Shownotes
It's Wax Season here on Box Office Pulp! Just in time for the release of her new book Millennial Nasties, we welcome back friend of the show Ariel Powers-Schaub, and what better to discuss than one of the nastiest of the era, Disney's Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra's House of Wax. For BOP n' A Movie's second trip to the Dark Castle, this commentary track goes back to a time when everybody wanted that Leatherface money, and you could market a film based on watching Paris Hilton die. Maligned by many genre fans on release, the most 2005 movie of all time also boasts some of the best body horror the decade, practical effects that are still chilling to behold, and the last great location from a studio once dedicated to keeping sets alive. Grab a seat (made of wax) and listen to the first of our love letters (of wax) to an oft-overlooked sub-genre (it's wax).
Pick up Ariel's best-selling book, MILLENNIAL NASTIES: ANALYZING A DECADE OF BRUTAL HORROR FILM VIOLENCE here https://encyclopocalypse.com/products/millennial-nasties or wherever you get books!
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Transcripts
How do you do?
Speaker:The box office pulp board feels it would be a little unkind to present this podcast without just a word of friendly warning.
Speaker:We're about to unfold a cinematic commentary track
Speaker:made by a group of men who sought to create a podcast after their own ravings without reckoning upon God.
Speaker:It is one of the strangest tales ever told.
Speaker:It deals with 3 great mysteries of the Internet, analysis,
Speaker:observation,
Speaker:and deconstruction.
Speaker:I think it will thrill you. It may shock you.
Speaker:It might even
Speaker:horrify you.
Speaker:So, if any of you feel you'd not care to subject your nerves to such a strain,
Speaker:now is your chance
Speaker:to
Speaker:well, we've warned you.
Speaker:Now, to pause and refresh. For your convenience, we have an attractive refreshment stand in the lobby with buttered popcorn, golden good and hot from the popper. Your favorite candies, wholesome and rich. Plus, delicious Doctor Pepper. So bright and brazen with a tang and tingle unmatched by any other beverage.
Speaker:Enjoy an ice cold Doctor Pepper at our beverage stand right now. And then return to fully appreciate to this bop and a movie commentary track. Enjoy.
Speaker:Anyone need a hand?
Speaker:Conversation? We didn't get the worst. We missed out on Ed Gein.
Speaker:Did find out Chad Michael Murray played,
Speaker:Ed Bundy. So Yeah. That's fun. Kind of fun? Fun. Is that in a way, is that better or worse than,
Speaker:than Jeremy Renner playing Dahmer?
Speaker:That's it. I would say it's a good one. William Forsythe as Gacy just makes sense. This is what we're talking about tonight.
Speaker:We'll get to the movie when we get to the movie. We have serial killers to talk about.
Speaker:Alright.
Speaker:I'll bring us into an actual intro here, I guess.
Speaker:Hello, and welcome to Box Office Pulp, your once saw podcast for movies, Madness, Moxie, and tonight, a bop and a movie with a curious likeness
Speaker:to a real commentary,
Speaker:or possibly one of wax. Who can tell? I'm your host, Cody. Joining me today are my co host, Mike. Say hello, Mike. I'm gonna postulate that this movie is actually a remake
Speaker:of House of Wax Yes. Horace Trap Yes. And the Treehouse of Horror episode where Bart has an evil Siamese twin.
Speaker:Oh.
Speaker:I'm gonna say we can embrace.
Speaker:There is 100%
Speaker:a
Speaker:scars on the wrong side
Speaker:seen in this movie.
Speaker:Oh, gosh. You're right. This dude is very Hugo coded.
Speaker:That's too good of a line just to pass by, but I'm gonna pass by it anyways because we can't be here all night.
Speaker:Say hello, Jamie.
Speaker:The biggest difference between watching this movie whenever it came out and rewatching it for the commentary
Speaker:is watching it as a teenager, I saw the eyebrow waxing. I was like, that's not that bad.
Speaker:I cringed from top to bottom this time because
Speaker:no. No. Even in the best case scenario, eyebrow waxing is torture.
Speaker:I'm glad you didn't end up with, like, some weird sense of nostalgia for it, though.
Speaker:Oh, god.
Speaker:Alright. And on that note, we also have with us a very special guest.
Speaker:Everyone say hello to Ariel Powers-Schaub.
Speaker:Fresh author release of her book, which I think means we can now call you a best selling author. You can legally.
Speaker:I technically
Speaker:said yes. On all the business cards. Congratulations.
Speaker:Not to not to say we were part of the bump here in popularity,
Speaker:but I I really, I owe it all to you guys.
Speaker:And I can get you back by doing this episode for free. There we go. Now it's all the tax man.
Speaker:I like the idea that congratulations. You're a best selling author. Your prize is getting to you commentary for the House of Wax remake. It's kinda like a Twilight Zone. Like, you actually died in the plane crash and didn't tell.
Speaker:Hey, man. If I die and heaven is just doing commentary on House of Wax, I'm doing okay.
Speaker:It could be worse. Movie. Actually, yeah. I I enjoyed it a lot, originally in my head, and then I rewatched it and went, oh, thank god. I didn't pick a turkey for, like, the start of wax month. A thing I should mention to our viewers, it's wax month now. Enjoy. Mhmm. Box office cult movie's doing a series of wax related horror, whether you want it or not.
Speaker:You're getting waxed, baby. It's all waxed all the time. It's really, like, waxed 2 months, and we were supposed to go through September October. Really, it's gonna be October November, so enjoy your turkey while let's say it's a wax commentary. They they they put stuffing in the wax figures. Right? Is that the connective tissue? Yes. Perfect. Now it all makes sense. Anyways, in case, folks at home have not put this together, because there's been a lot of wax talk and there's a lot of wax movies, specifically tonight, we're talking about,
Speaker:Dark Castle Entertainment's House of Wax remake
Speaker:from, 2005.
Speaker:So, if you wanna watch along with us, everyone go scurry. Go get your DVDs. I think Screen Factory put out a collector's edition Blu ray a couple years ago. Go pop that guy in. We'll give you a countdown in just a moment here. But we're going to be watching that, talking over it,
Speaker:and if anyone wants to drink along with me, tonight's drink of the evening is the Lonely Souls. So to make this, you're gonna need the following ingredients, 1 ounce of gin,
Speaker:a half ounce of lemon juice, a half ounce of lime juice, 1 and 3 quarters ounce tonic water, and 1 and 3 quarters ounce lemon soda. Not that much to it. So you're gonna put those ingredients minus tonic water and the soda into a mixing jar with ice, stir that till it gets cold, add that to a goblet, if you have a goblet. I personally am drinking mine out of a tiki glass that looks like the severed head of Vincent Price, but whatever you have available.
Speaker:You can get that nice and cold, put it in the glass, and then you're gonna wanna add the tonic water and lemon soda. If you add that earlier in stir, you're gonna lose out on the carbonation. It ruins the whole drink, folks.
Speaker:It's like drinking
Speaker:a kinda spiked,
Speaker:lemon,
Speaker:starry. Very refreshing. Actually, pretty low in alcohol because it's only an ounce of gin. Highly recommended, folks. If you want a nonalcoholic
Speaker:option to drink along with me, I'll just be drinking hot melted wax.
Speaker:It does wonders for the sake of they call that.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:It's garnished with one cassette tape. Just don't break me with that.
Speaker:Alright. Well,
Speaker:yeah. I was gonna talk more about the drinks meeting, but whatever. You're gonna figure it out as we get out of the way. I'm sorry. I fucked it up. No. No. That was me. I just did not have flow. I liked your joke a lot better than mine.
Speaker:So if everyone is ready and raring to go, do you guys all have your copies of House of Wax pulled up? Mhmm. Alright. Mike, do you wanna do us the honors of counting us down? I will count to 3. After I say 3, we will press play.
Speaker:123.
Speaker:Hey. Mine's busted. This is Vincent Price.
Speaker:I'd like to say, 1st and foremost, I have not, at this point in recording, seen the original House of Wax, which we probably will be covering later on
Speaker:in this series, but that's okay because I don't know if anyone making this movie has seen
Speaker:House of Wax. And I have not.
Speaker:Wow. I love the original House of Wax. Well, even Right.
Speaker:Even, like, the the earlier, you know, Mystery of the Wax Museum and all kinds of stuff. Wax Outside of this, I haven't seen any of the movies we're gonna be, covering for this series. It's exciting. That's gonna be a treat for you, Jamie.
Speaker:I I do honestly really love House of Wax. Even better, it's one of those movies that was filmed in 3 d, and now no one watches in 3 d. So you just get to see really gimmicky 2 d, which I personally do love.
Speaker:Gotta love it.
Speaker:Yeah. It was all also, I just wanna say one of my favorite things about the original,
Speaker:the Vincent Price one is filmed in 3 d by someone who is blind in one eye, so
Speaker:it doesn't really work. Nope. And the gimmicks haven't changed. The same shit they were pulling for Friday 13th 3 d.
Speaker:Same shit they were pulling in the, 20 tens.
Speaker:Just look at my yo yo.
Speaker:Oh, man. That's the they said that was, like, the biggest success of the movie. People loved the, the paddleboard scene so much. I'm not even joking. I was listening to the commentary the other night. People went ape for it.
Speaker:Okay. I'm gonna try and run through some movie facts here very, very fast to set the stage.
Speaker:This movie was directed by
Speaker:I'm gonna butcher this because it's Jame, j a u m e. Am I doing my Spanish correctly? Jame Jomme Colette Serra.
Speaker:This is his first film as a feature director. He started as a commercial guy, but then moved in to,
Speaker:do this at the request of Joel Silver, who really liked his commercial and TV work.
Speaker:But he'd go on after this to do Orphan and the Shallows.
Speaker:And you might even know him from his Dwayne Johnson movies. He did Jungle Cruise and Black Adam back to back. I did not realize that until, like, earlier researching this. Like, god. What a weird career trajectory.
Speaker:Pays the bills.
Speaker:This movie was written by Chad Hayes and Carrie Hayes, and you might have guessed it from the names identical twin brothers and writing partners, which I think makes a lot of sense when you look at what this whole movie is about.
Speaker:Before this, they'd worked on a lot of TV stuff,
Speaker:but after this movie came out with a success, they did a bunch of horror screenplays,
Speaker:The Reaping, Conjuring 1 and 2, The Crucifixion,
Speaker:and then most recently, The Turning in 2020.
Speaker:Oh, I like The Turning.
Speaker:That one, that was a weird Wait. No. I didn't. That one sucked.
Speaker:Okay. I got confused.
Speaker:Sorry. I
Speaker:it's I thought you were you were thinking of buying a blinds or something.
Speaker:The soundtrack to that one was really good. I'll give him that. The score is really good. I'm so sorry. So good they used it for the conjuring 3.
Speaker:Oh, no. I'm go I'm not going fast enough. We're already to the title.
Speaker:I love the not 20th century Fox logo. That always throws me off. Right.
Speaker:So our cast here, we got Eliza Cuthbert as Carly Jones.
Speaker:I was a little confused because on our Wiki page, they deemed her a scream queen because she was an extra in Are You Afraid of the Dark. She was in captivity,
Speaker:and she starred in 24. And I'm like, I don't think that's enough to consider a string stretching. Queen.
Speaker:Anyways, we also have Chad Michael Murray as Nick Jones. We have Jared Padalecki as Wade Felton. You know him from Friday 13th, the remake.
Speaker:And 300 some episodes of Supernatural.
Speaker:And, of course,
Speaker:Paris Hilton as Paige Edwards in a bit of a fun stunt casting.
Speaker:More to say on that comparison. Take a moment to thank Paris Hilton for releasing her first album in 18 years this week in order to promote our House of Wax commentary.
Speaker:Yes. I'm glad that they were coming through. It was nice of them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:So, Ariel, in your book, you actually mentioned the kind of the William Castle esque ad promotion
Speaker:that went into this movie of just using Paris Hilton and seeing her die as the main draw to get people in theaters.
Speaker:Yes. Apparently, that didn't do a great job because the movie did okay at the box office, but not, like, huge, huge gobs of money. Mhmm.
Speaker:As far as winning castle gimmicks go, where would you rank that?
Speaker:Not good. Didn't age well.
Speaker:Getting the culture fired up about killing a young woman is is not the vibe.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:She's not even bad in the movie. It would be one thing if she can't manage to read her lines. She's really good. Yeah. Arguably, the only truly likable character.
Speaker:Yes. Makes a I agree.
Speaker:It makes a kind of a weird blend too because
Speaker:the ad promotion makes it seem like she's getting a weird cameo where she's gonna walk in and get stabbed immediately.
Speaker:But she is just as big of character pretty much as anyone else in the supporting group.
Speaker:She gets, like, her own stalking scene and pretty graphic murder compared to a lot of the other ones.
Speaker:This is, like, not just a cameo. This is a pretty elevated role. Yes.
Speaker:So a little insulting for the marketing guys to be writing this off in a way as, oh, everyone hates Paris Hilton. Let's just
Speaker:make the campaign. We want her dead.
Speaker:Yeah. And then they do a few,
Speaker:sex tape jokes in this movie too that I'll point out as they come up because as a culture, we couldn't let that go either. So
Speaker:Yeah. That is something that confused me about this movie for years until seeing you point that out in your books. Like, oh, I've never till seeing you point that out in your books. Like, oh, I've never connected the dots there.
Speaker:Ew.
Speaker:And they all feel very conked in.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Oh, if you watch the special features on the DVD,
Speaker:like, you can watch,
Speaker:the cast.
Speaker:It's a it's an Easter egg. It's it's actually in the menu.
Speaker:You can watch the cast I'm gonna come and get right to us. You'll watch the cast watching outtakes and kind of riffing on how,
Speaker:cringey some of the dialogue is and kinda
Speaker:making fun of how silly the movie is as it as it goes along. And every time they get to weird stuff like this, you can hear Paris kind of go,
Speaker:I was told it wasn't going to be like this in the edit. Like, she was very upset about the blowjob joke later on because that came across way grosser than she had agreed to shoot it.
Speaker:And there seems to be a lot of stuff like that that was going on. Mhmm. One thing you don't necessarily think about in movie making is
Speaker:if a performance seems really odd and bad, it's not necessarily because the actor doesn't know what they're doing.
Speaker:That that could be a lot of choices from the director or editor. And in this case, it's unfortunate because they're kinda stacking
Speaker:the movie against this actor who did a you know, the rest of the scenes, pretty good job with the material she had. Yeah.
