'HOUSE OF WAX' Who wants to end up dead?

Life lessons can be difficult to learn when you're a dead teenager.
By ROGER MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
A few things we can safely assume about you if you've made it or are making it through your teen years without becoming that movie cliche, a "dead teenager."
You never stopped to camp out and have sex on private property in middle-of-nowhere Louisiana.
You never provoked a redneck pick-up truck driver by busting out his glaring headlights when he spot-lighted you.
You've never thought that poking around an empty wax museum was a smart thing to do.
The moment you smell dead things -- rotting corpses, for instance -- you flee.
And you never stopped fleeing from such things, even if Paris Hilton is with you and there's always the chance that Paris will do what Paris does best.
A doozy
"House of Wax," spun from a baroque bit of 1950s Vincent Price horror into a standard-issue "dead teenager movie," has a few "Don't go in there" moments. It's incredibly gross and the finale, although predictable (what melts wax, campers?), is still a doozy.
But it isn't scary.
Elisha Cuthbert of TV's "24" heads a cast of the-young-and-the-yummy on a college football road trip from Gainesville to Baton Rouge. Her beau (Jared Padalecki), ex-jock and ex-con brother (Chad Michael Murray of "A Cinderella Story"), pal Paige (Ms. Hilton) and her latest make-out partner (Robert Ri'chard from "Coach Carter") and this loser camcorder buff (Jon Abrahams) stop on the way to pitch tents.
A hassle from an unseen villain in a '70s Chevy pick-em-up truck, a little car trouble (one college kid can afford a vintage Dodge Charger, the other a pimped Caddy truck) and there goes the UF-LSU game.
The nearby town is a creepy time capsule, an art moderne ghost village where, yes, they might find a fan belt. But first, they've got to check out the empty and ancient "House of Wax" museum with lots of statues, none of them of famous people, reside.
Learning curve
The movie's first scene is a faceless flashback to child abuse involving the woman who founded the waxy pre-Interstate tourist attraction. Who knows who lives here and what secrets they keep?
Australia substitutes for Louisiana in this movie by first-time director (aren't they all?) Jaume Serra.
You have to wonder if Hollywood isn't a version of the early Lincoln administration, endlessly searching for a general, trying out just anybody. You do a music video and a commercial and they let you go off to Australia, burn down a set (an accident), and wax-whack a bunch of young not-quite-stars.