House of Wax (2005 film)
| House of Wax | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Jaume Collet-Serra |
| Written by | Charles Belden Chad Hayes Carey Hayes |
| Produced by | Joel Silver Robert Zemeckis Susan Levin |
| Starring | Elisha Cuthbert Chad Michael Murray Brian Van Holt Paris Hilton Jared Padalecki Jon Abrahams Robert Ri'chard |
| Cinematography | Stephen Windon |
| Edited by | Joel Negron |
| Music by | John Ottman |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures Village Roadshow Pictures |
Release date | May 6, 2005 |
Running time | 113 min. |
| Country | Template:FilmUS |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $40 million[1] |
| Box office | $68,766,121[1] |
House of Wax (alt title: Wax House, Baby) is a Template:Fy horror film, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. It is a very loose remake of the Template:Fy film of the same name which is a remake of the Template:Fy film Mystery of the Wax Museum. It was released in theaters on May 6, 2005, and was a financial success. On October 25, 2005, the movie came out on DVD and on Blu-ray on September 26, 2006.
Plot
The film starts in 1974 where a woman is making a wax sculpture in the kitchen while her son is having breakfast in his highchair. The father then comes in the room with another son who is shouting and kicking. He is forced into a highchair and strapped and taped in the highchair because he is having a violent temper tantrum. He attacks his mother and she slaps him across the face.
Six teenagers are on their way to a highly anticipated football game in Louisiana; Carly - an ambitious and mild-mannered young waitress who is planning to move to New York for an internship for InStyle magazine, her boyfriend Wade - a small-town guy who is hesitant about moving to the big city, Paige - Carly's best friend and her boyfriend Blake, Nick - Carly's juvenile delinquent twin brother, and Dalton - Nick's jester friend. When night falls, the group decide to pull over into the woods and set up camp for the night. The campsite is later visited by a mysterious stranger in a pickup truck who shines his lights at the campsite, but refuses to leave, speak, or turn off his lights. Nick throws a beer bottle at the truck, smashing a headlight, and the stranger leaves. The next morning, Wade discovers that his car's fan belt has been torn. Later, the group meets a disheveled, rural man named Lester, who offers to drive Carly and Wade to the nearby town of Ambrose to get a new fan belt, while the rest of the group goes to the football game. However, the group soon find themselves in a traffic jam and decide to return to the camp site to wait for Wade and Carly to return.
Wade and Carly arrives to Ambrose, which seems almost like a ghost town although the church is full. Inside the church, they meet a mechanic named Bo, who offers to take them to his house and sell them a fan belt. The central feature of the town is a run-down wax museum, which is itself made entirely of wax. Carly and Wade decide go to this house while they wait for Bo to finish up the funeral at the church. Inside, while the two explore the house, Carly spots a strange figure through a mirror and informs Wade about it and he decides to go outside and investigate. Carly is then scared off by one of the wax figures and runs out of the house only to be caught by Wade and they decide to walk over to the garage where they later meet up with Bo who takes them to his house. Once they make it to Bo's house, Wade asks to use the restroom and Carly waits outside in Bo's truck. While Carly waits in the car outside of Bo's house, she discovers that the headlight of Bo's truck is broken, and realizes it is the same truck that bothered them the night before. She tries to warn Wade by blowing the car horn, but then the lights cut off inside the house and Wade is attacked by a mysterious figure and faints. Revealing his true intentions, Bo comes out and tries to harm Carly, but she flees. Bo begins chasing Carly, and she eventually ends up in the church and discovers that all the funeral guests she saw earlier are actually wax figures. She is eventually captured by Bo and imprisoned in the cellar of his gas station, taped to a chair with her lips glued together.
Wade's attacker is revealed to be Bo's twin brother, Vincent, a mute figure wearing a wax mask. He drags Wade into a room where he embalms him in wax. Nick and Dalton soon arrive at the town to look for their friends and, upon encountering Bo, Nick asks him whether he has seen Carly or Wade. Carly hears her brother and Bo talking above and breaks a part of the chair off and tries to get his attention by pushing her finger through a grate in the ground. Rather than alert her brother, Bo sees her finger and cuts off the tip of it with pliers. Carly screams of pain are muffled by her glued together lips, so in a panic she used the blood pouring from her open finger to weaken the glue. Bo begins to walk away with Nick and gets out a knife. At the same time, Carly finally manages to pry her lips open and screams for her brother. Nick hears her and stops Bo from stabbing him and then he runs into the gas station and locks all the doors, as he rushes to the rescue and frees Carly. Meanwhile, Dalton enters the House of Wax and sees Wade embalmed in wax. Wade is alive but paralyzed. Dalton tries to peel the wax off but is actually peeling Wade's skin off. Vincent then attacks Dalton, knocks him down a flight of stairs and decapitates him. The siblings discover that the rest of the town's population is dead, wax-preserved, and displayed to make it appear that the town actually has living residents. Meanwhile, Vincent goes to the campsite where Paige and Blake are located, and kills them.
