House of Wax is a 2005 slasher film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra in his feature directorial debut and featuring an ensemble cast consisting of Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt in a dual role, Paris Hilton, Jared Padalecki, Jon Abrahams and Robert Ri'chard. It is a remake of the 1953 film of the same name, itself a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, based on the story "The Wax Works" by Charles S. Belden. The screenplay, written by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes, follows a group of teenagers who become stranded in a seemingly abandoned town containing an elaborate wax museum. The soundtrack features music by bands including Deftones, My Chemical Romance, Joy Division and Interpol.
House of Wax premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released in United States theaters on May 6, 2005, by Warner Bros. Pictures. It grossed $70.1 million worldwide and received generally negative reviews from critics, who criticized its lack of originality, screenplay and characters, but praised the performances and atmosphere. It has gained a cult following in the years since its release.
En route to a football game, Carly Jones, her delinquent twin brother Nick, her boyfriend Wade Felton and their friends – Dalton Chapman, Paige Edwards and Blake Johnson – set up camp for the night in a wooded area. A stranger in a pickup truck arrives, then leaves after Nick damages one of the truck's headlights. The next day, Wade discovers his car's fan belt has been severed; a local named Lester offers to drive Wade and Carly to the nearby town of Ambrose while the rest of the group head to the game.
In Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town, mechanic Bo Sinclair offers to sell Carly and Wade a fan belt and drive them back to their car after he finishes attending a funeral. While waiting, they visit the central feature of the town – "Trudy's House of Wax", a wax museum-like tourist trap which is itself, like everything inside, made of wax. They follow Bo to his house to get the fan belt; Carly waits in his truck while Wade goes inside to use the bathroom. Wade is soon ambushed and abducted by Bo's twin brother Vincent, who wears a wax-made mask to cover his facial disfigurement from when they were once conjoined. When Carly notices Bo's truck has a broken headlight and realizes it was he who visited the campsite, she flees with Bo in pursuit, ultimately being caught and taken to the local filling station's cellar.
Realizing they will not arrive at the game in time, Paige and Blake return to the campsite while Nick and Dalton arrive in Ambrose to look for Carly and Wade. When Carly attempts to call for help, Bo cuts off the tip of her index finger. She eventually gets Nick's attention as he fends off Bo and rescues her, while Dalton finds Wade as part of the House of Wax, restrained in coated wax. Dalton tries to free him by peeling off the wax from his face, inadvertently removing his skin in the process. Vincent then ambushes Dalton and slashes off more of Wade's face, causing him to instantly die of shock, before decapitating Dalton.
While searching the town for help, the Joneses realize that the wax figures, both in the House of Wax and placed around Ambrose to make it appear populated, are actually the wax-coated corpses of its inhabitants and visitors lured there. Vincent had been attempting to continue the wax sculpting work of his mother and the House of Wax's creator, Trudy Sinclair, following her death, but Bo began manipulating him into making more realistic figures out of their victims. At the campsite, Vincent murders Blake and chases Paige into an abandoned sugar mill, where he does the same to her using a metal pipe. Vincent encounters the Joneses in the House of Wax's basement as Nick unintentionally incites a building-wide inferno. Upstairs, Nick battles Bo and is stabbed in the leg before Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat. A vengeful Vincent chases Carly to the top floor where she tries to reason with him but then fatally stabs him with Nick's help. The deceased Vincent ends up on top of Bo's corpse, while the Joneses escape as the House of Wax melts to the ground.
The next morning, local authorities, having seen the fire’s smoke, arrive and report about how Ambrose had been abandoned for the past decade ever since the local sugar mill went out of business. As the Joneses are driven away in an ambulance, one of the officials is told that the Sinclair family had a third son. The ambulance passes by Lester, who waves goodbye to the siblings while smiling.
Return to House on Haunted Hill is a 2007 American horror film and the sequel to the 1999 film House on Haunted Hill. Directed by Víctor Garcia and written by William Massa, the film stars Amanda Righetti, Tom Riley, Cerina Vincent and Erik Palladino. The film follows Ariel Wolfe — younger sister of Sara Wolfe, a character from the previous film — being forced by a group of people to search for a mysterious idol hidden inside an abandoned and haunted psychiatric asylum.
The film was released straight-to-video on October 16, 2007 on DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD formats.
Ariel Wolfe is the younger sister of Sara Wolfe, a survivor of a birthday event eight years ago in the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, which at that time had been abandoned and later converted into a private residence— but has since been abandoned yet again. In the 1930s, the asylum was overseen by the sadistic psychiatrist Dr. Richard B. Vannacutt. Sara claimed that the ghosts of the house residents killed the party guests, and later committed suicide.
