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By: Rachel Deahl
HOUSE OF WAX
 Recalling the gruesome, swift and nauseating recent remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the similarly styled and themed update on the 1953 Vincent Price spook fest of the same name, "The House of Wax" is a fine popcorn screamer. Giving the audience what they so desperately want - namely lots of blood intermingled with shots of Paris Hilton doing strip teases and running from a psychotic serial killer in her skivvies - this remake, which stumbles occasionally along the way, works up to a wildly entertaining finale in which the titular material is perfectly milked for all of its cinematic power as an entity which can be horrifying, dangerous and beautiful all at the time. While the film itself may fall short of such brilliance, it's good, nasty celluloid.
Putting a 21st twist on the original,
"House of Wax" depicts its crazed wax artist as a serial killer
sculpting his masterpieces not out of corpse but, rather, living human
beings. Like Leatherface in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - who would
remove the facial skin of his victims (sometimes while they were alive)
and then slap the flesh mask on his own mug - the psycho killer in
"House of Wax" incapacitates, or his kills, his victims and then covers
them with wax to create a living doll, of sorts. The resulting
monstrosity is a wax figure with a human interior: a skeleton, muscles,
organs, blood, etc.
And, since few things are more frightening
than backwater hicks when it comes to horror movies (blame "Deliverance,"
I suppose), "House of Wax" is also rife with those. Though the film's
vermin-ridden Louisiana town isn't as grotesque as the in-bred Texas
hamlet where Leatherface and his clan resided, there's plenty of
nastiness in the swampy surroundings.
After a group of teens get waylaid en route
to a big college football game in Baton Rouge - they pull off the side
of the ride to camp after hitting a detour - they're lured into a
desolate and strange town where the main attraction is a long-shuttered
wax museum called The House of Wax. After the teens begin falling prey
to Vincent, the deranged wax artist who has populated the museum and the
town with his humanoid figures, the twin brother-sister pair on the
trip, played by Elisha Cuthbert and Chad
Michael Murray, start fighting
back.
The most notable cast addition though is
Paris Hilton, who makes her big screen debut in the film. Thankfully
Hilton's lines are kept to a minimum while her real-life persona is
milked for most of its potential; mocking her other major screen role,
opposite her ex-boyfriend in the sex "home video" that leaked to the
world, the heiress keeps unwittingly being taped by another teen on the
trip, who is filming everyone with his hand-held. And, without ruining
any surprises, Hilton's on-screen demise is sure to satisfy fans that
find her, well, hard to like.
Finally "House of Wax," which
is filled with creepier versions of already creepy things, wax figures,
skillfully incorporates its real stars into the pictures. As Cuthbert
and Michael Murray run around the deserted town, appropriately being
upstaged by the inanimate wax dummies that surround them - one of the
best scenes in the film involves the duo hiding an abandoned theater,
filled with wax moviegoers, where "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" is
playing on repeat -- "House of Wax" does a fine job of bringing together
past and present eras, and film genres, to produce an adroit B-movie
that recalls slasher flicks and campy zombie movies at once.
Grade: B+
KICKING & SCREAMING
 Not to be confused with the 1995 Whit Stillman-esque film of the same name about post-grads trying to map out their lives, the 2005 Kicking and Screaming offers a juicy comedic scenario for Will Ferrell: A role as a deranged soccer dad. Despite the nifty plot, which revolves around Ferrell trying desperately to live out a missed life as a winning athlete, Kicking and Screaming relies too heavily on the contorted facial expressions and subdued insanity of its star and far too little on good writing and character development.
In this classic Oedipal tale, which
unravels on a suburban soccer field, Ferrell stars as Phil, the
non-athletic son of a competitive sporting goods store mogul, played by
Robert Duvall. A cursed loser, who was reared by a
testosterone-fueled and winning-obsessed parent - Duvall's elderly pop,
Buck, constantly reminds his son he can beat him at everything from
darts to grilling -- Ferrell's docile dad gets a chance at proving his
worth when he's unexpectedly thrust into the role of soccer coach for
his son's team.
Stuck with a cast of unskilled tots, whose
team is in dead last after the first two games of the season, Phil
seizes on his new coaching job as a way to finally beat his father, who
happens to be coaching the best team in the league. But, after running a
few aimless and mostly fruitless practices, Ferrell's coach turns to his
father's neighbor, and arch-rival, Mike Ditka (who plays himself
in the film).
For reasons unexplained Ditka and Buck have
an entrenched hatred for one another - Ditka blows leaves onto Buck's
yard - and Phile exploits this when he turns to the Superbowl-winning
former Bears head coach. And, despite the fact that Ditka knows even
less about the game of soccer than Phil, the two attempt to turn their
underdog team into winners.
Despite the fact that Kicking and
Screaming begins with the odd premise that Phil's life got
extremely worse when his dad had a second time at practically the same
time he gave birth to his own son, the film doesn't make much of the odd
family tree. The focus of the film is on the rivalry between father and
son, and Duvall's young soccer star, who plays on his winning team, The
Gladiators, is all but left out of the plot.
Hoping to turn the vision of Will Ferrell
as a deranged coach into comedy gold, Kicking and Screaming never
provides good enough scenarios, or lines, for the laughs to gel.
Plotlines about Ferrell becoming addicted to coffee and telling the kids
to break the other teams' collarbones ultimately fall flat, as Ferrell
does his crazy routine in a void.
Attempting to work up to a more gruesome
version of the family-friendly Rodney Dangerfield vehicle
Ladybugs in which the comic had the ill-fated idea of dressing his
step-son up as a girl into to turn his all-girl squad into winners,
Kicking and Screaming never gels the way the film did and, instead,
regurgitates the feel good message of all bland sports film -- it's
about how you play not whether you win, blah, blah.\
Grade: C+ |
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