of 1,000 Corpses, but it's increasingly tense and resourceful and, in the end, it gets the sick job done. (Actually, Zombie evinced a kind of relish—along with some actual talent for staging and composition—that gave his film a certain je ne sais quoi. OK, je ne veux pas savoir quoi.) The centerpiece in this one is a machine that rains scalding wax over a still-living young buck, whose subsequent smooth visage conceals the fact that his skin has been … Never mind.
House of Wax takes forever to get going and features too much foreplay and too many false scares (one is too many). But at least there is plenty of time to reflect on the phenomenon of Paris Hilton, who plays an especially promiscuous victim. There will be a competition among critics for the best Hilton insult. Here's my first: Her attention span is so short that she can't even maintain her concentration while running away from a psycho. Here's my second: Her vacant expression with a steel rod through her head is no different from her expression the rest of the time. Others I heard just leaving the screening room: "She's already wax." "With a pole taking out half her brain, who'd know the difference?"
Maybe the ultimate insult is that she makes her co-star Elisha Cuthbert seem, by comparison, the sexiest and most interesting actress in modern cinema. Cuthbert was an irritant for three seasons of 24, especially the dire third. In House of Wax, she is a goddess. Those pillowy lips. Those expressive eyes. That jigglevision that is the remake's answer to 3-D. Hail, Elisha, the new scream queen!
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
~ Muhammad Ali
