Summer is headed our way, there’s actually a slate of incoming would-be blockbusters I’m excited for this year, and this is also the season when I like to look back thoughtfully and/or nostalgically at memorable summers of the past. As with so many things I get in the habit of doing annually, I’ve painted myself into a corner – I’ve already written about so many movies and so many specific years that it becomes harder to find fresh ground. But on the positive side I’ve been reviewing movies for so god damn long that I can look back at a summer from during my career and realize that enough time has passed that I really could look at most of those movies with new eyes.

Case in point: the summer of 2005. Doesn’t sound like that long ago when I say it. I was definitely a grown adult at the time, and I’d been a self-appointed film critic for 5+ years, even self-published a best-of collection. But I have run the numbers and though of course I’m open to corrections on this I do believe that particular year was 20 (twenty) whole years ago at this time.

I make no promises that this will be a review series imbued with great meaning. In some ways it was a time like now – there was a new pope, and one of the worst American presidents ever had somehow been re-elected, with predictably disastrous results. Maybe we’ll find the solution to all this by watching STEALTH again, who knows? But I do not foresee a particular theme I will dig into. I also intend, or at least hope, to go a little lighter than I usually do, a little less completist, just for the sake of not burning myself out. For me at that time the movie of the summer was definitely STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH, which I believe I saw four times in the theater. But I reviewed it at the time and then again nine years later in my Star Wars No Baggage Reviews series so I don’t think I’ll be writing another review of it, I’ll just be referring to it when relevant in other reviews. I think. We’ll see.

All I want to do is revisit some movies I haven’t seen in a long time and some other ones that I missed, and think about how movies and culture have changed in two decades. We’ll see where it goes.

Today we’ll look at where the horror genre was at in that moment. Let’s start with a brief recap of horror trends at the start of the century. 2000 gave us the last SCREAM movie for quite a few years and the last theatrical URBAN LEGENDS movie, but also FINAL DESTINATION, a new non-slasher version of that type of slick, youth-oriented mainstream horror. 2002 gave us CABIN FEVER, kind of a rowdier, gorier approach to that sort of thing. It also gave us Gore Verbinski’s THE RING, kicking off a cycle of American remakes of J-horror movies, as well as PG-13 ghost movies. But 2003 gave us FREDDY VS. JASON, a giant smash that ended up kind of being a farewell tour for the iconic slashers of the ‘80s, since they never figured out how to do a sequel. That same year, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and WRONG TURN took obvious inspiration from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE while Marcus Nispel did the official remake, kicking off the “oh shit, let’s remake everything” era of horror. And 2004 gave us the indie phenomenon SAW, the godfather of a wave of movies that would later be labelled “torture porn” by various scolds.

HOUSE OF WAX (released May 6, 2024) builds off of many of those trends. It’s a studio movie with a big-for-horror budget ($40 million) and an ensemble of good looking young stars, it uses the title of a famous old horror movie most young people wouldn’t know anyway, it has some obvious CHAIN SAW influence and a torture element. Though it was technically released in spring and though there is at least one way better horror movie we will be revisiting later I think it could be argued that this was the horror movie of the summer in the sense of being the more mainstream one that played for 34 weeks seemingly enjoyed by many during its moderate box office success.

It’s the fifth movie from Dark Castle Entertainment, the horror production company founded by Joel Silver, Gilbert Adler and Robert Zemeckis in 1998. Like their debut HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, it’s supposed to be a remake of a Vincent Price movie (itself a remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM), though it has very little to do with the original. At the time that bothered me, because I was less than a decade out from a formative 3-D screening of the original, but by now that grudge has dissolved. So maybe I’ll like it better this time, I told myself.

The ‘70s-set prologue is promising at least in the way it’s shot. Showing the abusive parents of the future killer only from the neck down, it has a novel look to it. Respect to cinematographer Stephen F. Windon (THE POSTMAN, FIRESTORM, DEEP BLUE SEA).

Years later in the present day of 2005, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert, who had completed her 3 seasons starring in 24, and had not yet done HE WAS A QUIET MAN) is leaving her job as a Gainesville Waffle House waitress for an internship at InStyle Magazine. Her best friend Paige (hotel heiress/reality star Paris Hilton) is supportive, but her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki, NEW YORK MINUTE) is being weird about moving to New York City with her. He prefers small town life.

