‘Intellectual property’ is increasingly regarded as a slur when it comes to creativity – the notion of a project only getting a green light if it’s some kind of name-brand is viewed as cutting originality off at the knees.
And sure, modern movie fans may feel that we’re all living through Seth Rogen’s nightmare in the Apple TV series The Studio as he’s pressured into bringing the Kool-Aid Man to the big screen. But adapting, recycling, and exploiting existing characters and titles for the next wave of audiences is nothing new in Hollywood. It’s been going on for decades.
More often than not, it’s done with an eye on the bottom line. Sometimes, however, it allows for the best of both worlds – a name on the poster that sparks a bit of recognition, a production on the screen that takes the nucleus of an old idea and transforms it into something new.
Fans of B-grade horror got a front-row seat to such a phenomenon in the early 2000s. In 2001, the late make-up effects artist Stan Winston joined forces with HBO and Cinemax to create ‘Creature Features’, five made-for-cable ‘tributes’ to monster movies produced by American International Pictures in the 1950s – while these new pictures would share the titles of AIP programmers like How To Make a Monster and The Day the World Ended, they’d bear almost no resemblance to the originals.
The results were, shall we say, mixed: She Creature, starring Carla Gugino and Rufus Sewell, is moody, sexy and gory fun, but Larry Clark’s Teenage Caveman is…well, let’s just say it’s the Kids and Ken Park filmmaker letting his freak flag fly in ways that felt gross even in the more permissive years of the early 21st century.
A slightly more upmarket version of this IP mining was taking place in the HQ of the newly established Dark Castle Entertainment, assembled in 1998 by Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler, who’d worked together throughout the ‘90s on the Tales From the Crypt TV series. In tribute to one of Zemeckis’ heroes, B-movie impresario William Castle, the trio had the idea to revamp Castle’s kitschy body of work with modern special effects, a splash more gore and a knowing wink to the camera.
However, only two of Castle’s productions – House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts – were reimagined before Dark Castle embarked on a proto-Blumhouse strategy of turning out relatively low-budget fare across a variety of crowd-pleasing genres – horror, of course, with the likes of Ghost Ship, Gothika and The Reaping but also crime (Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla), mystery (the Kate Beckinsale thriller Whiteout) and action (2010’s The Losers, a far superior men-on-a-mission romp to the same year’s Expendables).
Given its familiar title, one may be forgiven for believing Dark Castle’s 2005 release House of Wax, written by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes and directed by Spanish-born filmmaker Jaume Collet-Serra in his feature debut, was another return to the Castle well. The OG House, however, had no Castle involvement – it’s a Warner Bros title from 1953, starring genre legend Vincent Price as a demented, disfigured sculptor staging exhibitions of his murder victims coated in wax, itself a remake of the studio’s 1933 release Mystery of the Wax Museum, directed by the great Michael Curtiz of Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood fame. (And here you were, thinking do-overs were a new thing!)
The ’05 House of Wax forgoes fusty old museums in favor of an isolated backwoods town, which may distinguish it from its ’53 antecedent but instead aligns it with the early-2000s like of Jeepers Creepers, Wrong Turn and the Platinum Dunes take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, defined by a witty Redditor as “tank-top classics of the 2000s”. Indeed, it’s not so much the original House of Wax the remake resembles as the 1979 drive-in mainstay Tourist Trap, what with its blank-faced but eerily lifelike statues (mannequins in Trap, wax figures in House), off-the-beaten-track location, victim list of hot young things and a pair homicidal siblings (…or maybe not?).
But while we’re talking distinguishing features, what separates the ’05 House of Wax from Tourist Trap, which has a nifty horror-movie title and some eye-catching key art going for it and not much else, is someone behind the camera who really knows what they’re doing.
Over the last couple of decades, Collet-Serra has become one of the more reliable makers of mainstream genre entertainment (Orphan, The Shallows and four Liam Neeson bangers: Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night, and The Commuter) displaying great aptitude for setting of mood, pacing of story, and staging of action, all of which results in entertainment that is wholly engaging for the duration and genuinely satisfying at the conclusion.
(OK, there was a glitch moment where Collet-Serra was roped into traffic-cop duties for the Dwayne Johnson Industrial Complex, with Jungle Cruise and Black Adam two of the worst movies either man has their names attached to, but JCS appears to have course-corrected with the Netflix hit Carry-On.)
His chops were evident from the get-go, as House of Wax shows Collet-Serra’s facility with, and willingness to, putting the screws to his characters – and the audience. This isn’t always in terms of gruesomeness, even though his ventures into horror demonstrate he’s certainly not afraid to get bloody, but more in terms of unease and discomfort.
As the situation becomes more sinister and the stakes heighten for House of Wax’s young protagonists—six friends en route to a college football game unlucky enough to cross paths with a psycho who has an appreciation for bloody murder and wax sculpture—there’s no dead air between the setpiece scenes of stalking and slashing. The movie slowly, carefully ratchets up the tension. But House of Wax wasn’t sold on the prowess of its then-unknown director – it had its recognizable title, its promise of homicidal carnage and, most importantly, a cast of the finest young It Girls and Boys 2005 had to offer.
Elisha Cuthbert, hot off 24 and the teen comedy The Girl Next Door! Not one but two of Rory Gilmore’s love interests in Jared Padalecki and Chad Michael Murray! (Respectively, they played Cuthbert’s straight-arrow boyfriend and wayward brother, although many viewers have noted the two should have traded roles, given that Cuthbert’s chemistry with Murray gives the movie a weirdly kinky vibe.) Jon Abrahams from Meet the Parents and Scary Movie! And Robert Ri’chard from…some Nickelodeon show called Cousin Skeeter? (It ran four seasons, so I guess someone was watching.)
They’re all fine, and in some cases better than fine (Murray actually plays a short-fused prick pretty well). And they’re given a worthy predator in Brian Van Holt, who does the Lonesome Rhodes trick of using folksy charm to disguise something way darker and nastier – he’s very good indeed, and he strikes me as having had one of those Rick Dalton careers where he could easily have been, say, Josh Holloway had the cards fallen his way.
And then there’s Paris. Paris Hilton, the very first actor cast in the movie. The superstar socialite was far from a screen novice when she landed the role of Paige (a role for which the ever-reliable IMDb says Oscar winners Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly were sought – take that with a grain of salt), having briefly appeared on the big screen in Wonderland, The Cat in the Hat and Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!, but this would be more than a cameo or bit part, or even ‘being herself’ on the reality-TV series The Simple Life. And while Hilton doesn’t disgrace herself or diminish the film, her real contribution would be in the promotional side. Because House of Wax surmised that its audience was not there to see Paris act, it was there to see Paris die. So signs saying exactly that were placed in the window of chic West Hollywood boutique Kitson, and the limited-edition run of T-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘See Paris Die’ sold like hotcakes. What would today be regarded as kinda misogynistic and tasteless was, in 2005, just savvy marketing.
And that’s before we even look at the possible stylistic similarities between Hilton’s death scene, part of which is filmed by the killer on an old-school camcorder, and a certain sex tape leaked a year or two earlier. Let me tell you, in terms of sensitivity, we were off the rails at the turn of the century.Is it possible, however, that a willingness to roughly shove good taste to the side in favour of an attention-grabbing moment that would have the crowd cowering in fear, groaning in sympathy or chuckling sadistically is part of House of Wax’s enduring appeal? After all, it captures a particular moment in time – a quintessential 2005 state of mind, in this case – and does so with a timeless kind of huckster showmanship…almost like a well-made wax statue, one might say.
“House of Wax” is available for digital rental or purchase.
