When Robert Zemeckis helped establish Dark Castle Pictures, it appeared the aim was to transform bargain-basement 1950s mad-scientist pictures into mid-budget baroque schlock starring shameless Oscar-winning hams such as Geoffrey Rush (The House on Haunted Hill) and F Murray Abraham (Thir13en Ghosts).
The original House of Wax, a 3D extravaganza directed by André De Toth in 1953, is a bit classier than Dark Castle's previous source material, but the plot - deformed Vincent Price dips maidens in boiling wax and then displays the resulting exhibits in his museum - seems ideally suited for the mini-studio's purposes. So what happened? This year's House of Wax, all rutting teens and gap-toothed hicks, has been turned into yet another witless retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The House of Wax itself (in a nice touch, now actually made of wax) has been relocated from the big city to a remote Louisiana town hidden from the world at the wrong end of an impassable dirt track. A huddle of youths, only one of whom, sadly, is played by Paris Hilton, is, after a long, boring, shag-filled build-up, embalmed and mounted by the museum's deranged proprietors.
With no chocolate-voiced thespians to hand, the villains this time are gothic twins, one an ill-tempered hunk, the other pale and deranged, both played energetically enough by somebody called Brian Van Holt.
To be fair, the film, once it gets going, is both brutally efficient and efficiently brutal. Fingers are chopped off, lips are glued together and tendons are snipped with a sadistic glee that does the first-time director, the young Spaniard Jaume Collet-Serra, enormous credit.
And then there is the fabulous Miss Hilton. The fun-loving heiress, whose most notable previous performance was seen mainly on laptops, finds herself saddled with the unenviable role of the brighter heroine's promiscuous best pal, the girl most likely to end up in more than one piece. Sure enough, a spike is eventually forced from one side of her skull to the other. Anybody who has heard Paris speak will be surprised at the amount of resistance the weapon encounters on its path.