Before they leave, the friend group is going on this two car caravan road trip to attend a college football game. The big controversy is that Paige’s boyfriend Blake (Robert Ri’chard, COACH CARTER) invited Carly’s bad boy ex-con twin brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray, MEGIDDO: THE OMEGA CODE 2), even though he’s an abrasive prick who does almost nothing but try to aggravate everybody else, even his sister who he falsely accuses of narcing him out when he did time for stealing a car.

Also on the trip is Dalton (Jon Abrahams, KIDS, THE FACULTY) who is that character from so many horror movies of that era whose whole thing is he has a minicam and is always taping everybody so it can keep cutting to shaky video footage all the time. I don’t know if it was BLAIR WITCH envy or what but directors were so fascinated with that shit back then, it was befuddling. I don’t know what they thought was so appealing about it.

They stop along the way to camp overnight, and suffer two very LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III-like scares:

1) a pickup truck that menacingly shines its headlights on them and 2) a body pit, though in this case it’s a pit of rotting roadkill collected by a local weirdo named Lester (Damon Herriman, fresh off of SON OF THE MASK). This was five years before he played Dewey Crowe on Justified, I didn’t know who Herriman was, but in retrospect yeah, of course he could play a Chain Saw family member. But he only got an off-brand one.

The group gets separated because Wade’s car breaks down. Lester overhears that he needs a fan belt and Wade and Carly reluctantly accept a ride into the dying town of Ambrose to see if the gas station has one. Lester says of the rotting animal smell in his truck, “Well, you can get used to anything if you’re around it long enough.” But they’re not around him long enough to get used to him, so they get creeped out and demand to be dropped off.

“Damn. Now I feel like a real asshole,” Wade says when he sees that they were just around the corner from Ambrose. Like, a 30 second walk.

It’s one of these towns that seems to be one block, with the gas station, a church, an old timey movie theater, and somehow Trudy’s World Famous House of Wax. A mechanic named Bo (Brian Van Holt, WINDTALKERS) gets on their case about interrupting a funeral to ask about the fan belt, so they explore the (closed) wax museum while they wait for him to be done. It’s dusty and doesn’t make sense as an attraction but it’s cool that the actual building is made of wax.

In an attempt to probe deep into the complex psychologies of the characters, there are scenes where Carly explains that because she was a goody-two-shoes Nick decided he had to be an “evil twin” and it ruined his life. But Bo has an actual evil twin named Vincent who wears a wax mask and bonks Wade over the head while he’s using the bathroom. Like I said, this was after SAW, and it was before HOSTEL, but it does seem of that era because the killer straps people to a chair and in one scene attaches a contraption to a guy’s head so he can’t move while he dumps hot wax on him to make him into a sculpture. (Which is cheating, isn’t it? It’s basically tracing.)

Though critics weren’t kind at the time, it’s always been my impression that HOUSE OF WAX is well-liked by actual horror fans. I partly get it. There is definitely a bunch of cool stuff in it. I like when Dalton finds the sculpture of Wade, who is still alive inside, and can only move his eyes. Dalton tries to pull the wax off to free him but the skin tears off with it. What a nightmare!

Then Vincent knocks Dalton down some spooky stairs, stabs two fancy-ass knives across his neck and drags the body so that the head cuts off, but still blinks. I bet that got a big reaction if you saw it with a crowd.

There’s a good gimmick that Carly and Nick go around town trying to find help but discover that it’s mostly populated with wax dummies. In fact the funeral they thought they walked in on is just a diorama in the church. Also the movie theater is crowded with dummies watching WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?. There’s one in the box office, one selling concessions, one as an usher holding a flashlight and shushing somebody. I bet there’s one in the projection booth reading a book and one in the restroom taking a shit – these people are real artists. They create a whole world.

The reveal that Bo and Vincent are formerly-conjoined twins and Vincent covers his disfigured face in wax is kind of cool, I guess. I don’t like Vincent’s long hair/blank mask look though. I feel like with the wax face you could have an iconic killer, but they made him generic.