Speaker:I'll maintain I've never seen Paris Hilton suck in anything
Speaker:other than roles where they're just asking her to be Paris Hilton.
Speaker:Mhmm.
Speaker:I think we were denied a a few at least a few more roles with Paris Hilton as a novelty celebrity back in the 2000.
Speaker:I know. We should have some more. She needs a Lindsay Lohan style revival, I think. Yes.
Speaker:Yeah. Where my sweet heads at?
Speaker:House of Wax 2 where she comes back. She's pretty much fine this time, but has an eye patch. Yeah.
Speaker:Couple more fun facts here. Our cinematography
Speaker:is by Steven f Winden. He's the go to DP for Justin Lin, so, pretty much all the Fast and the Furious movies. He did Tokyo Drift, Fast 5, Fast and Furious 6, Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, f 9,
Speaker:and Fast X.
Speaker:But he's also done Sonic the Hedgehog, Star Trek Beyond, GI Joe Retaliation, the Tuxedo, the Patriot,
Speaker:kind of a big hodgepodge of big action films and some comedies.
Speaker:So this is a little bit of a departure for his usual style.
Speaker:But I guess actually, I'm looking at the rest of my list. He also did Deep Blue Sea, Anaconda,
Speaker:Hunt for the Blood Orchid,
Speaker:Before Wax Wax. So he he had some prep for this.
Speaker:Our music is by John Otman. I really wanted to cover Otman as soon as we started because we had those beautiful strings.
Speaker:Too late, folks. We're just gonna have to go back later and turn my voice off so they're gonna hear his beautiful, beautiful music.
Speaker:More to talk about him later if I remember. It's always hard because you can't hear the music on the commentary.
Speaker:Our editing is by Joel Negron.
Speaker:This was released May 6, 2005. The budget was about $40,000,000.
Speaker:It made 70,000,000 at the box office. And here's a weird nostalgia thing. Because this was the early 2000, the film made more money on VHS and DVD rentals than it did at the domestic box office.
Speaker:It made it nice. I I can get a House of Wax VHS?
Speaker:It made 32,000,000 in theaters and $42,000,000
Speaker:in rentals and sales.
Speaker:Just imagine we only got Hellboy 2 because of that pretty much. Like, it broke even at the box office, and then the DVD sales were insane. So the studio said, yeah. Here's another $100,000,000. Go nuts.
Speaker:Good times. I miss that. Now with streaming, you don't really have that secondary market to bounce back on the same way.
Speaker:I'm sorry. I got distracted. I heard Interpol, and I got, just a flashback to my teens.
Speaker:What?
Speaker:Do people not listen to Interpol when they're, like, you know, teenagers? Is that just me?
Speaker:I can't speak for everybody.
Speaker:We listen to very different types of music, Cody. Alright.
Speaker:You guys are missing out.
Speaker:You know what I always think when I watch this movie? This is too many people for a road trip.
Speaker:Oh, it really is. Too many. You got 2 cars?
Speaker:And they have to sort of that weird too because, like, they only Too far no noise on no end. Like, it seems wasteful.
Speaker:So this is a little bit of clunkiness in the script.
Speaker:It it almost feels like this should be exclusive, the story of kids who wandered into the wrong area and they shouldn't have. Kinda like the original Texas Chain Saw Master. They're they're intruding upon Leatherface as a layer, and that's why they have to die.
Speaker:This one, they're kind of intruding, but they're also
Speaker:partially lured in, like the fact that, you know, one of the vehicles is disabled, and we find out at the end, spoilers for 20 minutes or an hour from now,
Speaker:the 3rd brother had had kind of lured them to the city in the first place.
Speaker:It it feels like they couldn't quite decide which direction they wanted to go in. Were these kids being punished for being nosy and disrespectful,
Speaker:or were they being punished,
Speaker:just for not being locals?
Speaker:I don't think it was a wrong turn.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:I would go as far as to say that this movie's biggest problem is I think most of the third act should probably or most of the first act should probably go.
Speaker:It really does change gears at a certain point. We have so much drama upfront between all the characters.
Speaker:Everyone has an issue.
Speaker:They really set up the the brother character as just being a mega douche. Like, he literally starts the movie by kicking a homeless man's change cup over and telling him how to tell him goth homeless man I've always been perplexed by.
Speaker:So it feels like we're gonna be working through his issues as the movie goes on, But at a certain point, it just kinda flips a switch and says, you know what?
Speaker:The only thing that matters is these siblings are working together to survive. So
Speaker:maybe that's the larger point. Their their individual issues don't matter, and survival's the only important thing. But it feels like they're doing a lot of legwork
Speaker:for personal dramatic setups that don't pay off. I have a feeling characters.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That movie sometimes forgets about most of the characters.
Speaker:I have a feeling if we ask any of the creatives, hey, what were you trying to say about twins?
Speaker:They would ask us to leave.
Speaker:They would say, how did you get this address?
Speaker:Please get off our lawns.
Speaker:There well and I kind of agree, Mike. There's so much twin imagery in here. We have kind of the competing foils in
Speaker:you know, the actual twins of the movie are the bad guys, but our siblings here are,
Speaker:you know, they're good foils or good reflections in a way.
Speaker:So that has to be saying something. It's a hell of a setup. And the fact that it's written by twins feels like they have to be working out something of their own past in this movie. It's a lot of imagery, and there's a lot of speaking on how there's always supposed to be, like, a good twin and a bad twin.
Speaker:And
Speaker:Chad here,
Speaker:who might his character's name might as well be Chad. It's a very Chad character.
Speaker:You find out later, like, he didn't do the thing that he got in trouble for. He took the fall for it, and so he's
Speaker:not actually like a bad twin. And, of course, there's the
Speaker:the Hugo twist later on with,
Speaker:with Vincent's, and
Speaker:but that it really only works if it turns out Eliza Cuthbert is actually a serial killer.
Speaker:I see your point. If she would been, you know, on the surface a good person, but underneath more troubled
Speaker:in a way to immediately reflect what's happening with the bad guys,
Speaker:that would be good. That would that would say a lot more in the movie. There's a lot of heavy themes being handled by a screenplay
Speaker:where one character says, dude, did you crap your pants? And the other says, I don't know. Maybe.
Speaker:It was Pa Kent.
Speaker:Nice. I it's it you can tell this is a movie of its time because a character can't wear a a red baseball cap anymore. Oh, yeah. Unless you wanna make a very specific point.
Speaker:Which honestly is in Florida. So
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Well, it does bleed into the kind of that found footage
Speaker:veneer
Speaker:a couple of times, but that gets kinda dropped. And they make a big deal out of the camera at the end of the movie. So they they wanted you to be thinking of that, I guess, but it does immediately kind of date the film,
Speaker:which I don't want, actually. I'm perfectly happy when a film is, like, nope. I'm of its time. I Yeah.
Speaker:I like it more when they're giving you something to grab onto of its period. If they try and make it feel like it's timeless, it never works. It always just feels dated
Speaker:in a different, weirder, cheaper way.
Speaker:Honestly, it just makes me really hungry for some kind of backroom
Speaker:style analog horror
Speaker:movie,
Speaker:set in an abandoned wax museum that writes itself.
Speaker:Yeah. Well wax movies.
Speaker:You should watch tourist trap.
Speaker:No? Okay.
Speaker:Never mind.
Speaker:Don't kill it.
Speaker:Very convincing, Jamie.
Speaker:I adore Terrorist Trap. I was actually glad, you brought that up because
Speaker:that is
Speaker:something
Speaker:I learned about this movie
Speaker:in the research before,
Speaker:we began our our wax series
Speaker:that made
Speaker:so much about this
Speaker:fall into place. That's all that's always confused me, which is
Speaker:this is never really intended to be a remake of House of Wax. It's mostly a remake of Tourist
Speaker:Trap. And once you look at it through that lens, it's like, oh, no. I get it. Okay. I like this movie.
Speaker:And that Simpsons episode.
Speaker:Definitely that one. Now that you've mentioned that, Mike, I'm never gonna get the Hugo stuff out of my head.
Speaker:Tommy Wiseau is Hugo.
Speaker:So I was I was talking to a friend who grew up in the South recently, and she mentioned that it really bothers her watching a lot of horror movies, like Wrong Turn,
Speaker:just for the attitudes they have against, like,
Speaker:Southern America.
Speaker:Like, the the automatic idea of, oh, it's just a bunch of rednecks or people that want to hurt you if you go down here. Like, you don't belong,
Speaker:which,
Speaker:you know, since she grew up in, like, Virginia, it's like, this feels weird. This feels like they're insulting my family, and we're all very nice people. I don't understand why we have this reputation.
Speaker:And do you see that throughout this movie so much, like, when they
Speaker:meet in the next scene, the
Speaker:kind of trash collector guy, how they immediately distrust him because he's just kinda dirty and grubby. Even though he's being kinda friendly with them, he's offering him a trip and all this other stuff. He's being actually kind of nice. Very nice. He just wants to show off his knives, his knives, and, you know
Speaker:Yeah. They go behind the molding the whole time.
Speaker:It's Chris Elliott. I'm kinda
Speaker:I'm kinda two minds of this subject where
Speaker:on the one hand,
Speaker:stereotypes like that do do very real psychological
Speaker:damage
Speaker:to people in rural areas,
Speaker:and that does end up becoming kind of a self fulfilling prophecy with, you know, a lot of people being told, we don't like you, so you grow up thinking, okay. I have to be defensive. I have to,
Speaker:you know, be distrustful of people coming down here.
Speaker:On the other hand,
Speaker:I live in rural Alabama, and there are some scary motherfuckers down there, so I can't say that's entirely inaccurate
Speaker:of betrayal.
Speaker:Like, I grew up down here, and I've had some weird,
Speaker:dark dirt road interactions with with, people around here that could have come out of a movie like one of these.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's weird that, as Northerners,
Speaker:Ariel, we just get a free pass even though I think we're producing more serial killers than, like, any other region of the country. Because you're cold. Oh, yeah. It's because we're friendly Hicks.
Speaker:We're friendly Hicks with casseroles, so they leave us alone.
Speaker:I just wanted to say, like, we made Gene and all Ted Bundy and all these other guys. Everyone was like, nah. Nah. The worst we get in movies is, like, Fargo. Yeah.
Speaker:Oh, fucking love Fargo.
Speaker:When I have to explain to people not from the United States whereabouts I live, I'm like, have you seen Fargo?
Speaker:Close enough.
Speaker:Which season?
Speaker:But, I think you said something, Jamie, about a self fulfilling prophecy. And I I had that note I had a note that mentioned that, and I was like, oh, brain connection.
Speaker:Mhmm.
Speaker:We kinda see that with the twins at the very start to kick the movie off. Right? We've got the 2 kids in the high chair, the one is being told he is the good twin, the other brother is the one that acts up and he because he's, you know, acting up.
Speaker:But psychologically, what that would do to the children of just, hey, if you always treat one as a monster, he's gonna grow up as the monster.
Speaker:Of course, the twist here is both of them are going to be killers. So there's no real
Speaker:good here. It's just surface level,
Speaker:which I think we get quite a bit in the movie. I don't know if that's an intentional theme, but it it does seem to be referring back to superficial goodness quite a bit. Yeah. There's also an odd thing.
Speaker:God, serial killer Walker here.
Speaker:There's also an odd thing
Speaker:where she wants to move to New York City. He doesn't really want to, and then he dies.
Speaker:So I guess she's free to move to New York City, and and moving to New York City is
Speaker:the big city is treated the same way in,
Speaker:he gets his salsa from New York City. Like, it's that style of talking about moving to a big city. It's very weird to me. You sure do like small towns.
Speaker:So going back to how we mentioned before, like, it's insane that they just had 2 cars for this whole movie. Like, that's too many characters.
Speaker:Just the idea that they had all this camping stuff with them, and they're going to a football game, but they had bought ticket. Everything about this stresses me out. I don't know if they were in the situation. You're not going to a situation. Stock or something. Right? This is so much effort. Yeah. And they're late. Like, they woke they didn't set an alarm. Everything about these people, if I was with them in real life, would make me on edge. I'd be so upset right now. It never comes across like they traveled that far
Speaker:until they stopped to camp, though.
Speaker:Yeah. It stresses me out now, especially, like, who I am as a person now. But I feel like in college, I could have ended up on this trip with my fly by the seat of my pants friends.
Speaker:Like,
Speaker:one time we drove 6 hours to a concert and we didn't have a plan of a place to stay, like, just no one had thought about it, so we just drove back
Speaker:overnight.
Speaker:It was the stupidest thing I've ever done, but I'm like, yeah. I kinda see how this could happen.
Speaker:Horrors of a world without Airbnb.
Speaker:Truly.
Speaker:I do I do love that charger, though.
Speaker:It's a sweet car. American Muscle. I'm like,
Speaker:Toretto,
Speaker:Dominic Toretto.
Speaker:Family.
Speaker:Family.
Speaker:Did they did they ever explain why
Speaker:Vincent and company decided to only sabotage one car?
Speaker:To make it a fair fight.
Speaker:Somewhere the screenwriters
Speaker:just shot up.
Speaker:Oh, god.
Speaker:Because I've always run you in a 15 year old hell.
Speaker:Well, there's so much in the movie, like, to separate the characters. I think it practically makes sense. It's like a character saying, we need to split up in the haunted house. Like, wait. No. We don't. But there's There's a lot of splitting up in this movie. Yeah. It gives us more to do if we can separate the characters. So I'm assuming it has functional purpose. But
Speaker:They might have been offended that somebody was driving that beautiful Charger on a 2 track in the woods.
Speaker:Like, it was a freaking jig. Insulting. Yeah. I'm upset by it. Yep.
Speaker:No consideration. Oh, rats and suspension.
Speaker:They just pull off the road and decide this is a campground. And luckily, they found, like, a wide open field.
Speaker:Yeah. Camping with no preparation sounds terrible.
Speaker:I I mean, I had that dream in college, but I also had all my camping stuff, like, packed with me and, like, several campsites I knew I could make it in case of, like, I don't feel like driving home tonight. That's the closest one.
Speaker:That's kinda cool. I never I never did that, but that would have been smart, especially that one. Oh, I had the dream. I didn't actually do it.
Speaker:You realize I sort of were like, no, I actually don't wanna sleep on the ground. I don't have to dream.
Speaker:My bad. I can't sleep on the ground like that anymore.
