house of wax pic

In my campaign review for House of Wax back in 2005 I wrote: 

The trailers showed what they needed to show and work alright considering their target audience. I was surprised to see, though, that they didn’t play up Hilton’s role a tad more. The curiosity to see her bomb on-screen is going to drive people to this movie that otherwise might not have gone to the theater. It’s a solid campaign that contains two tremendous stretches. It’s now up to the studios to jump on these and take them to the next level.

Well….I watched it finally. And I have to say that while I didn’t really address it in my summation of the campaign the trailer in particular really oversells the thrills and chills that are in the movie. Not that there aren’t plenty of both in the movie but there’s also a lot of just walking around and trying to figure things out. So it makes it look like a straight-up non-stop slasher movie when in fact it’s slightly – and I can’t believe I’m going to say this – better than that. Yes, it has all the tropes of the genre but it’s actually not a bad story.

As to my comment about Hilton’s presence in the marketing…no, that’s about right. She’s not great but she’s in the movie about as much as the campaign suggests. Cuthbert is of course the main character and Hilton her friend in the story and that’s shown pretty well it turns out.