DVD review: Multiple homicide, double standard

If you’ve never seen a movie where the character walks backwards towards the edge of the frame only to be surprised by someone standing behind them, “House of Wax,” now out on DVD from Warner Home Video, may seem like cutting-edge cinema. Of course you would still have to sit through 45 minutes of lazy exposition designed to make characters with the depth of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog seem lifelike before their inevitable waxing. For, you know, contrast.

Paris Hilton getting killed is really the only thing they’ve got here, and the filmmakers know it. I found myself checking my watch all the way past the hour mark waiting for her to get it. The casting of Hilton, an “actress” totally untroubled by talent or good taste, goes to one of the central weaknesses of this film.

Good horror flicks scare by inverting the norms of reality and violating the boundaries of safety that society establishes. Thus, actually frightening films like “Psycho,” John Carpenter’s first “Halloween,” “Rosemary’s Baby” or “28 Days Later” really work on their audiences deep down. The realest thing “House of Wax” has going for it is real heiress Hilton “playing” a dumb teen, surrounded by a bunch of other dumb teens who have all kinds of fancy toys (like a Cadillac pick-up truck) that few grown-ups could afford. Call it aspirational horror. A better movie might successfully find a consumerist parable in the killing of these cardboard dummies, but director Jaume ColletSerra is no George Romero, and this is definitely no “Dawn of The Dead.”

Watching “House of Wax” got me to thinking (surprisingly enough). How is it that a film with zero redeeming qualities other than copious gore and gruesome violence can get an R rating from the MPAA and something like Atom Egoyan’s “Where The Truth Lies” or the Ewan McGregor starrer “Young Adam” gets slapped with NC17s for some semi-explicit sex?