The finale, with the whole House of Wax on fire and melting, is really cool – that much is undeniable. If I had been drawn into the story by characters who were either charismatic or believable or at least entertaining in their vapidity then this would’ve been a great pay off. But for me it never fully recovers from the first half where you sit around not enjoying the company of these uninteresting dipshits driving and camping. The stuff they threw in to make it seem like these people have lives outside of the movie (the internship, a bad relationship, a missed period) isn’t compelling and then never turns out to have any relevance or even be mentioned again. The “having characters who are coming from somewhere and going somewhere” part of the movie is extremely half-assed and unconvincing.

I cannot tell a lie, I like looking at Cuthbert, I will not contest her placement as #5 on FHM’s “Sexiest Women in the World” list that year. But the character isn’t allowed to be likable, she doesn’t turn out to be smart or funny, and she just doesn’t have the aura of inner strength needed for a captivating final girl. You’re talking to a guy who thinks the first couple FRIDAY THE 13THs have good enough characters, I’m not asking for the moon here. But Carly doesn’t cut it, and she’s way better than all the guy characters. The only kind of passable one is Paige, actually – she’s in the Tatum-in-SCREAM slot as the friend who’s kind of vulgar and funny but supportive and then gets a fanciful death.

From what I remember, Hilton being in this was its biggest draw. Her reality show The Simple Life had been on for 3 seasons, her leaked sex tape 1 Night in Paris had been released on home video the previous summer, she was to many of us the primary symbol of a new cultural low (still sinking all these years later) where people can be famous just for some combination of having a sex tape, growing up rich, and appearing to be dumb and superficial in a reality show (a format that at that time felt like it could be a fad and not necessarily an incurable affliction). All of these legitimate misgivings were definitely enhanced or overshadowed by just straight up misogyny. Therefore they came up with the slogan “SEE PARIS DIE – May 6.” it was on promo t-shirts (including pink girl-cut ones) and here you can see Hilton posing happily next to it on a window display at the premiere.

As mean-spirited as that may have been, she does in fact get a good death in the movie, which is an honor, and I seem to remember some amount of begrudging respect for her being willing to do that. She also won the worst supporting actress Razzie, so I give her credit for getting under the skin of people who suck. The movie won 3 of the 4 Teen Choice Awards it was nominated for, and was nominated for an MTV Movie Award, so it had some sort of recognition in pop culture at the time.

The soundtrack features My Chemical Romance, Disturbed, Marilyn Manson, others. A song that’s on it that I like is “Spitfire” by The Prodigy (from that album with Juliette Lewis doing most of the vocals).

The script is by Chad and Carey Hayes, the twin brothers who were in RAD and later wrote THE CONJURING and ANNABELLE. Obviously being twins relates to this movie’s heroes and villains, but mainly I mention it so I can inform you they were in a Doublemint gum commercial.

I think people still like HOUSE OF WAX, and it got to have a Scream Factory special edition. But I think historically it’s most notable as the directorial debut of Jaume Collet-Serra. He followed it with GOAL II: LIVING THE DREAM (2007), which I haven’t seen, and then ORPHAN (2009), which won me over to his cause. After that he became one of the main Liam Neeson guys (UNKNOWN, NON-STOP, RUN ALL NIGHT and THE COMMUTER) and briefly a The Rock guy (JUNGLE CRUISE, BLACK ADAM). He has returned to horror two other times – THE SHALLOWS in 2016 and THE WOMAN IN THE YARD a few weeks ago. Does he have too much personality to be called a journeyman? I’m not sure. But you could certainly do worse, even if I don’t love this one.

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2005 shit: Blake is really excited about his GPS, they have crude flip phones, a haircut is compared to He-Man’s (which was before these kids’ time but maybe they would’ve heard of it), there’s an in-joke about Paris Hilton’s sex tape (they mistakenly think Paige is going down on Blake and shoot it in night vision).

Problematic?: Dalton’s outfit is called “Elton John but more gay” – mildly homophobic, maybe. Definitely tame compared to what you would’ve seen a few years earlier.

Other 2005 horror remakes: THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, DARK WATER

Other 2005 slasher movies: CHAOS, CRY WOLF, REEKER, SANTA’S SLAY, VENOM, WOLF CREEK

Other notable 2005 horror movies: THE DESCENT, DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST, HOSTEL (played TIFF only), LAND OF THE DEAD, MORTUARY, SAW II, THE SKELETON KEY, URBAN LEGENDS: BLOODY MARY, another one we’ll be revisiting in August