Director Jaume Collet-Serra's complete reimagining of the classic Vincent Price horror film of the 50's succeeds despite a number of reasons why it shouldn't. First, rather than falling prey disappointing comparisons to the original, this version is so entirely different in tone, story and characterization as to be a remake in name only. This version comes late in the post-Friday the Thirteenth era, in which a band of hapless teenagers is predictably split into easily victimized groups before being decimated in creatively horrific ways.

Although this might have been cause for the resulting story to be a stale yawner, Collet-Serra and writer Chad Hayes take the risky course of allowing the audience to spend an unexpectedly long time with the cast as they make their way on a road trip to a football game in a neighboring city, detouring off the main road to find the eponymous House. What results is a dynamite stick of a movie with a very long fuse, and an intense eventual payoff.

The tone of the film mixes realistic, almost mundane settings with over the top, nightmarishly surreal sequences and Grand Guignol violence. The filmmakers tip their intention by including a sequence from 1962's garish, gothic film classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, playing at a dead town's movie theater while mouldering corpses encased in wax sit mutely staring at the screen.

The second expected pitfall avoided is the casting of Paris (why am I famous?) Hilton as a friend of lead character Carly Jones, played by the beautiful Elisha Cuthbert (of the TV series '24'). Paris not only aquits herself adequately, but actually manages to elicit sympathy when she meets an especially brutal end. Ironically, her role in an explicit videotape also plays a bitter part in the denouement of this shocking tale.

Surprisingly stunning special effects, creative situations and some unexpected plot twists make House of Wax the best horror film since last year's sleeper hit Saw.