Wax Sux

I have a soft spot for horror movies. I understand and accept that you have to be willing to see about 10 bad ones just to find one good one; sit through Darkness Falls, Boogeyman, They, Cursed... eventually, you'll find The Ring, Jeepers Creepers, and Dawn of the Dead. So, in this spirit, I went to see House of Wax yesterday with a small group of similarly minded people.

House of Wax had some good "set piece" moments of gore, and some neat concepts in there. And it was fun to see Elisha Cuthbert of 24 back in the role of "disaster magnet" for a couple hours. But anything remotely good about this movie was completely undermined by how phenomally stupid the characters were.

Be warned here, from this point on, there are SPOILERS, if you care. But trust me, you don't.

Like I said, the characters did dumb things. Not a few dumb things. These people were willfully, actively, and aggressively stupid. Among the whole lot of them, they did like one smart thing in the movie. Here are some examples:

We all know the horror movie cliche about the girl being chased by the killer and runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. (The brilliant movie Scream even calls this out.) Well, they do that cliche in this film -- in a house that is made of wax, and on fire at the time. So rather than try for the door, Elisha runs up the melting staircase instead. At least there weren't any cougars up there.

Elisha and her boyfriend are caught twice snooping around town, and are politely but creepily chastised by a local both times. You'd think this might dull their snooping spirits, but no. After being led into Creepy House (TM) to use a bathroom, the guy takes off wandering again into clear "Don't Get Here" territory. Guess how that turns out.

Another character comes across his buddy encased alive in wax, and starts picking at his face to get him out. All the buddy's layers of skin peel off with the wax, exposing blood and gore. But does the character go "oh my God!" and try to put it back or something? No! He goes, "oh my God!" and then keeps peeling!

Even the bad guys are not immune to moments of complete idiocy. When one gets shot through the arm by a crossbow bolt, he goes back to his house to extract it. He has the presence of mind to pull it through his arm rather than backing it out and tearing up his innards with the arrowhead -- but he decides for some reason not to clip off the end of the shaft before pulling it through. So he gets to endure the pain for like twice as long, and brings all the fletching right on through the hole in his arm as well. And then he grabs the pliers to clip off the end of another bolt stuck in his chest.

This is just the tip of a giant Stupid Iceberg. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't expecting a cinematic masterpiece here. But I think I could feel myself getting dumber just watching all this dumbness being inflicted on me.

In the end, about all I could take away from the movie was enjoying Paris Hilton's death scene, which me and my friends applauded and cheered in the theater.