Speaker:I just got a camping cot for, the music fest I'm going to this weekend. I'm very excited to not sleep on the floor for once. There you go. Hotel just doesn't have enough beds for everybody, so I always end up with, like, an inflatable mattress on the ground and
Speaker:It eats you very much.
Speaker:It just sinks and sinks, and then it makes weird scraping noises as you turn around. So you gotta, like, lay like a mummy. Your life just immediately becomes a Seinfeld episode.
Speaker:Probiotics. Shows life always does.
Speaker:Yeah. Oh, also,
Speaker:shout out to Damon Harriman
Speaker:giving the best performance in the film as the apotheosis
Speaker:of all red herring rednecks.
Speaker:Oh, it's so good.
Speaker:It's like the woods
Speaker:created him, like Swamp Thing.
Speaker:Oh, yes.
Speaker:I think it's the teeth. Like, he always has his kinda his front lip pulled back a little bit. He's doing a lot of jaw acting. Yeah. He's got a lot of jaw going on. He's also a super strength based on throwing a full size deer with one arm.
Speaker:Yeah, man. Bothers me. If you've ever had to drag a deer out of the road, you know that his fucking super strength.
Speaker:Yep. That's either 2 person job or you get a sled.
Speaker:Right. Yes. Exactly. Or you drive around it.
Speaker:He's talking like he's gotta dip in his front lip. You know? Yeah. I'm obsessed with that. That's that's, like, one of the hallmarks
Speaker:of a specific
Speaker:kind of silly southern accent when you have the invisible
Speaker:jaw in your mouth. Yep.
Speaker:Because so many people overhear southern people talking like that. They don't realize that's because of dip. They think it's just some kind of speech impediment,
Speaker:and they internalize that.
Speaker:It's a very purposeful way to not accidentally
Speaker:swallow a bunch of fiberglass.
Speaker:In high school, I dated the guy who dipped. It was very gross.
Speaker:Oh.
Speaker:One of the one of the worst experiences I've ever had
Speaker:at work was back whenever I was a cashier, I had a customer ask if he could use
Speaker:my trash can. I said, okay.
Speaker:And then he just leaned over and spat us a mouthful of jaw,
Speaker:and there, I almost quit that day. Yeah. You would have been justified, the smell.
Speaker:That happened to me at work once too. I was so confused because I couldn't understand what the guy was saying.
Speaker:And then he got frustrated, and he, like, he eventually, like, he just found a like, the the garbage can outside and spit into that, and he came in, oh, he's trying to spit. I'm like, well, okay. Well, you know, I'm not gonna use it. I can't smoke crack in here, sir.
Speaker:Your majesty.
Speaker:And here we get the transformation
Speaker:to the final girl white tank top of the 2000.
Speaker:An essential uniform.
Speaker:Although this one does kinda twist around because instead of even lovers, it's just,
Speaker:brother, sister.
Speaker:Mhmm.
Speaker:Mhmm. Yes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah. There's nothing there's no, like, weird accidental
Speaker:overtones that are happening. Mike, this is no Folgers coffee ad. This is completely different. God.
Speaker:I know the ad you're talking about.
Speaker:Oh oh, god. Oh, god. I'm so glad I can talk about this. You guys know why that ad exists? No. No.
Speaker:Oh my god.
Speaker:That was supposed to be something beautiful
Speaker:that was devised by an ad executive
Speaker:who, if I remember correctly, like, had a son who was stationed overseas. So she had the idea of, oh, let's do a commercial where a son comes home from Iraq and surprises his mom, and then they make coffee.
Speaker:And then that got put through the machine.
Speaker:Mhmm. And by the time they got to filming it, they had removed Iraq because that upsets people.
Speaker:So instead, he's coming home from the Peace Corps,
Speaker:and having a mom there would still be too emotional, so they changed it to a sister but didn't change the dialogue.
Speaker:So when by the time they're shooting it, everyone's like, this is weird. We have to do this.
Speaker:And that's how you get the Folgers incest commercial.
Speaker:Something beautiful
Speaker:was And they don't. Telephoned game into incest.
Speaker:It's like it's like something that would happen in, like, a parody about how wacky Hollywood is. Yes. We we turned it into beach nuts.
Speaker:It's like they don't talk like humans.
Speaker:She's like, hello. I'm your sister. Hello, brother.
Speaker:I'm sister.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I'm going to go get the laundry. I hope I do not get suck.
Speaker:Oh, no. Stuck in dishwater. Send help.
Speaker:Oh my god.
Speaker:There's
Speaker:7 different types of deep cuts going on.
Speaker:Anyway, that's actually nice. Back to the movie for a second. Yeah. It's a good knife.
Speaker:I actually sympathize with him quite a bit when he's like, you can get used to anything. I don't even know his smell anymore because I grew up in a paper mill town and you forget yeah. You forget that it smells very bad to everyone else.
Speaker:It's just it smells like a fart all the time, so you stop smelling the fart.
Speaker:My dad worked at the paper mill for a long time, and he had my mom made him leave his boots outside
Speaker:so that the smell wouldn't come in the house.
Speaker:We never did that for my dad, but,
Speaker:but we were apparently just so nose blind it didn't matter. I can barely smell paint for the same reason because of my dad doing industrial painting my whole childhood.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It is funny what you can get used to. Yeah.
Speaker:So, yeah, I feel like I'm on this guy's side. I'm actually thinking like, oh, this seems like a person I might have grown up with. He doesn't seem that bad. The truck's a little over the top, but come on. I like him. I'd call him. Yeah. He's offering a free ride. I'm stuck in the middle of the woods. Hell, yeah, brother. Let's go. Yeah. Never thought about this. I I it's my head, Kenna, now. This character is the reason Tucker and Dale versus evil exists.
Speaker:Oh. But what's his story?
Speaker:Guys. He just wanted to go to his cabin and have a nice weekend, and these teens are being dicks.
Speaker:Started killing themselves all over my property.
Speaker:Oh, man. That is a great movie for parties. If folks at home are looking for something for Halloween,
Speaker:Tucker and Dale versus Evil will kill if you have a party. It's it's gonna work for everyone.
Speaker:I feel almost feel like I got,
Speaker:yeah. Talk about millennial nasties. I feel like Tucker and Dale is almost like the watchmen
Speaker:of that era, like and here's where we deconstruct
Speaker:everything and put a put a bow on it for the next generation.
Speaker:I'm not familiar with watchmen, but I I sounds like I agree with you.
Speaker:In theory, yes.
Speaker:Okay. So this is this kinda blows my mind that, you know, back in the 2000,
Speaker:you need a house of wax? Why don't we build an entire city around the house?
Speaker:So, obviously, they don't go into all these buildings, but they did build, like, a little town out in the woods to film this entire thing, which is fantastic. It's so cool.
Speaker:It also, in my mind, makes this movie feel like it is
Speaker:the sequel that never should have come out to the original House of Wax.
Speaker:Because, like, the first one would be The House of Wax where all the horror is contained in the titular House of Wax.
Speaker:This movie, they have an entire city full of wax people they're just running around in. This is Town of Wax.
Speaker:Town of Wax.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So it just The city of the living wax is a much better title.
Speaker:Damn it, Jamie. That's why you gotta workshop these things. I gotta take them to you first.
Speaker:Honestly, it's just thinking about, like, this being, like, going back to what Jamie was talking about with, like, the watchmen of millennial nasties.
Speaker:I actually think
Speaker:as much as, like, this movie is
Speaker:good, like, on its own, like, as what it is,
Speaker:but an actual house of wax remake
Speaker:that went into, like, the themes from the original
Speaker:butts
Speaker:applied to, like, what horror movies had become
Speaker:at that point in the decade.
Speaker:Especially, like, post Texas chainsaw massacre, which is is kind of, like,
Speaker:trying to ride the wave of. Mhmm. The whole idea of, like, displaying art and people being really into the macabre and, like, make creating it to, like, the extreme by
Speaker:actually having the audience be part of
Speaker:the
Speaker:the art form of macabre that is present in the original film.
Speaker:That would've actually been a really interesting way to deconstruct what had been going on in horror at the time and the, quote, unquote, torture porn that was happening.
Speaker:Especially with so many thing like, so many themes already present in the Saw franchise that would lend themselves so have a late of that kind of thing. Yeah.
Speaker:Well, Koopa Stank told us it's not too late. It's never too late.
Speaker:It's been a while since we've had a good wax movie. I think we're due. I think so.
Speaker:I'm
Speaker:gonna say it's been a long time since we had a good Hoobastank.
Speaker:Okay. This is a real hellospecific
Speaker:memory, but do you guys remember when Denny's had the Hooberito?
Speaker:They had, like, a rock and roll menu.
Speaker:Oh, god. It's just coming back to me. Oh, god. They have, like, a rock and roll menu in the 2000, and the only item I remember on it was the Hooberito,
Speaker:names as such for Hoobastank.
Speaker:And this is real, and you can Google it, folks.
Speaker:God. I was trying to find other people who remember it. The word Hoobastank
Speaker:got said so casually for a couple of years there.
Speaker:Sure did.
Speaker:So one one thing that,
Speaker:bums me out here is Beau comes out, and he's all you know, his hair is slicked back. He's wearing a black suit. He's apparently just leaving a funeral, which you find out later, is not really quite true.
Speaker:This is a fairly distinct look for our psycho killer, especially one that's happening kind of in a backwoods hidden town.
Speaker:And then, eventually, he just kinda transforms back into, like, a gas station attendant look. And it's it's a bummer to me because it kinda goes more generic when it's like, no, you got something good right here. This is
Speaker:different than expected. It's kinda sleek. I like the gas station right now.
Speaker:Yes. I like that I like that more.
Speaker:And I like the contrast too because there's you know, he comes out, and he first, he's angry, and then he's smooth and apologetic and nice enough.
Speaker:And we kinda get these twists from where he looks slick,
Speaker:then he can't pin him down even in the moment where he's, like, trying to tie his shoe and he ends up cutting off Elijah Cuspert's finger. You know, like, he's he's trying to be one guy, but he can't help himself from being who he truly is underneath that.
Speaker:So I I kind of like this costume for that behavior a little more.
Speaker:Almost as if he's a twin of himself.
Speaker:Oh, we got twins all the way down. Twins on twins.
Speaker:Well Well that's also what the movie is trying to say, but it has to not mind. Dishwasher.
Speaker:I would
Speaker:say remake this and just, like, up that ante and do it purposely.
Speaker:Really weird people out. I'd watch it, man. I'd watch it for sure.
Speaker:And to go back to the idea of people revealing who they are underneath as the movie goes.
Speaker:Like, when this movie starts, the boyfriend doesn't seem that bad. Like, he's trying to deal with this
Speaker:dickish brother. He's, you know, generally being nice and and maybe a little standoff ship points. The more we go into the scene, the more of a dick he is. So by the time he dies, you're like, he probably had it coming.
Speaker:Yeah. It's a nice turn.
Speaker:Yeah. You don't really expect that it's not a direct heel turn. And considering our bad guy so far was introduced kicking a homeless dude, you just really assume this guy in comparison has to be a better guy.
Speaker:It's a sign to break up with your high school sweetheart before you go your separate ways to your college or whatnot. Just don't don't it's not gonna work. Break up. No. If he's not going with you to New York City, cancel it. Yeah. Shut it down.
Speaker:Sorry. It always looks like he's making her out of cheese.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:I'm very uncomfortable by the, sculpting of the nipple.
Speaker:It's making me very uncomfortable. Can't imagine why.
Speaker:Do we do we get to play therapist now? Tell me more about these nipples, Mike.
Speaker:Know who had a nipple belt? Ed Gein. That's true. It's true. Very true. Why did you cut the wall with a knife, man?
Speaker:When would you ever do that if you weren't at the house of wax?
Speaker:This
Speaker:place should just be melting in the sun.
Speaker:It's a really bad idea to have in their names.
Speaker:It's a really bad idea to have an entire building made of wax in the middle of the south. In the south. Yeah. For goodness sake. Bonkers.
Speaker:And I I will say too, this goes back to the point I was saying earlier.
Speaker:They really hammer how disrespectful this guy is, which makes it seem like it's the catalyst for all the violence that happens. No. But they undercut that again with, you know, the sabotaging of the car and the the kind of jerking them around and getting them to the city.
Speaker:They didn't even need any of that. This guy was a big enough jerk in going to, you know, drag people there and play around with stuff he shouldn't be.
Speaker:That's reason enough.
Speaker:They just need 1 Harbinger character to, like, literally say, like, oh, we don't go down that road,
Speaker:and you woulda had it.
Speaker:Yeah. Well, it's a shame that it takes us over 30 minutes to get to the House of Wax, considering, let's face it, it's the star of the movie. This is
Speaker:such an extraordinary
Speaker:set. It looks incredible, doesn't it? Yeah. And the fact that it sells,
Speaker:that it's all made of wax, once you once you once that's revealed, that doesn't feel silly despite the fact that it is incredibly silly.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I love the entire city. The the design they chose for it, it looks
Speaker:retro, but in no way does it remind me of,
Speaker:like, cities of my childhood or pictures of earlier versions of the city I grew up, any of that stuff. It looks very unique and distinct for what it is. It feels like an art deco
Speaker:neo futurist small town, which doesn't make any sense for the location they're in, and it creates, like, a weird uncanny valley kind of type of feeling. They they go into it on some of the special features on the Stream Disc,
Speaker:but they were looking for small towns to kind of, like, lift wholesale and recreate.
Speaker:And I I think most of the city was actually based on an existing town,
Speaker:but it wasn't in the United States. I'm I'm blanking right now if it was, like, in Africa or Europe or somewhere, but it it was
Speaker:not on this continent. And they they saw that. It was, like, a 19 fifties thing, a town that flourished very briefly and then fell apart.
Speaker:And they're like, this is perfect. We can just lift this whole thing and just drop it into
Speaker:Southern America and call it good. They just went to that,
Speaker:fake town that Henry Ford built in South America. Like, perfect.
Speaker:This was filmed in Australia.
Speaker:Did they lift the town from Australia?
Speaker:That would make sense. No. No. Uruguay. I'm gonna say Uruguay. Yeah. Lock it in.
Speaker:They actually did make it out of wax, and then the whole thing melted, so they had to start over.
Speaker:Oh, god. Like, looking at the timeline, this really was the last
Speaker:of the traditional,
Speaker:Dark Castle
Speaker:location
Speaker:movies.
Speaker:And it's really obvious to see why with this not being a bigger hit. And
Speaker:God knows the production
Speaker:budget on this thing
Speaker:was insane.
