house of wax

In 1974, a woman is making a wax sculpture in the kitchen while her son eats breakfast in his highchair. Her husband enters with another son who is shouting and kicking. The boy is forced into a highchair and strapped in place by his father. After being strapped and taped to his chair by his mother, he scratches her hand. She then slaps her child across the face.

In 2005, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki) with her friend Paige (Paris Hilton) and Paige's boyfriend Blake (Robert Ri'chard) are on their way to a highly anticipated football game in Louisiana. Eventually, Carly's delinquent twin brother, Nick (Chad Michael Murray) and his friend Dalton (Jon Abrahams) also join them. Night falls and the group decides to set up camp for the night. The campsite is later visited by a stranger in a pickup truck who shines his lights at the campsite, but refuses to leave or address them until Nick smashes a headlight with a bottle. The next morning, Carly and Paige go exploring, Carly falls down a hill and lands in deer remains and sees a fake hand. Wade's car's fan belt is found to be damaged. The group meets a disheveled, rural man named Lester (Damon Herriman), who offers to drive Carly and Wade to the nearby town of Ambrose to get a new fan belt, while the rest of them go to the football game.

The two arrive at Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town. Unable to find an attendant at the auto mechanics shop, they wander into the church, disrupting a funeral. There, they meet a mechanic named Bo (Brian Van Holt), who offers to sell them a fan belt after the funeral. While waiting for the services to end, Carly and Wade visit the wax museum, which itself is made of wax and is the central feature of the town. Afterward, they follow Bo to his house to find a proper fan belt. While there, Wade is crippled and stabbed by a long-haired man with a wax facemask named Vincent. Bo grabs Carly, super glues her lips shut and locks her in a cellar. Dalton and Nick arrive in Ambrose to look for Carly and Wade. Vincent meanwhile strips and shaves Wade, then puts him in a chair with a metal contraption on his head which pins his eyes open. Vincent pulls a couple of levers which showers the immobile Wade with hot wax.

While Nick questions Bo if he has seen his sister, Carly tries signaling for help by sticking her finger out of a vent, trying to get her brother's attention. Bo notices her finger sticking out, and snips the tip off with a pair of dikes. Carly falls screaming in pain and later pries her lips open in order to scream for help. Nick, hearing her screams, knocks Bo out after he attacks him. Nick locks Bo out of the station and finds his sister, and the two escape. Dalton finds Wade who is alive but he is unable to move or talk because he is immobilized by the layer of wax covering his body. Dalton peels off the wax but realizes he is peeling Wade's skin off. Vincent finds Dalton and accidentally slashes Wade's face with a knife. Wade dies from shock. Vincent later chases and decapitates Dalton, killing him too. Meanwhile, Nick and Carly realize that the wax figures are actually real people – Bo and Vincent have been trapping people in wax in order for the figures to look more realistic. Bo finds Carly and Nick at the theatre, but they escape after Nick shoots Bo with a crossbow.

Vincent goes to their camp site, kills Blake, and chases Paige to an abandoned sugar mill. After being stabbed in the foot, Paige hides in a car but Vincent finds her, and impales her in the head with a spear. As Vincent brings Blake and Paige's bodies Carly and Nick overhear Bo and Vincent talking and discovers that they were conjoined twins. Their father, a doctor, performed a controversial procedure to separate the brothers. The surgery left half of Vincent's face badly deformed, forcing him to wear a wax mask for the rest of his life. Nick and Carly find the basement where they find Dalton's body covered in wax. Nick tries to remove the contraption but ends up twisting his head. Bo and Vincent find and chase Carly and Nick to the House of Wax. Nick and Carly unintentionally set the House of Wax on fire, causing the entire structure to melt. Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat, which enrages Vincent. Vincent chases Nick and Carly on to the balcony but Carly and Nick stab Vincent in the hip, thus killing him. As the House of Wax melts from the fire, the room in which all three are in collapses, causing Vincent to land on Bo's corpse. Nick and Carly escape the fiery House of Wax and breathlessly watch as it melts to the ground.

The ambulance and police arrive at daybreak, reporting that Ambrose has been abandoned for ten years when the local sugar mill failed. The policeman (Andy Anderson) reveals that there was a third son of Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair who happens to be Lester. Nick and Carly are then taken to hospital. As the ambulance leaves, Carly sees Lester looking and smiling at her while sitting on his truck with Vincent's dog, Sandwich.

10/10