Carly and Nick run to a sporting goods store and retrieve a crossbow; they are soon spotted by Bo and are nearly shot by his shotgun. They run to an old movie theater, where Bo nearly shoots Carly in the seats. Nick then fires an arrow at his arm. The siblings escape to the lobby, where Nick fires the second and last arrow at Bo's chest causing him to fall unconscious. They go back up to the house and go to Bo's truck which is awkwardly parked at the elevated road curb and look for Carly's cell phone but do not find it; so they go inside the house to hide. Then Vincent drives up to the house with Paige and Blake's dead bodies. Bo pulls out the arrow in his arm, and walks over to the window to find that Vincent has arrived with two more dead bodies and yells at him for leaving town. Later, Carly overhears snippets of conversation between the two brothers: Bo and Vincent were Siamese twins born to Dr. Victor and Trudy. They separated them at birth, leaving Vincent disfigured and slightly mentally deranged. But it turns out that Vincent, the outwardly abnormal one, was the "good" twin, and simply wanted to continue his mother's work, while Bo, the outwardly normal one, grew up violent and eventually became psychotic. Ever since their parents died, leaving the boys orphaned, Bo manipulated his simple-minded brother into murdering people, in order to use their bodies to make their wax figures more realistic.
Nick and Carly attempt an escape through the underground tunnel connecting Bo and Vincent's childhood home to the wax museum, but Vincent catches them. Nick then topples a vat of hot wax and the workshop begins to catch fire. The fire starts to consume the museum, slowly melting the entire house. Carly and Nick are discovered by Bo, and Nick faces off with him and is stabbed in the leg, but Carly saves him by hitting Bo several times on the head with a baseball bat. Vincent appears, escaping the fire in the basement workshop, and upon seeing Bo's lifeless body, flies into a rage. He leaves Nick behind and goes after Carly to the second floor of the increasingly softening and collapsing building. Carly hides in a bedroom but Vincent finds her. Carly tries to reason with him, saying that he was manipulated by Bo and doesn't have to keep killing people, but Vincent does not listen. Nick limps upstairs and tackles Vincent, tearing off his wax mask and revealing the one side of his face missing after being separated from his brother. Carly stabs Vincent to death under her brother's commands. As the wax floor melts underneath them, Vincent's body falls through and lands on top of his brother's corpse. Carly and Nick manage to dig their way out as the wax building melts.
The next morning, the smoke from the fire has drawn help from outside and police and rescue workers sift through evidence throughout the town. As Nick and Carly are sitting in an ambulance, the sheriff informs them that the town has been abandoned for a decade, since its sugar mill closed down, and it doesn't even appear on maps anymore. As the ambulance carries Carly and Nick away, the Sheriff hears over the radio that the Sinclair's actually had three sons, not two. Out of the ambulance window, Carly sees Lester, the roadkill collector, petting Bo and Vincent's dog and waving to Carly and Nick (leaving the audience to wonder if the seemingly innocent man is the third brother).
Alternate Opening
When Jennifer's car breaks down, a stranger shows up. The stranger then backs up his car and goes full speed. Jennifer runs off but then the stranger grabs her and throws her through window screen. Jennifer is killed and the stranger drives off. You can see the alternate opening on the Special Features on the DVD. The original opening was decided to be in the film. The role of Jennifer was played by Emma Lung.
Cast
- Elisha Cuthbert as Carly Jones
- Chad Michael Murray as Nick Jones
- Brian Van Holt as Bo Sinclair / Vincent Sinclair
- Paris Hilton as Paige Edwards
- Jared Padalecki as Wade
- Jon Abrahams as Dalton Chapman
- Robert Ri'chard as Blake
- Dragitsa Debert as Trudy Sinclair
- Thomas Adamson as Young Bo
- Murray Smith as Dr. Victor Sinclair
- Sam Harkess as Young Vincent
- Damon Herriman as Lester
- Andy Anderson as Sheriff
Lawsuit
In January 2006, it was announced by Warner Roadshow studio owners Village Theme Park Management and Warner Brothers Movie World Australia that 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 the 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 a field kept for Movie World for future projects.
Release
Box office
Opening in 3,111 theaters, the movie grossed $12 million in its first three days. Though most critics did not quite recommend the film, many of them acknowledged that it was well made and/or better than other recent similar films. House of Wax earned $68,766,121 worldwide. 46.6% of that total came from domestic receipts. House of Wax also earned $42,000,000 in VHS/DVD rentals.[2]
Soundtrack
The commercial soundtrack was released May 3, 2005 and a score soundtrack was released May 10, 2005 by Varese Sarabande.
References
- ^ a b "House of Wax (2005)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2007-06-17.
- ^ "House of Wax Box Office & Rental Numbers". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2007-06-17.