Speaker:Mhmm. And,
Speaker:it's
Speaker:it's so sad. I guess, yeah, the the dark castle had such a good run for a couple of movies of
Speaker:just being set porn
Speaker:in an era where that was dying
Speaker:so hard.
Speaker:The sets are the best characters in the movie.
Speaker:That's true. I root for the house of wax.
Speaker:Fuck them up, House of Wax. Get those yuggies.
Speaker:Smush them real good.
Speaker:One thing that gets me and this this is obviously not a great talking point. No. But I'm gonna forget it otherwise.
Speaker:This was, again, 2005. So they were just starting to meddle more with CGI effects in the movie, but they knew they weren't good enough to just have the, you know, the house be entirely CGI or something like that, or giant extensions of it be CGI.
Speaker:So they went to some really interesting lengths to composite all of the film together. Like, they actually had miniatures that were made of wax, and then they would speed up that footage and then composite it into the actors
Speaker:so you get the melting effects around them
Speaker:and all the little tricks they had to do to make actual wax melting so they didn't have to CGI it. And then just do a little bit of extension here and there. It looks pretty good considering the age of the film and the kind of primitive nature of,
Speaker:CGI at the time.
Speaker:I pretty much had to invent
Speaker:a new way for wax to melt on film because they immediately
Speaker:realized in preproduction
Speaker:that welting matte well, well, melting wax does not look interesting on film at all. No.
Speaker:Well, yeah, there's a speed thing. Like, they they had heat guns on stuff they said, and then they would really have to, like, crank it up because it took too long for any of the wax to really melt in an interesting way. And at a certain point, you're just putting your actors in an inferno
Speaker:for an effect that's not that great.
Speaker:That's actually a plot point in the original House of Wax, so that's why they didn't call this a remake.
Speaker:Yeah. It's it's bonkers,
Speaker:going back and looking at a film made in
Speaker:in 2005 and hearing the director say,
Speaker:now,
Speaker:the practical effects are becoming a thing of the past, and we wanna preserve
Speaker:that. So we're trying to stay away from CGI as much as possible.
Speaker:It feels like we've we've been hearing those words for half of our lifetimes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They really wrote the script on that one to deviate from it. It does drive me a little crazy because so many big box office movies now are using extensive CGI, and then in their campaign say, no. This was practical.
Speaker:And then they're completely subbed out in in postproduction, redone with CGI effects. There's really, really good CGI effects so you don't notice.
Speaker:So I'll say that this is the scene,
Speaker:in the
Speaker:commentary where the actors just burst into laughter and go, what the fuck are any of us saying?
Speaker:How hard do you think it is to film a peeing scene like that?
Speaker:Now you just gotta stand next to the other guy pretending to pee for, like, 5 hours as they get the shot right? The behind the scenes footage of them just
Speaker:holding
Speaker:tubes
Speaker:exhausted
Speaker:is very surreal.
Speaker:Just wondering, why in the context of the film are we directly next to each other?
Speaker:So you can high 5. Come on.
Speaker:Sword fight.
Speaker:We're bonding.
Speaker:That's what buds do in the woods.
Speaker:That's what I heard.
Speaker:That's one of the the things that's a little frustrating is you get
Speaker:so close
Speaker:to a legit
Speaker:gay subtext
Speaker:subplot.
Speaker:But like everything else in the movie, it just kind of peters out. It's like, no. No.
Speaker:Get more obvious with it. Right now, that's the most compelling thing.
Speaker:Have you all seen Captivity
Speaker:with Elisha Cuthbert?
Speaker:No. I haven't. Although, apparently, it's what made her a scream queen according to Wikipedia.
Speaker:It's very gnarly. I love it. It's gnarly.
Speaker:I haven't seen it in a really long time. I'm really liking it. Oh, god. People forget. I mean, Elisha Cuthbert got her start on 24
Speaker:where up until, like, they rewrote her character to be,
Speaker:you know, a a bigger part of the show. Her job was to run and scream
Speaker:for, like, 3 seasons. So that's pretty much in her blood.
Speaker:I was a little surprised going through her filmography
Speaker:and not nearly as many
Speaker:credits as I was expecting. I thought, like, there would have been, like, 3 movies a year in the 2000 where they're just putting her into every single thing they could get.
Speaker:That was a career that, like, really quickly burned out as far as, like, being the it girl
Speaker:went.
Speaker:It's really weird.
Speaker:I blame girl next door.
Speaker:That's it. I wanna revisit the idea of captivity and how nasty that one is. I maybe shouldn't be surprised considering,
Speaker:part of the idea of doing this was, oh, hey. House of Wax is in Millennial Nasties.
Speaker:Then rewatching this one and going, oh, this one is surprisingly nasty. For some reason, the title of the book didn't Hello. Clue me in.
Speaker:But I forgot that it's
Speaker:fair like, not even fairly mean spirited. It is mean spirited pretty much the whole way. Same. It's really good. Yeah.
Speaker:And a way that the Dark Castle movies aren't, like, there's a certain,
Speaker:wink at the camera goofiness
Speaker:to all of them. This and Gothica
Speaker:are pitch black films. Yeah.
Speaker:And it's it's I don't know. Part of it that throws me off is,
Speaker:you know, Joel Silver, he was one of the big producers that put all these together, and he was a big part of, like, Tales From the Crypt. And I was just expected his movies in the horror realm
Speaker:were gonna have a little bit of that attitude where they could be very dark, but there's
Speaker:kind of a winking comedy edge like you were saying to them. And this one doesn't really hit that. I don't know. Maybe I just don't have a dark enough sense of humor because there's there's parts of this that are like, oh, shit. That is like a legit, really good disturbing bit.
Speaker:It's not even like a little goofy crypt keeper laugh would to save this one. This is a whole different thing.
Speaker:Yeah. Like, you put this next to 13 ghosts. They are not you know, 13 ghosts is fun.
Speaker:Yeah. You know? And, like, I like this movie. I think it's fun, but it is not like 13 Ghosts is fun. You know?
Speaker:Exactly. Yeah. It's a movie that's fun for us.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:My brain is broken. So
Speaker:But that also saves the movie too. Because like we said, this takes a long time to really get going. We're about 44 and a half minutes in, and we haven't quite hit stride. We've gotten the cool spooky wax house. We're slowly getting into our villains and ratcheting things up.
Speaker:Once it starts going, then it's like, okay. Yeah. This is a different movie from what we started with. And when it gets mean, that's when it gets interesting.
Speaker:I do like that this movie takes its time. Like, I think it's too many people for a road trip,
Speaker:but I like that it's people with inner lives,
Speaker:and it takes its time. Like, it doesn't just feel so much like
Speaker:we're dropped into the middle of a slasher camp. You know? Right. Yeah. I think that's kinda neat for 2005.
Speaker:I'll give it credit. Even though I don't care for the characters in this movie, they are
Speaker:characters
Speaker:who are relatively distinct, which it it was slim pickings for character development in these movies back in the day.
Speaker:Very much so. Like, I remember
Speaker:watching these movies to write millennial nasties.
Speaker:Like, it was a relief to get to House of Wax because I was like, oh,
Speaker:some story.
Speaker:I can take I can take a breath.
Speaker:I I I adore,
Speaker:Misspell's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, but
Speaker:name a character in that movie
Speaker:other than Jessica Biel.
Speaker:Leatherface.
Speaker:I did it. Yeah. Gotcha, Jamie.
Speaker:You're right.
Speaker:Yeah. Jessica Biel's tank top.
Speaker:Yeah. Tank top.
Speaker:So as long as we're talking about tank tops and characterizations,
Speaker:this really grabbed me in the latest issue. And now I've got connected to this material. Don't laugh at me.
Speaker:This really grabbed me from the most recent Fangoria issue. There was, Stephen Graham Jones' Slasher Nation had a write up about, like, the evolution of the slasher girl through the years. And I I love this point he made that in earlier Slashers, it was very common that
Speaker:the defining characteristic of the early Slasher Girls wasn't that,
Speaker:going through this event necessarily
Speaker:was resolving their issues with something. They were just surviving an event. Something bad had happened, and they just had to survive it. But then when you get to Scream era, all of a sudden, the murders have to be tied into
Speaker:whatever trauma they have. So resolving the murders or surviving the murders really unlocks part of their past and dispels whatever was haunting them.
Speaker:So in Nieb Campbell's case,
Speaker:killing Ghostface essentially is seen as, like, a shorthand for her resolving her intimacy issues,
Speaker:or letting go of her mother, who had died in the previous year from the start of the film.
Speaker:Whereas you don't necessarily get that with something like Halloween. Laurie Strode is just trying not to die in that movie.
Speaker:And then this movie is almost like it's straying the needle between the two halves of that.
Speaker:We have all the character stuff between the siblings,
Speaker:but it kinda gets dropped in the second half.
Speaker:So it feels like they're just trying to survive, but their survival also feels like maybe that's the point to them. It's more important to survive than it is to
Speaker:argue back and forth and have these petty grudges.
Speaker:It kinda ultimately just boils down to,
Speaker:good
Speaker:twins battle evil twins.
Speaker:And
Speaker:the the other set of twins let their dynamic bring them down, but these other twins
Speaker:conceivably
Speaker:will not.
Speaker:Question mark.
Speaker:Alright. Jamie cracked it. I think
Speaker:we solved film criticism.
Speaker:We can all call it a day. Done.
Speaker:I love the House of Wax. Yay.
Speaker:Good job.
Speaker:I think anytime you have twins versus twins, you're essentially saying, oh, they're fighting their shadow selves. So
Speaker:it might not be literal, but whatever issues are present in the bad guys, we have to assume are hurdles that are facing our main characters, if it's written well. I just thought of something that I want.
Speaker:I want a sasca sisters house of wax twin remake
Speaker:Thomas. Oh, that would be so good. Give me, sasca sister, twin problems.
Speaker:Throw cmpunk in there. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker:What was the last one I saw from him? The The Girl on the 3rd Floor?
Speaker:I loved that movie. So did I. Yeah. I was surprised you didn't talk about that as much. It felt like it just kinda disappeared.
Speaker:It did. It's just kinda did it just get dumped on streaming or something? I adored it. I think it was a
Speaker:exclusive or something? I think so. I think so. I don't think it's going on to our own. And that's when it's a Netflix thing, it doesn't get released. I didn't know I had a kink for Centimeters Punk fisting a house, but
Speaker:here we are.
Speaker:Could I get more of Centimeters Punk eating marbles? I didn't know I had a face for this, but I'm curious. Why not?
Speaker:I don't even like the guy as a wrestler or a person, but he he was in that movie.
Speaker:That was it. It's one of those surprising things where it's like, oh, it turns out, like, if you're a good wrestler, you might have some acting chops. Yeah. That's hey, man. I've been saying it for years.
Speaker:Only he had his mustache from Jacob's wife. And then we switched this over to a see no evil commentary.
Speaker:Ah,
Speaker:Kane. This is my the one thing I know about Kane.
Speaker:Yeah. I also had to pause there to make sure I didn't say the wrong wrestler. I can tell you some other stuff about Kane that's very unpleasant.
Speaker:He's gonna make sure.
Speaker:Slam socialism. Yes.
Speaker:He also burned down his family's home, but the Undertaker
Speaker:had survived, but he killed their parents,
Speaker:which is why they had a rivalry in the nineties.
Speaker:Yeah. But it turns out that Paul Barrow was actually their father. Right.
Speaker:If anybody,
Speaker:has time after this commentary,
Speaker:go to YouTube and look up Kane in anger management
Speaker:where you get to hear him describe his entire lore
Speaker:in anger management. It's one of the greatest things, wrestling has ever produced. It's so good.
Speaker:God, I love wrestling so much. I wanted Mike and Ariel to go back and forth for 5 more minutes about the secret history of Kane to me because I wouldn't know what was a lie.
Speaker:And then at a certain point, we just slowly sub in the music from as the world turns. We just see how long we can make it before we got taken off the Internet. Baby, you have no idea. Like No. We got lore on lore.
Speaker:I got a even watched the Netflix special, like, escaping Kane's house or whatever it was, and I had no idea what was going on. Escape the Undertaker Undertaker. I'm sorry. It was the the
Speaker:the last
Speaker:problematic one.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. Very funny.
Speaker:I got into it with Mike on the pod of the pendulum a few episodes ago
Speaker:because he casually said he didn't like The Undertaker, and I had to fight him Oh. Verbally through the computer. And I got, like, legit mad.
Speaker:And, we we healed. We fixed it. I think it was on the VHS 2 episode where this all came out, but he almost broke me. Did you actually go to a ring somewhere and fight it out? I feel like that's how wrestling beefs need to be resolved.
Speaker:Yeah. We had a no holds barred,
Speaker:lights out dark match.
Speaker:I know so little about wrestling. I just thought for years that the the canvas was a bouncy
Speaker:material. I did not realize that was not the case. Yeah.
Speaker:No. You learn something new every day. Sound is the sound of pain.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:K. So, Mike, you wanna start a wrestling podcast? Or
Speaker:Please. I've been wanting to do that for years. I can finally do Parts Unknown, Mike. Yes. I've had the title forever.
Speaker:Oh, good. Someone else who has a podcast they never are gonna do.
Speaker:No. Mike's gonna do his podcast despite your podcast.
Speaker:Hey. Spike's a great motor.
Speaker:Someone's gonna do my limited fast and furious pod with me one day.
Speaker:We're already halfway there. The DP on this is basically your guy for all the cast and the furious. He lives his life a quarter mile at a time.
Speaker:Can that be the,
Speaker:the podcast that records a quarter mile at a time?
Speaker:You have to get in your car, and you just gotta say what you're saying.
Speaker:It's the only way you can listen to. Talking really fast to try to get stuff done. Yeah. And we'll see you next week.
Speaker:It's called
Speaker:the barbecue.
Speaker:Oh, and then everybody gets a corona at the end. It's all about the family.
Speaker:Oh, it's so good, you guys. There's so many parallels between the Saw franchise and the Fast and Furious franchise. We don't have time.
Speaker:But Do they do they have, like, an overarching jigsaw for the Fast and the Furious? I know they kinda move between different villains and then they become family and drop out and
Speaker:One villain.
Speaker:The villain is anti family.
Speaker:But they eventually got to Architect of All Your Pain.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah. We are to the point now where they're kind of recounting the past and be like, no, no, no. There was an evil just a Momoa behind all of this from the the get go. Oh, I gotta love it so much.
Speaker:I would not to spoil the Fast and the Furious franchise for people, but if they didn't make another one and they just left us on where the last one ended, it'd be the funniest possible way.
Speaker:I I would walk into the sea.
Speaker:I was very upset. To retake you.
Speaker:Also, speaking
Speaker:of terrorist trap, we are in, I think, my favorite scene in this entire movie. Look at this shit.
Speaker:This is oh, yeah. Look at it. When we talk about mean, this is what I'm talking about. Encasing a person who's basically parallel after you cut, like, his attendants, Achilles' attendant and all that,
Speaker:just just waxing him alive.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I would Jamie on this. Like, waxing sucks.
Speaker:No matter how often I get it done.
Speaker:The first time I ever got my eyebrows waxed, it was like getting a tattoo.
Speaker:I have not waxed over the wall. Tried trimming it with scissors and glue it. Marker in just for the afternoon. That is Yeah. I'm sick. Yeah. I'm just a cartoon character now.
Speaker:Jamie has entered her Peaches Christ era.
Speaker:I love that journey for you. Dream is to be a film by Peaches Christ.
Speaker:Yes. Weird hellraiser helmet.
Speaker:I mean, yeah.
Speaker:I love this set. Look at all these fucking pipes grimy. Germy things, and I just wanna live in a place that's just dusty chains.
Speaker:This is a Jigsaw set. The Yeah. Big This is one of the traps. If you don't remove him in the next 30 seconds, he will become entombed in wax forever. Fucking shower heads of hot wax, man. Like, on the one hand, it sounds kinda relaxing.
Speaker:Or kinking depending on what you're into.
Speaker:I I'm only bothered he's wasting a lot of wax. Yeah. It is quite wasteful.
Speaker:I mean, how many more people are gonna call you later? Like, he's just producing it.
Speaker:Maybe it's safe to say suspicious.
Speaker:Reuse it. Reuse wax.
Speaker:Yeah. That's true. True. This house had 3 more wings 5 years ago, and he just keeps chopping it up and putting it in a wax maker.
Speaker:Use every part of that. You're eating the house.
Speaker:Like, the opposite of a Winchester Mystery House. He's just taking stuff away.
Speaker:It upsets me so much more now knowing these actually
Speaker:are real people just wearing wax masks. Yeah. It's it's like the level 2 disturb
Speaker:disturbing.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I imagine it's so much easier to do it that way though than to, like, make all the puppets you would need for these scenes. I know. Oh, yeah. Mannequins are, like, ludicrously cumbersome apparently. It's just, like, it's just a difficult to make in a in a hurry. Just
Speaker:it's it's weird to think an actual human being is easier to deal with than just a mannequin.
Speaker:Right. And to their credit, they do a pretty good job staying still. And even if they jiggle a little bit, that just kind of adds to the unease of the scene. Right. Because they're out of focus.
Speaker:Just imagine, though, this was your job for, like, 3 weeks, and you just had to be an extra in, like, the church and just sit there with a giant cumbersome mask on your face, and you're told, do not move
Speaker:at all. Don't breathe. Don't just stay still like you're dead.
Speaker:Collect the check, man. From Maxine. That's what's going on now.
Speaker:And these are probably just, like, glorified extras too because they don't have lines. So who knows? They're probably not even getting paid scale.
Speaker:Yeah. I will say, in talking about this movie's strengths,
Speaker:the reveal that the town was the wax museum the whole time is an all timer. I love that story. I agree with you.
Speaker:Oh, it's a very fun way to do it, especially if you go and think House of Wax. The title's already misleading you. 2, you're coming in thinking it's gonna be like the Vincent Price one where there's, like, an actual Chamber of Horrors, which it's not doing.
Speaker:So the the whole thing is kind of a switcheroo. Plus, we just saw the boyfriend character who looked like who's gonna be the the main lead
Speaker:totally get chopped up. I mean, it's it's throwing a lot of curve balls in here, which is what makes this part so exciting. Mhmm. I'm unsafe as a viewer.
Speaker:Yeah. It's the best.
Speaker:And we get to Jesus is somebody that they just made look like Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The one hippie in town.
Speaker:And I appreciate this too, because sometimes in slasher films, they forget you need these tension moments where a person is just hiding or being stalked. Yeah.
Speaker:I don't think you can call yourself, like, a great slasher film unless you have scenes like this sprinkled in here. Is it a little silly she's underneath the priest's clothes?
Speaker:Doesn't matter. It's fine. She's a very tiny person.
Speaker:Yeah. I feel like cat and mouse kind of went away with a lot of these movies
Speaker:in the 20 teens just because of, I think, a lot of reflexivity
Speaker:on that being a trope people were used to seeing made fun of.
Speaker:My god. This is the bread and butter of a slasher movie.
Speaker:Well, just think like the early Friday 13th. There'd be, like, 20 minute long segments at the end where they were just running and hiding and running. Our lord and savior, Damian Leon, is gonna just bring help us all with Terrifier movies. I mean, bring it back.
Speaker:So more horror movies need a top down tracking shot of people being chased. Oh, yeah.
Speaker:Love that so much.
Speaker:Although, you know, they had to cut it pretty fast because he was catching up with her so much. I think that's the hard part in any running scene, like, it'll turn out one person is just really, really fast, and they have to pretend to be slow to make things work.
Speaker:I
Speaker:was watching, In A Violent Nature
Speaker:a few hours ago, which, god, I I cannot recommend
Speaker:enough of anyone listening, has not checked that out on Shudder yet.
Speaker:And they have a really great check tracking shot of the killer that's top down.
Speaker:And seeing someone,
Speaker:Jason Wolk, from that perspective
Speaker:is kind of mind blowing. It's like, oh, I haven't seen that before. That looks
Speaker:visually very compelling.
Speaker:Hey, guys. Look at the music choice. I remember what era we're in now.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I I wanna pull back, like, neighborhood tracking shot of, like, Michael Myers. It's just done as, like, that scene from season 1 of True Detective.
Speaker:Oh. Oh, man.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Season 1 of Sure Detective is my favorite thing that's ever existed.
Speaker:Like Oh, god. I wanna take the Blu ray and sew it under my skin.
Speaker:That's how much I love it. I love it too much.
Speaker:Okay. We're not talking about this movie anymore. Okay. Like,
Speaker:wasn't wasn't that just do you occasionally look at truth season 1 of True Detective and go, what a time to be alive? Truly. Yeah. Yeah. Watching that the first time is, like, a magical
Speaker:memory for me. Yes. Watching it week to week, going bananas on Reddit.
Speaker:Like That was the most fun part, the water cooler nature of it, where everyone had theories about, like, the king in yellow.
Speaker:Yes,
Speaker:ma'am. Because time is a flat circle. That means that the the people interviewing
Speaker:Cole are the new detectives
Speaker:investigating
Speaker:the yellow king because there's a new one because
Speaker:god.
Speaker:That was that was the heyday of overthinking things. It was my favorite thing.
Speaker:It's my favorite thing. Alright. I do wanna get back to True Detective
Speaker:True Detective just a moment here, but I I can't ignore this scene because this is another banger.
Speaker:And the fact that it happened just after that last chase, back to back, it just makes the movie feel so much bigger than it probably is.
Speaker:I was listening to a Guillermo del Toro interview where he's like, the secret is, if you have an action movie
Speaker:and you only have a handful of set pieces, just do 2 of them in a row at the start, and everyone will be fooled into thinking you have, like, the biggest, most epic scope movie that's ever existed.
Speaker:And he's not wrong because, essentially, that's what they did with Casino Royale.
Speaker:There's, like, 2 big action set pieces to start that movie, and then it gets pretty quiet and kinda becomes like a character piece for a majority of its run time after that. Yeah. And some of the other action beats are fairly small, like the fight in the hallway.
Speaker:But you don't remember it that way. You think of Casino Royale as a big, big movie, and I I think that's what we just saw here. We just went from that great
Speaker:hide and seek scene to now this one
Speaker:where he's gluing her lip shut, she's trying to get her brother's attention down underneath the grates.
Speaker:Man, it just it goes so far, just 2 in a row. It's it's fantastic.
Speaker:Apparently, there's no way to fake this, so that was just glue.
Speaker:Oh, shit. Really?
Speaker:It it was a safe glue where, like, she could obviously, like, pull it apart without, hurting herself. But, yeah, her that's just low level glue on there.
Speaker:And that insert shot was just of opening her mouth for the the duration of filming this. God, that is terrifying. She had to learn how to drink water out of a straw through her nose the day.
Speaker:Just that insert shot though of him gently blowing our lips to dry the glue, just so creepy.
Speaker:It's one of those details that you absolutely if you miss it, it doesn't hurt the film really, but it hurts the film.
Speaker:Like, the film functions without that stuff, but it's so much better when you have that little bit of extra thought put into place.
Speaker:Now I would like to draw oh, go sorry.
Speaker:Oh, I I I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker:I was just gonna say, I would like to draw your attention to when she pulls her lips apart, they're bloody, and then in the next scene, they will just be covered with lipstick. So just, like, watch out for that.
Speaker:The reason I was reading that is because I was like, yeah. I I that's all I could see I could see on the in the 3rd act. Like, goddamn it. The first piece in there really just sealed everything up.
Speaker:Ariel, do you agree this entire sequence
Speaker:feels more like something from p 2 than the house of wax remake.
Speaker:I agree.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:It's the single trapped female
Speaker:type trope, but it's really just condensed into this one scene where she's almost got help, but she doesn't.
Speaker:It's so out of place, but not in a way
Speaker:not there's things in this movie that are out of place in a way I think detract from it, but I kind of like how it just becomes a completely different kind of horror movie for about 10 minutes.
Speaker:Yeah. Well, because her brother's suspicious,
Speaker:and so he's trying to get a handle on it. And she's trying, like, hell to survive, which is very p 2.
Speaker:And also, I think this is worse than the face,
Speaker:later on. This Oh. Oh. I don't like this at all. Casual. The fact that it's casual has haunted me since I was a teenager. It just happens suddenly. And it's like, hey. That's the main character who just lost the tip of her finger. Can't do that. That's illegal. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:Isn't that what like, in a movie, typically, if a character is maimed, that's just shorthand for, oh, we have to kill this guy now. Mhmm.
Speaker:Like, you just can't have a guy walking around with, like, a chopped off hand or something. It's very rare. Like, Game of Thrones gets away with it, but it's in most movies, if a guy gets a broken arm or something, they gotta put him down.
Speaker:The only thing for around this time I could even compare that to is when the kid shoots himself in the face in planet terror.
Speaker:Just going, wait. But
Speaker:Yeah. That's not that can't happen in a movie.
Speaker:Yeah. Jesus. It's not over.
Speaker:It does happen.
Speaker:I guess the other main one I could think of is, like, Evil Dead 2 where Ash cuts his hands off with a hand off with a chainsaw. But, again, it's it's more rare that a person survives being mutilated. So it's it's double shocking when a person loses a finger. And the fact that it's just part of a finger too makes it more unnerving for me.
Speaker:Like,
Speaker:I don't know why. In 2000. You know? In 2000 horror, you could be maimed and survive.
Speaker:Which ones am I, forgetting?
Speaker:The the last Saw movies?
Speaker:Oh, but what was left of them?
Speaker:And who will survive?
Speaker:Oh, everybody who survives Jigsaw ends up maimed in some way. That's actually very yeah. That's a great point. I wasn't thinking about that. And The Collector?
Speaker:And The Collector. That's a big one. How many people survive The Collector?
Speaker:He always cakes 1. Just 1. Yeah. But Well and I don't wanna spoil it, but some people do survive,
Speaker:and end up maimed.
Speaker:I'm yeah. It's been so long since I've watched, 1 and 2. I'm I'm blanking on, like, the actual details.
Speaker:Twist my arm if you wanna watch those 2.
Speaker:I have a commentary to it.
Speaker:It it does it has been too long. I don't like being egged down for this. I wanna do it. I'm on our we're all on the same side.
Speaker:Let's argue anyway.
Speaker:We have to will the collection
Speaker:into into being. Exactly. Oh my god. If I can talk about True Detective for a moment longer,
Speaker:what is the feeling in the room on season 4? I loved it. I still I was really into it. I've only watched a little bit of it, but I really liked what I saw. I felt like people kinda turned on it towards the end, but I feel like that is true of every single season of True Detective. Like, that might if they don't, is it an episode of True Detective?
Speaker:So season 4 suffered from
Speaker:the fans of season 1 going, you're not my real dad.
Speaker:Yes. And me being like, it didn't say it was.
Speaker:So
Speaker:yeah. They threw in some tentative details to 1, I guess, and maybe that's with Eggman, but it's it's more like Easter eggy kind of stuff than anything. Exactly.
Speaker:Let it be its own show and be quiet for 5 minutes.
Speaker:That's what I say.
Speaker:It's not season 2. You can calm down. Oh, shooty do.
Speaker:It is not season 2. I'll tell you that for free.
Speaker:Oh, no. I was gonna say something about season 2 that was snide, but now, oh, jeez. Oh, no. Don't poke him.
Speaker:I love how
Speaker:horribly relatable that is. Because no. No. You were just fucking poking.
Speaker:God, his face squishing in first, and then the the the Oh, I'm just gonna keep going. The little tears, all the little details in this. And he just keeps pulling his face off, like, bro, please stop. Why would why move? Put it back.
Speaker:I'll make it better. I'll make it better.
Speaker:Oh. Please, Walker.
Speaker:And then insult to injury, this guy's just trapped here. Eyes roll up in his head after half his face gets sliced off.
Speaker:Well, I have a pretty strong stomach,
Speaker:but this gets under my skin a little bit.
Speaker:Yeah. That scene always stood out to me. That was one of the ones where you can't forget it.
Speaker:Your standout role.
Speaker:And it's the only bad thing about it is it's so powerful,
Speaker:it it kind of dwarfs what's happening right here when this character gets decapitated and his eyes, like, blink for a second after he's been killed.
Speaker:That
Speaker:5 minutes down the road also probably would have really stood out, but you're still kind of in shock from what you just saw a second ago that this doesn't register like it should. Yeah.
Speaker:And I was like, god. A great bit. This is a great gig.
Speaker:This might this entire sequence might be the most dark castle
Speaker:thing they ever made. Just the hallway of screaming
Speaker:wax faces and the bone dragon scissors. Like, malignant was born in that moment. I was gonna make a Gabriel
Speaker:commentary. Yes.
Speaker:Okay. Surprise. More movies. Oh, yeah. I I show that to a friend who is not a horror fan. He was very confused.
Speaker:Yeah. That that makes sense.
Speaker:It might have been a mistake on my part of my life. Ever was,
Speaker:me
Speaker:and my fiancee and Mike
Speaker:watching The Malignant on HBO Max the day it premiered on the last morning of our vacation.
Speaker:And just
Speaker:not even having seen a trailer or anything and just watching that
Speaker:unfold
Speaker:live.
Speaker:I love that for you. Just being able to pause, like, every 20 minutes or so and go,
Speaker:okay. So what does everybody think is going on in this movie?
Speaker:The thing is you have to watch dead silence to understand malignant. Dead silence walks
Speaker:so Gabriel could fucking
Speaker:charge ahead.
Speaker:I think you could see that in the Twitter reactions. There are so many people that didn't understand what was happening with the tone and and use that as criticism against the movie when it's like, no. This is really intentional. Yeah.
Speaker:They want the movie to feel this way. Make mistakes.
Speaker:Excuse me.
Speaker:Now hurry up to rediscover Dead Silence, everybody. Yeah. Fucking figure it out.
Speaker:One more side here as long as we're talking about people's reactions to things altogether.
Speaker:I had a Friday 13th party last weekend, and, I showed Freddy versus Jason.
Speaker:That still brings down the house. Even watching it with people that don't know anything about horror, you have to explain to them, like, what Freddy's deal is and what Jason's deal is, and then they're good. It's just an hour and a half of, like, that movie going, and everyone's very excited.
Speaker:Freddy's steals fire. Jason's is water. How do we use that?
Speaker:And that is nothing. Amounts to nothing.
Speaker:Place your bets.
Speaker:Place your bets.
Speaker:Someone did bring that up. He's like, oh, so Jason drowned the lake, so he's afraid of water. I get him, like, yeah, I guess. Sure.
Speaker:Water turned him into a boy that one time. What is toxic water?
Speaker:Something.
Speaker:Also, I love how these people are just fucking for 11 hours, apparently.
Speaker:Camping is really boring.
Speaker:I was like, considering all the other,
Speaker:CW people on this show
Speaker:or in this movie, I'm generally surprised that Robert Ricard wasn't anything on that network.
Speaker:He seems like he should have been, like, a shitty CW Cyborg or something.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:That said, all of this is still in canon with my cousin Skeeter.
Speaker:Some pretty specific movie thing, but it it just, like, oh, a, you guys were fucking probably, like, 20 minutes earlier.
Speaker:So is, like, the strip tease, like, right beforehand really necessary?
Speaker:This is not, like, the first time this has happened.
Speaker:In the last 24 hours.
Speaker:I just wanna say, like, that underwear is very impractical for camping.
Speaker:Unless you're going to a football game, the camping was unexpected. That's true. That's true.
Speaker:I'm assuming one of the teams that was playing had, like, an all red color scheme or something, so she was just, you know, into the school spirit. Weren't they going to see Bama, or did I make that up?
Speaker:I thought they just said, like, a generic football. Yeah. They they I might have just inserted. I don't think.
Speaker:Yeah. It feels like it should be with the rural location.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I don't know. That'd be the most fun product placement if all of a sudden they just, like, ramble you were talking about Roll Tide.
Speaker:This whole movie is just an advertisement.
Speaker:The Jacob twin brothers,
Speaker:are divided by football loyalties once in a while. Oh, no. Oh, no. A house of wax divided upon his brother's sports friendships cannot stand as Abraham Lincoln was famous sequel. Title House of Wax Divided. Oh my god. I think it has to be.
Speaker:I think we have to make this movie now.
Speaker:There is that one amazing shot of the knife coming through the hot wax wall and separating these 2 wax babies.
Speaker:It's good stuff. It's such a great image. I'm like, I wish there was a little more commentary attached to the rest of this to kind of beef that up. But I guess, you know, picture says a 1000 words.
Speaker:It's a it's a it reminds me a lot
Speaker:this movie, more than any other Dark Castle picture,
Speaker:reminds me of the haunting remake
Speaker:where there's so much environmental
Speaker:storytelling being done with the set design that, oh, you just wish they coulda just dug their teeth into that and really dedicated themselves to making
Speaker:the the house itself,
Speaker:the central point of the movie?
Speaker:This poor guy gets such a lame death compared to all the other cool ones we've seen.
Speaker:But it's all once again, it's mean spirited. Like, just the idea that the knife and the knife is just left there to suffer before he's finished off. I mean, it's a nice effect with the collapsing knife and all of that. It's just
Speaker:we got a man encased in wax with half his face sliced off. We got a guy with his head torn off, and he's still blinking his eyes.
Speaker:Oh, great. Alzheimer's. 2 great gigs in a row. And then that was just, like, a standard knife death. And also, always was weird to me that he killed, like he seemed to enjoy encasing people in wax while they were alive,
Speaker:but then he immediately just starts killing people then encases them in wax.
Speaker:Yeah. I think it's
Speaker:I have a slightly different read on it. I think,
Speaker:Beau is obviously the sadistic brother of the 2. Like, he's the one who enjoys
Speaker:pain, and the wax doesn't matter him to that much because he got you know, later in the film, he's just shooting them with shotguns to try and get to what he actually wants to hurt.
Speaker:Vincent, on the other hand, is the actual artist, but I don't get the sense he's creating to be god, like, in a lot of other films where you have, you know, like a mad scientist or a mad creator. He's he's not trying to be God. He's not trying to be a father.
Speaker:This is a lonely guy who's trying to, like, make a family that accepts him or a town that accepts him or friends that accept him.
Speaker:Yeah. He's just making a standard city
Speaker:that Oh.
Speaker:That,
Speaker:I was making a salient point, I thought, but I'm much tendon abuse in this matter.
Speaker:Well, and then the fact she can't get off this grate,
Speaker:it's so good. And the way she sells the fall too really just puts it all together.
Speaker:Although it's a little funny that she was getting stabbed in the leg. She runs downstairs, and she's looking back up.
Speaker:Not not the best direction to give this, this actress.
Speaker:Also, I
Speaker:I thought this was weirdly wholesome.
Speaker:You can if you look at the footage
Speaker:of them filming this scene,
Speaker:Paris was really embarrassed
Speaker:having to scream
Speaker:in some of the takes, like, especially, like, just screaming in her underwear.
Speaker:So the entire crew
Speaker:started screaming at the same time whenever she would scream so she wouldn't have to scream by herself. They're adorable. That's really nice.
Speaker:The same guy who was so mad.
Speaker:I didn't want it to be one of those,
Speaker:so the crew got in their underwear too.
Speaker:Yeah. It's always weird.
Speaker:They already were.
Speaker:Other than relatives. It was hot in Australia. They didn't have a choice.
Speaker:Also, the the footage of her walking around with the pipe
Speaker:hanging out of her head is hilarious because it looks
Speaker:very obscene just wobbling around.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I wish we got a little bit more of Vincent's wax face.
Speaker:Ditto.
Speaker:Like, I I think they could have taken a couple more notes from a Friday 13th and really milked, like, the big reveal at the end when half his face is unformed.
Speaker:Especially considering it's malleable, so you can have it get fucked up throughout the whole movie with, like, handprints and shit. Oh, yeah. That would be cool. Getting melty, and
Speaker:it's fun. We at least got to see some of his other masks. Another great insert shot of all that blood in the ground.
Speaker:On some ground. Had another one of her head slowly going down the pipe, I think. Just just another Mhmm.
Speaker:Sell that effect slightly more.
Speaker:But, yeah, Paris Hilton gets pretty big scene, compared to most of the other people. Mhmm. She gets to chase. She gets to fight a little bit. She strikes him with the pipe. She gets killed by the pipe. Way more than a couple of the other actors in the movie get. I mean, considering her placement,
Speaker:like, the death's placement in the timeline, she's pretty much the centerpiece kill of the movie right before we move into the 3rd act. That's Yeah. That's kind of a place of honor. Yeah. We got 35 minutes left, so you're absolutely right about the timing.
Speaker:So
Speaker:one of my,
Speaker:earliest examples of encountering,
Speaker:noticeable
Speaker:Internet misogyny
Speaker:that,
Speaker:I was beyond the pale from what I was used to from, like, growing up on message boards as a kid, was seeing people on horror boards
Speaker:specifically happy that Paris's character was pregnant when she died.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You know, because that's, like, extra work.
Speaker:Yeah. It's
Speaker:oh, we don't have time to unpack all that, but yes. Weird.
Speaker:It turns out the Internet was a mistake, and we shouldn't look at it. Yes.
Speaker:Everybody go delete it right now. Just get rid of your Twitters.
Speaker:Don't even keep your blue skies
Speaker:when you're done listening to
Speaker:this. Yeah. No. No. No. No. We're we're the good ones. Please keep listening to us forever.
Speaker:Let BOP be your social media.
Speaker:We definitely won't powership at all. I'll say it would be great if all the weapons they get end up also being made of wax.
Speaker:Oh,
Speaker:a wax gun.
Speaker:So what do we think the is there a significance to whatever happened to baby Jane being the movie that's just apparently on total loop for this thing?
Speaker:Well, that's another sibling rivalry story
Speaker:of who's the good twin, who's the bad twin. They weren't twins, but, like,
Speaker:there's definitely a a narrative in that of, like,
Speaker:good versus evil sisters.
Speaker:I I mentioned what that says about Victor with the whole, like, you know, one brother essentially keeping the other captive in an impaired state.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So this is a bit of a weird
Speaker:thing for a horror film a slasher film. But we have the killer. 1, he was never masked. He has personality masked, but he didn't have, like, his own Vincent style wax mask of his own, and he uses a gun.
Speaker:So this whole section in here, he's got a gun, which you rarely see. Scream does it always as, like, the 3rd act kinda twist thing when they're done with the Ghostface personality.
Speaker:But, you know, we've never seen Jason pick up
Speaker:a a rifle.
Speaker:Closer we get is, what,
Speaker:a spirit gun in 3?
Speaker:Yeah. And I think it has to do with, like, this is a human who we've interacted with, so he has a little bit more humanity versus a
Speaker:masked killer or a supernatural
Speaker:killer.
Speaker:And it works with the scene too because you got this tension. He could kill from a distance, and she has to somehow sit perfectly still as he's poking the mannequins.
Speaker:So it works pretty good even though
Speaker:I guess, gun shootings in movies should be terrifying. In real life, you know, gun violence would be enough to scare you, but it never plays quite the same to me as compared to someone threatening you with a axe or a knife.
Speaker:It's true.
Speaker:There there's too much of dissonance, I think, of
Speaker:the experience of a gun going off near you
Speaker:in a film versus real life where
Speaker:it's much easier to
Speaker:shorthand,
Speaker:imagine
Speaker:a knife,
Speaker:and everyone's kind of been cut
Speaker:in some way. Yeah. It triggers like a fight or flight.
Speaker:Yeah. But maybe you haven't been around a gun or had a gunshot near you
Speaker:to feel
Speaker:Yeah. Scared by that.
Speaker:Love the extra detail we just saw. Not only are these corpses, but they're, like, being eaten by bugs from the inside out. So when that one gets its head blown off, it just says cockroaches.
Speaker:Oop. Got a scatter.
Speaker:Which I guess makes sense, but it's so gross. Oh, it's incredibly gross. It's like 3 more steps than necessary, which is, again, what makes us a little bit mean, but also memorable. Mhmm. Good stuff.
Speaker:You know, Bo is honestly a really underrated,
Speaker:like, slasher villain.
Speaker:I mean, how does
Speaker:I like him more than Vincent.
Speaker:Picking favorite twins? This is how you make monsters? Yeah. That's how that's how I made a Bo.
Speaker:One thing I have to say
Speaker:about, Vincent and all that. I'm very glad that they didn't lay the homage on too thick and make one Vincent and the other kid named Price. Oh, god.
Speaker:Could you imagine? Right? I would I would, like, roll my eyes and walk out of the theater. But, luckily, they had the receipt, like, one's Vincent. That's enough. Okay.
Speaker:You know, I feel like I've never really seen anyone
Speaker:talk
Speaker:extensively
Speaker:about
Speaker:the
Speaker:the the trope that's only present in certain slasher films of
Speaker:the monster
Speaker:and the monster's keeper
Speaker:as dual villains.
Speaker:Kinda like
Speaker:Pearl and her husband is a recent example, like, in in x.
Speaker:That's a that's a very interesting dynamic
Speaker:that is, like, surprisingly
Speaker:few horror movies play out, but it seems like any time they do, they're playing at, like,
Speaker:the same type of themes.
Speaker:There's something, I think, very scary about
Speaker:a single killer that is
Speaker:one codependent relationship
Speaker:Yes. Functioning
Speaker:as one entity?
Speaker:Yes. Absolutely true. And there's you know, the the monster's keeper,
Speaker:are they even worse than the monster? Because they're choosing
Speaker:what they do where maybe the monster isn't.
Speaker:Yeah. That was the one I had recorded for a movie as dead ringers because it's an entire film all about that just with no killing.
Speaker:I I was gonna mention Dead Ringers and the fact that,
Speaker:more than wax movies, we have so many
Speaker:twin horror films. Like, that's a huge subgenre.
Speaker:And I I was trying to pinpoint what exactly about twins make such good thematic material to keep coming back to for horror.
Speaker:And I It's just a thing in everyday
Speaker:life that seems like it shouldn't exist. It's weird, and we all pretend like it's not weird, but it is.
Speaker:Definitely weird. But I think part of it too is is it's
Speaker:kind of the
Speaker:violation of individuality.
Speaker:Like, why are there 2 of you?
Speaker:There's 2 of you that look exactly the same.
Speaker:How similar are you? You do have the same quirks and mannerisms.
Speaker:I don't like that. Everyone is supposed to be a rugged individual separate person. That's what America's built on.
Speaker:So you get twins and all of a sudden that goes out the window because it comes partly to
Speaker:behavior, like, what what they're raised with, what they're just genetically like to start. It's it's a whole weird hodgepodge. I think that questions
Speaker:identity.
Speaker:It's a good point. Yeah. I never really thought about it.
Speaker:Well, I imagine
Speaker:that's got to
Speaker:concentrate
Speaker:everything
Speaker:it that would be in a normal sibling rivalry,
Speaker:like, down to a fine point when on top of everything else, you were born at the
Speaker:essentially
Speaker:the same person just split down the middle. Like, that that's given people's,
Speaker:especially little kids, propensity for binary thinking, like,
Speaker:there is almost no way you can't grow up thinking of that other person as, you know, some kind of shadow self.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Oh, no. Vincent forgot to pay the phone bill.
Speaker:How difficult do you think it was to ensure a house of wax when they built the whole thing out of wax back in, like, the fifties?
Speaker:It's just simpler time. We're like, hey, it stands up. That's fine. We don't have to worry about rain.
Speaker:Oh, it's the gingerbread
Speaker:house law. Like, as long as you can keep it from collapsing, the state won't intervene.
Speaker:That place wouldn't have air conditioning, plumbing.
Speaker:So you got nothing says 2000s horror like dark living rooms.
Speaker:And the strangers is happening just off camera.
Speaker:Plot twist. The Strangers was in a house made of wax.
Speaker:You never see it coming. They really that's why the deleted scene sometimes should be put back in the movie.
Speaker:So I feel like we got a second before the the big, big climax hits us here. I just wanna go back to talk about, John O'Bond score.
Speaker:And on the special features, he he discussed how
Speaker:typically, how it works is the studio gives you x amount of cash, and you have that money to hire all the,
Speaker:musicians you need.
Speaker:So the less people you hire, the more money that's just pure profit.
Speaker:But he didn't wanna go that route and have everything played on, like, a synthesizer. So he did go out and actually hire
Speaker:an orchestra to play this to give it a larger, more lush sound because he wanted that instead of something more atonal.
Speaker:Now in horror, maybe that's not the most logical choice because
Speaker:atonal stuff is, well, think of like the shower scene in Psycho. Right? It definitely works for the moment and gets you into the right mood, which is almost more important than anything else in horror.
Speaker:But I love it when it's an actual thematic score, like, with a a true melody carrying through.
Speaker:Plus, if you're making a horror film and the whole thing is done on synthesizers,
Speaker:it immediately makes a movie feel like it was made for $10,000,000.
Speaker:Like, it just it feels so much cheaper than it really is.
Speaker:So I I think his choices here for the music elevate this entire thing. It makes it feel much bigger and more grand than it would be otherwise.
Speaker:Mhmm.
Speaker:Which feels appropriate for a whole town made of wax, like,
Speaker:the amount of care that went into that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And, we've really passed it now. But the very opening
Speaker:starts off with kind of beautiful strings,
Speaker:which is something
Speaker:important to me. The the first impression the movie makes sets the entire tone for everything else that's gonna happen, and you only have about the first 5 seconds to make that impression on the viewer. So if he started with jarring, loud, evil strings, it would just give me the impression this was gonna be cliched,
Speaker:hack,
Speaker:and he doesn't go that route. He sets a great foot to start off on.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Anyways, I think he's a pretty smart guy.
Speaker:Yeah. Speaking of starting things off on the wrong foot, did you see the
Speaker:original
Speaker:opening to this movie, which was just
Speaker:a murder?
Speaker:I have not seen it, but I have read it. Like, I've I've read the synopsis of it.
Speaker:Yeah. It's kinda like exactly, what you were saying as far as, like, the generic version of the score goes. Like, that is
Speaker:the most generic
Speaker:nothing kind of opening for a movie like this you could imagine.
Speaker:At the very least, with the opening that we get, there's
Speaker:a great deal of, of mystery
Speaker:established and and and tone setting to exactly
Speaker:what kind of movie you're going to be, sitting in for.
Speaker:Yeah. You really don't get that with just and then a woman's face is smashed through a windshield.
Speaker:House of Wax.
Speaker:It goes back to setting up the superficialities
Speaker:too. Because we start off with what looks like a normal, you know, 50, sixties domestic scene, and then it quickly reveals, no, it's something darker than that when the child is dragged in and chained to his high chair. Mhmm.
Speaker:I wanna say one of my favorite
Speaker:dumb review,
Speaker:points
Speaker:ever
Speaker:was in Richard Roper's negative review of this.
Speaker:He particularly highlighted the opening scene and said it was much better in the original when Vincent Price was killing those people for no reason whatsoever.
Speaker:Why they gotta be adding these tragic back stories to our House of Wax movies? That's wrong. That's a modern thing.
Speaker:To go back to the idea of this being a remake in name only,
Speaker:maybe I'm just less sensitive to it now, but I remember growing up and seeing things like the American Godzilla and how everyone called it, Geno, Godzilla in name only, or Catwoman in name only, how that was just a trend for a while where the fans would turn against any sort of new adaptation of classic material.
Speaker:Thankfully, House of Wax didn't get that same kind of pushback. I don't I didn't see a lot of people being like, this is the House of Wax in name only.
Speaker:Possibly because maybe they hadn't seen the original? There's a good chance of that.
Speaker:Yeah. I I I'll tell you, I just feel like this is one of those movies where outside of maybe, like, people who yell about things on YouTube,
Speaker:I think the only people who remembered this movie happened were people who liked it.
Speaker:Vincent half of Vincent's face just looks like the other mother from Coraline. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Stuff.
Speaker:This isn't making him look less like he's made out of cheese.
Speaker:What kind of cheese are you eating, Jamie? We gotta get you the good stuff. Are you eating wax?
Speaker:You know, you gotta you gotta peel that wax cover off the little the little cheese wheels before you eat it. Right?
Speaker:So he's just Bill Paxton ing so hard at this point in the movie. Oh my god. You're right.
Speaker:He's about to slay him some demons.
Speaker:This is Shane. We didn't get a bunch of him doing more stuff like frailty before he passed. Yeah.
Speaker:And that's where the commentary on. No more comments. We'll just get back. That totally holds up too.
Speaker:Does it tickle you that Beau and Vincent play pool sometimes?
Speaker:Gotta pass the the only 2 people in town, plus that harbinger guy. So He's apparently the 3rd brother.
Speaker:And considering they go to a funeral
Speaker:every single day, I imagine they don't have a whole lot to occupy their time.
Speaker:I mean, Vincent seems like he stays pretty busy on his wax creations. I'd like to imagine. They have this evil dead basement down there. I mean, you can get lost for hours in these catacombs.
Speaker:And he's gotta take a break though now and then.
Speaker:That one, the boyfriend got encased in wax and put on display in
Speaker:a couple of hours? Like, he made very fast I think that was, like, 20 minutes. Yeah. He's got it. He's got it really fast there.
Speaker:That is He's got to show you
Speaker:down. No. It's an actual purse, and you're just tracing.
Speaker:Well, this is this is my like, I get a Lego set and I build it right away. It's, like, oh, I should've taken longer. I should drag this out and enjoy the fun. Mindful building. I the yeah. The the insult the insult you just gave Vincent and Jamie.
Speaker:Tracer.
Speaker:Comic community will never accept him as one of their own.
Speaker:Now he's going to sculpt my face.
Speaker:So I just I because we mentioned it for a second, and I know we're not the end of the movie yet. Mhmm.
Speaker:But what a weird idea to throw in there that the,
Speaker:like, the roadkill guy was the secret third child.
Speaker:He's a first summer's brother. Yeah. We spend so much time discussing the twins and focusing on that, at least in the imagery.
Speaker:That just feels wild. Like, oh, yeah. There's a third one that just never got even hinted at throughout the rest of the film. And you kind of fuck up the twins thing by, like, throw it like, oh, yeah. There was another brother too.
Speaker:It's how they set up for a sequel that we don't get. Right?
Speaker:What would the sequel have been? How's the hours of that dude? Is 2 hours of that dude stalking people. House of Roadkill.
Speaker:House of Roadkill. Oh, the smell. That would be a smell o vision movie. If only it was him as a hero
Speaker:trying to be a heroic,
Speaker:wax builder for good. I keep telling the kids
Speaker:not to go in the wax house.
Speaker:Also, this is unintentionally hilarious. Right? Yeah. What did you think was gonna happen?
Speaker:It's the fact that he just immediately gives up. Like, nope. Nope. Yeah. I killed him. He's he's dead. He's dead. Okay.
Speaker:But the the weirdest thing though about that brother being a setup for a potential sequel
Speaker:is that the Hays brothers have talked about it, and they had plans for a prequel movie. Yeah. So it wasn't they didn't wanna use that as a cliffhanger for a sequel. I don't know if that would have been, like, part of the lead for the prequel, like, all 3 brothers are evil,
Speaker:but that just blows my mind, like,
Speaker:why why are we doing this? It's not even, like, a good jump scare.
Speaker:I guess it's it's the evil's still out there, but I don't think those kids are gonna hang around. And, it didn't look like that was the kind of guy who's gonna pull Friday 13th part 2 and follow them back into the big city to murder them. He does seem fine.
Speaker:Yeah. He seems to live elsewhere.
Speaker:All you're letting us know is that it's possible to escape bad homes.
Speaker:That's a positive message, Cody.
Speaker:There we go. I was looking at it the wrong way. Also, what the fuck would a prequel of this have been?
Speaker:More
Speaker:wax killings.
Speaker:Leatherface.
Speaker:Oh, yeah.
Speaker:Yeah. So got more movies need to end with their key location
Speaker:being aflame the entire 3rd act.
Speaker:I've always said that. That's the big homage to Vincent Price right there. Like, the number of Corman movies he made that just ended in a burning house.
Speaker:It's also is as as far as it being a remake goes, quote, unquote,
Speaker:ending it with where the original began is kind of brilliant,
Speaker:but on a larger scale. More actual melting. There's not that there's a lot of burning. There's not that much melting in the original house of wax.
Speaker:Because it's a normal house. This is a literal house of wax.
Speaker:And to think, if all these people had, like, a wax fetish, they would just be continuously orgasming the entire third act of this film.
Speaker:That's my least favorite way to end a movie.
Speaker:Go, wax powers. Go.
Speaker:Enter peanut butter. So is that true that there was, like, a lot of this set really was wax and, like,
Speaker:they had to, like, claw through it and it was kinda hot? Oh, yeah. Yep.
Speaker:They had them yeah. You can see in the behind the scenes footage, like, they're having a hard time doing some of the scenes because they are just
Speaker:just trying to get through all the sludge.
Speaker:It's gotta be awesome when you have a relationship. Where she looks like she's drowning in the swaps of sadness
Speaker:from the never ending story. Well, I've heard that, the reason they don't do a lot of movies on, like,
Speaker:in the snow, it's because all of a sudden now you have to worry about, you know, freshening up the the scenery once you're done with it so you can do a second take, or otherwise, you got footprints everywhere. Yeah. I imagine the same deal with wax. Like, you're probably leaving a lot of sludgy footprints everywhere, which makes it a nightmare. You have to have, like, a wax waker or something trying everything back to normal.
Speaker:And, god, like with snow, the second you light that thing, it starts melting.
Speaker:And this is a weird food waste thing with me, but they use peanut butter a lot. Like, the bed's completely like peanut butter. And all I could think was that's just so much that's a waste of a lot of peanut butter. I always think about the food waste too.
Speaker:This is why we're doing this by craft services.
Speaker:Also, man, look at how violent this, the spinal climax here is. This guy is just getting wailed on the face of the bat.
Speaker:Everyone's been stabbed multiple times.
Speaker:She's gotten punched directly in the face and knocked across the room, like, everyone's taking a real beating here.
Speaker:I'm a big fan
Speaker:of,
Speaker:slasher movies that end with the heroes being allowed to go absolutely
Speaker:apeshit on the killers.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:It's like, oh, god. That's my favorite one of my favorite things about the the movie monster man.
Speaker:I don't know which one that is. I assumed you were gonna talk about something like the final terror.
Speaker:I can I will just occasionally reference the existence of monster man to each other back and forth? Just to make ourselves happy. Yeah. I've not seen this movie.
Speaker:We gotta do an episode on monster man.
Speaker:Would I like it?
Speaker:I think so. That that has a that's getting I would say it's getting more of a cult following. I I have seen it mentioned here and there.
Speaker:What's going on the old watch list?
Speaker:Is monster man, is this a man being made into a monster? Is this, like, a tusk situation?
Speaker:Oh, god.
Speaker:It's like if the the first if you made the first act of Jeepers Creepers an entire movie and it was a comedy.
Speaker:Oh my god. How have I not seen this movie? 2003?
Speaker:It used to be on Starz, like, once a week. Yes. Big,
Speaker:like,
Speaker:like, premier, like,
Speaker:cable movie channel fodder.
Speaker:It was on constantly. This looks exactly like my shit. Oh, totally.
Speaker:Alright.
Speaker:Is it if wait. There's monster trucks?
Speaker:Yes. Yes. There's And then that's what I'm saying. It's like Jeep the first act of Jeepers Creepers. Just a a dude in a big ass monster truck terrorizing some people on a road trip. It's delightful. Because the the the kind of summary makes it sound a little bit like his duel.
Speaker:Oh, yeah. It's like comedy duel with, like, redneck shit. It's awesome.
Speaker:As a crazed driver runs down whoever gets in his way, the 3 seek refuge in a Backwoods Diner. Unfortunately, it serves human flesh.
Speaker:You can also see it as a little bit, like,
Speaker:a
Speaker:parody of Joyride without actually being an official parody of Joyride. Yeah.
Speaker:Sounds like I'll love it.
Speaker:Alright. Let one significant thing come from this commentary.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Just a week from now, we find out there's a fucking, like,
Speaker:arrow release of monster man coming. That happens all the time.
Speaker:So here we can see some of the effects we were talking about earlier where they had to speed up the wax melting and find new ways to melt the wax.
Speaker:And it's a great for a visual too. You got all these corpses covered in wax, so you get to see, like, their bones and all the old meat underneath them.
Speaker:This scene never works for me because clearly Vincent
Speaker:is a murderer.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I I think you're supposed to take it a little bit like a Frankenstein's monster. Like, he's he's killed some people, but he didn't necessarily
Speaker:mean it maliciously.
Speaker:I think if they had showed that
Speaker:does. Yeah. It
Speaker:and specifically, like, really brutally, like and
Speaker:making people into living mannequins. It
Speaker:I think showing, like, him doing things under the direction of Beau or,
Speaker:like,
Speaker:implying it was Vincent, but it turned out to have been Beau most of the time actually doing the murders.
Speaker:And
Speaker:the only time Vincent goes really crazy is after Beau's death. Mhmm. That maybe have gotten that across a little better.
Speaker:Also, you cannot unsee that bed just being peanut butter. Yeah. Which
Speaker:now it is. Straight up peanut butter.
Speaker:Wallander.
Speaker:There was a a moment when he was doing, like, the Saving Private Ryan
Speaker:knife point,
Speaker:that I love because there's a POV shot of, like, the knife coming down, and they add in this, like, high pitched kind of, like,
Speaker:noise as the knife moves. And it's one of those wonderfully unnecessary bits of Foley that absolutely works.
Speaker:It's like in an action movie where someone like pulls a whip out and for some reason it sounds like a lion. It's just that's the good stuff. That's cinema.
Speaker:Just for the fuck of it, they should have thrown in the Terminator
Speaker:wax puppet
Speaker:man thing from the end of wax mask.
Speaker:Oh, right. Everything's wax. We discovered this earlier in the film.
Speaker:This is from, like, an hour ago, but I think my favorite bit of dialogue in this movie is Cuthbert
Speaker:asking why
Speaker:everything in the wax museum was made of wax.
Speaker:It's in the name, babe.
Speaker:Don't worry about it.
Speaker:This is so nasty. I love how
Speaker:like, this is very successfully
Speaker:illustrated. I love how fucking desperate this feels.
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:Well, I get it.
Speaker:It does not feel like they cheaply
Speaker:get out of this wax museum. Like, this really feels like some like a last ditch effort that logically should not work, and they get out by the skin of their teeth.
Speaker:So many escapes cannot pull that off. Like, this really deserves credit for that.
Speaker:And it's so weird seeing that wax come down that I always assumed that was a CGI effect. To find out it was actually model work that it composited into kinda blew my mind. Mhmm. I don't know if it's just so unnatural for the the way the model collapses that it feels fake or if it's just something's a little funky with the compositing.
Speaker:I love that all this comes about from Joe Schill Joe Silver, apparently, just saying, I've made
Speaker:dozens and dozens of sets in my career.
Speaker:I wanna go apeshit at least once.
Speaker:I mean, if you're making something called the House of, and the house doesn't immolate at the end, what are we doing? Like the House of Usher, you gotta have the house burned down.
Speaker:House of Frankenstein? I think there was actually a house in that one, but I'm sure a castle burned at some point.
Speaker:You gotta have a house on fire if it's called the house of something. I have I have detonated an improvised explosive after leaving every single IHOP I've ever been to.
Speaker:That's why I get worried every time I hear, you referred to as the house of Jamie. I just know it's gonna be the moment you leave.
Speaker:And there's the camera. They make a big deal out of this camera, and I I so weird. Like, like, it's like it's Blair Witch 2, and we're gonna, like, reverse the footage to see what really happened.
Speaker:Oh, man. I'm trying to remember what they recorded.
Speaker:The, that's the sequel to this one. They're setting up that guy to go into the woods, the hideout, Blair Witch.
Speaker:Alright. And there's a chat with Michael Murray there looking like he's Guts from Berserk.
Speaker:Just the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Speaker:Seeing CMM as seen this evening.
Speaker:To go back just to millennial nasties
Speaker:one more time before credits roll.
Speaker:So the house of wax partisan, the chapter, the locals run this town,
Speaker:and I find it fascinating that they don't even, like, consider
Speaker:the police. Phones are apparently not useful. They can't get the cops there in any way whatsoever.
Speaker:And then at the end of the movie, order's finally restored, and all of this place is covered with cops, and it feels like, oh,
Speaker:we finally have restored order. It's it's the classic, no, no, no, no, no. Just society was there the whole time. We just found a little pocket where we couldn't get into it. Mhmm. Well, this wasn't even on the map. Are we to be here punching the freaks?
Speaker:Yeah. You almost expect it to be a deal where it's it's a Texas Chainsaw Massacre type thing where the cops are in at the whole time, and they've been enabling the WACs.
Speaker:No. They just closed the road so they couldn't get in.
Speaker:Yeah. We thought this was a Silent Hill situation. We didn't think anyone was stupid enough to go see that House of WACs, so we just left it.
Speaker:Which guy? I can't even say is entirely,
Speaker:like, out of the realm of possibility because you spent a lot of time,
Speaker:going down the the interstate,
Speaker:especially in the in rural areas and in the south,
Speaker:there are whole ass towns that are just
Speaker:abandoned that conceivably
Speaker:Mhmm. You could just live there
Speaker:and do what you wanted without much fear of people passing through.
Speaker:Really was one of my favorite points about the original Texas Giant Saw Massacre and that it was,
Speaker:Hooper kind of discussed the idea that it it was like if you lifted up a rock and there were spiders underneath it. Like, that's on you. If you just left that rock alone, you would never know what was underneath it, and then you expose yourself to something that you find repugnant.
Speaker:And, originally, that's what he thought the sequel should be like. They it should just be people wandering into areas they don't belong
Speaker:and bring the harm upon themselves.
Speaker:Whereas a lot of other films try and justify it, like,
Speaker:it's not someone walking into an area that they're unfamiliar with and the customs are different, so therefore bad. It's
Speaker:more like these people need to be punished somehow, and this is just the place they end up at. Mhmm.
Speaker:That's one of the things I love about tourist traps so much is, spiritually,
Speaker:it's kind of the actual sequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I can't let this go without romance going. Yes. I I I can't let this go without comment. This
Speaker:is the first time a movie inappropriately cut to My Chemical Robot romance for the end credits.
Speaker:Man, do you think Gerard Way just sits around sometimes
Speaker:thinking,
Speaker:why was I at the end of Watchmen?
Speaker:The royalty checks come in. Don't matter.
Speaker:I mean, the the soundtrack for this one is very much of its time, but it was the period where they actually put effort into, like, oh, shit. We could put this on disc, and people are gonna go out and buy The House of Wax.
Speaker:It's, you know, mixed soundtrack. That's gonna be a moneymaker.
Speaker:It still weirds me out a little bit when movies go out of their way to do that, because I don't know who it's for at this point.
Speaker:I like that it's still out there, but are there a lot of people who are like, I really need the Into the Spider Verse soundtrack?
Speaker:Maybe. Listeners, write in. Let us know. I mean, they're making them still, so I guess.
Speaker:I I feel like the idea of a collected soundtrack doesn't make as much sense with a streaming service, because people can just find the 1 or 2 singles they really like and ignore everything else. Yeah.
Speaker:That said, the second the I saw the TV glow soundtrack comes out on vinyl, I'm getting that just for display purposes.
Speaker:I still need to watch that movie. Oh, it's so good. I I know I'm gonna love it. It's one of those movies where you just immediately want to bother everyone in your social circle with it.
Speaker:I feel like waiting for the right time to watch it. Like, I need to be
Speaker:able to, like, give it good attention, so I just haven't done it. Hey. It hits HBO Max in, like, a week or 2. So Well, there you go.
Speaker:Nice plug. Now I bought the, the a 24 release, and I've been sitting on it because, like, I'm gonna
Speaker:it's been talked up enough where I don't wanna put it on as background noise. I wanna actually make sure, like, I have a a good time
Speaker:where Yeah. I'm very glad whenever,
Speaker:it went VOD. I just went ahead and bought it digitally because I think I've watched it, like, 4 times since then.
Speaker:I've heard people compare it to The Adventures of Pete and Pete. If that's true, then I'm I'm over the moon.
Speaker:Pete and Pete,
Speaker:if
Speaker:it was
Speaker:Mulholland
Speaker:Drive levels of deeply unnerving.
Speaker:I'm thinking of Lost Highway now, and the guy with the video camera is just mister Swirly.
Speaker:You're not far off, Cody. You are not far off.
Speaker:Okay. This sounds this is how we're ending that House of Wax commentary.
Speaker:Sold.
Speaker:I mean, we've covered a lot of ground here today, folks. It's very true. And the movie is, like, an hour and 50 plus minutes long. It takes a while to get going, but they don't shortchange the end. So
Speaker:you get a lot of movie for your buck. Yes.
Speaker:Anyways, I am kind of glad they did not do this movie as a traditional wax house movie
Speaker:because
Speaker:when was the last time any of us have actually gone to an actual wax museum?
Speaker:Like, even in 2005, that feels like it was passe.
Speaker:Yeah. I think maybe in elementary school, we did a field trip to Wadde, maybe.
Speaker:But that was a 1000 years ago. So
Speaker:I was gonna say, like, I feel like there might be something in the Adels that's like a haunted house with, like, a wax chamber of terrors, but I don't know. Probably.
Speaker:So I guess they could have gone with that idea. They they kinda did. Right? Because it's an abandoned town,
Speaker:that had its heyday back in, like, the sixties or seventies or something.
Speaker:Well, god. Why hasn't nobody ever just licensed out Madame Tussauds for one of these?
Speaker:Probably because they would destroy it? Yeah. If they accidentally burnt it down, that would be a problem. Whoops. No more Madame Tussauds. Well, hell, I I just mean, like, the IP. Like, there's your your pitch right there. Escape from Madame Tussauds.
Speaker:Willie's wonder like, it's Willie's Wonderland, but it's Nicolas Cage at Madame Tussauds. I was thinking more like the Spirit Halloween movie where they have a budget of 35¢.
Speaker:I like this. Can we pitch this?
Speaker:Is there's no one stopping you. We can do anything.
Speaker:Except for actually finish off of a new podcast series. That's impossible. Yeah. No. That
Speaker:I'll show you wrestling your screen.
Speaker:20 years from now, one of us is gonna have a single episode recorded, and that's the victor.
Speaker:So there we go. We have survived the House of Wax.
Speaker:Oh, that's nice. Even the logo matches up with the the actual, like Melt. Logo on the house. Very oh, you bastard. Please. Please. Please.
Speaker:Now arts.
Speaker:Mhmm. I gotta throw the whole movie out. Really, what they should have done is, like, the WB logo should have melted. Yeah. That would have been cool. Yeah. I've heard WB can be protective of their logo. Like, they don't let people necessarily mess with it. Yeah. Did they still let Scorpion kill Daffy Duck?
Speaker:That was a new regime. It was a different time.
Speaker:Anyways, folks, thank you so much for hanging around with us while we wax it out. I swear we'll be back with more wax movies as the month goes on. There's a surprising number of good ones, so you're gonna wanna tune back in.
Speaker:You can find more of Box Office Pulp. At Box Office Pulp, we have our own website. You can find us on Spotify,
Speaker:wherever you get your podcast from these days. I don't know what the kids are into. We're there. Trust us. Zoom. Zoom. Sure. I I will agree to anything.
Speaker:You should also I mean, if you're watching a 2 hour long commentary track for House of Wax,
Speaker:you're gonna dig Millennial Nasties. It's just gonna be up your alley. So go to, Encyclapocalypse
Speaker:and go order your own copy. You're gonna thank me later.
Speaker:Aria, where's the best place for fans to find you? To own a book that has,
Speaker:Nathan from Repo the genetic opera on the back cover.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Oh, gosh. Thank you. Yes.
Speaker:How does that process work? Did you say, I really want repo, and they're like, yeah. We can clear that. Or, like, did they give you, like, 5 choices of things they had they could get? Here's what happened. The publisher said, what do you want for your cover art? And I said, I have no idea. I'm not a visually creative person. He took it to grim poppy designs.
Speaker:She came up with a banger of a design, and the rest is history. So you should follow grim poppy designs on Instagram. There we go. Yeah. Get the plugs a going. Yes. And I'm nothing if not a shill.
Speaker:That's why we're doing this whole thing. Whoo.
Speaker:Where can people find more of your stuff? I don't know if you wanna boost out a Twitter or anything these days, but in case you're interested. Yeah. Absolutely. You can find me on all social forms atre_hellraiser,
Speaker:and I will link all my writing and podcasting
Speaker:on my Instagram and Twitter. There we go. So, folks, again, thank you so much.
Speaker:I hope, everyone isn't waxed out. So get yourself fresh for more wax later. I'm still workshopping wax things because it turns out they never made a single good wax tagline for any of these movies. So, if anyone creative out there has a really good wax byline, please send it to me. So we can wax poetic about these movies.
Speaker:Yeah. I guess.
Speaker:I was thinking Brazilian waxes, and I just couldn't connect the dots. No.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:No. And that's the note we're ending. Exactly. I gotta really deflate the room. Cody.
Speaker:Hey. There we go. That's the best one yet.
Speaker:Alright, folks. That's a wrap. Get the hell out of here.
Speaker:You get more out of life when you go out to a movie.
Speaker:I remember looking at the poster for this movie, and it was dumb as hell. I gotta look it up again. House of Wes The Melty Chase. Poster. The poster itself was fine. It was, like, the tagline was dumb as hell. Oh.
Speaker:What was it? Come on, enhance. Oh, it off the top of my head. You can melt from horror.
Speaker:It was pray, slay, display. Oh, yes. I'm looking at it now. Stupid. It just sounds like some weird yeah. It just sounds like some weird girl boss thing. It was not it's not even, like, pray, like, pray to god. It's pray as in, like, I am I am being hunted prey,
Speaker:then slay, and then display, which is a shame because they do have what's actually a cool poster design of, like, the the welting,
Speaker:melting figure. It is weird how the the the matte wax figure is also Vincent at the same time.
Speaker:You know, some people have live, laugh, love on their pillows,
Speaker:but we have crazily display.
Speaker:That's gonna be the next thing in Spirit Halloween. They're gonna move past Beetlejuice, and then they're gonna circle back around to mid 2000 slashers. I can't
Speaker:If you could find me in there spending all my money, I'll tell you that for free because I'll be out of money. They open 1 on the east side now, and it's like, don't do this to me. I
Speaker:I have bills to pay.
Speaker:Oh, god. I went into a Spirit Halloween in an old CVS
Speaker:the other
Speaker:day. That was so small, they couldn't set up any of the big animatronics.
Speaker:Yeah. That What are you, party city?
Speaker:Damn.
Speaker:Yeah. You're getting screwed on that one. That's not an actual
Speaker:Spirit Halloween. They didn't have any of the good stuff in. I walked out with an absolute trick or treat mask. It felt perverse.
Speaker:Spirit
Speaker:Airlines Halloween, more like
Speaker:because Spirit Airlines is real cheap. You get it. Knocking them dead.
Speaker:You get it. And you can take that home with you.
Speaker:I'm so sorry for everything.
Speaker:At least I didn't say anything factually inaccurate this time.
Speaker:Yeah. What I did was last time.
Speaker:I always worry, like, I've done 5 of those, and then someday, Mike will be like, hey. Could you watch this stuff before you talk about it?
Speaker:I like how I'm the manager in this situation. Yeah, Mike. It's all to you. Cinch it up, man.
Speaker:Get your shit together or pack it up. Get out.
Speaker:Please remember to replace the speaker on the post when you leave the theater.
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