Ariel and her friend Paul are kidnapped by an art dealer, Desmond Niles. Ariel realises that Sara did not commit suicide: Desmond killed her. Desmond forces Ariel to help him find an artifact located inside the old Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute, a figurine of the demon Baphomet. Inside the building, they encounter Dr. Richard Hammer and his assistants, Kyle and Michelle, revealing that Michelle has been on Niles' team the whole time, betraying Hammer all along.
Ariel explains that the building has been rigged to keep everyone inside for at least 12 hours. The group splits up to search for the idol. Desmond's henchmen are killed by the inmate ghosts, having visions of the patients there suffering the same deaths as them. A ghost shows Ariel the depravity the inmates suffered under Dr. Vannacutt. These images reveal that Vannacutt was driven mad by the idol and performed experiments on the mentally ill. The inmates led a revolt against Vannacutt, during which the sanatorium burned down. (The audience is shown footage from the 1999 film House on Haunted Hill.) The deaths in the previous film were assumed to be caused by the ghosts. But now Ariel is shown that the idol actually forces the dead to do Vannacutt's bidding and did not willingly kill.
Although the 12 hours are up, the master locking mechanism begins to lock the house down again. Ariel escapes but discovers that Paul has entered the house to look for her, and goes back inside. Convinced Michelle wants the idol for herself, Desmond attempts to kill her. Michelle, however, is killed by Vannacutt. The rest of the group discovers a way out of the asylum, but it is blocked by iron bars. The ghost of an inmate shows Ariel that the idol is in the asylum's basement, or crematorium.
Ariel, Paul, and Dr. Hammer descend to the crematorium and discover the "heart of the house," composed of living flesh. Ariel tries to destroy the idol, but it is indestructible. She then reasons that if it is flushed down the sewer and leaves the building, the spirits will be freed. The team is ambushed by Desmond, who wants the idol. The ghosts seize Desmond and burn him alive after he has a vision about a patient dying a similar death. The idol's evil overcomes Dr. Hammer and tries to strangle Ariel. The ghost of Vannacutt and the inmates appear, Vannacutt hoping one of them will die in the fight. Hammer recovers his senses, but Dr. Vannacutt kills him. Ariel throws the idol into the sewer. The spirits vanish, and several attack Dr. Vannacutt, tearing him apart. The building comes unsealed, and Ariel and Paul leave.
In a post-credits scene, a man and woman are about to have sex on a beach. The woman feels something under the sand. They dig and pull the Baphomet idol into the light.
Ghost Ship is a 2002 supernatural horror film directed by Steve Beck from a screenplay by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue. Its plot follows a marine salvage crew in the Bering Sea who discover a mysterious ocean liner that disappeared in 1962 and stars an ensemble cast of Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies, Ron Eldard, Desmond Harrington, Isaiah Washington, Alex Dimitriades, and Karl Urban.
Shot in Australia and Canada, It was released theatrically in North America on October 25, 2002. It received generally negative reviews but was a commercial success, grossing $68.3 million worldwide on a $20 million budget.
In 1962, aboard the transatlantic liner Antonia Graza, carrying over 600 elite passengers from all over Europe and an Italian crew of 500, people dance to the song "Senza Fine" sung by Francesca, a lounge singer. A young girl, Katie, sits alone until the captain offers to dance with her. A hand raises the switch lever of a windlass, which begins to wind a steel cord, coiled on the deck, onto the drum. In the middle between its fixed end and the windlass drum, the cord passes through a metal ring, so that the tightening of the cord turns it into a drawn-back bowstring, spanning the entire width of the upper deck. Eventually, the ring snaps and the released "bowstring" whips across the dance floor, bisecting 75 dancers. Katie is spared due to her height.
Forty years later, a salvage crew—Captain Murphy, Epps, Greer, Dodge, Munder, and Santos—celebrate their recent success. Jack Ferriman, a weather service pilot, approaches them saying he has spotted a vessel adrift in the Bering Sea. Because the ship is in international waters, it can be claimed by whoever brings it to port. The crew sets out on the salvage tugboat Arctic Warrior. The ship is the Antonia Graza, which was reported missing on the 21st of May 1962, off the coast of Labrador. After boarding the abandoned liner, the salvagers discover nine wooden boxes, each containing twenty-eight 100-oz gold bars.
After a series of supernatural events, the group decides to abandon the salvage effort and retreat with the gold, but an invisible force sabotages the Arctic Warrior. The tugboat explodes, killing Santos.
With no other option, the group begins repairing the Graza. Greer encounters Francesca, who seduces him into betraying his fiancée, then makes him fall down an elevator shaft to his death. Murphy enters the captain's cabin and finds his ghost. The captain explains that they recovered the gold from a sinking cruise ship, the Lorelei, along with a sole survivor. Murphy is shown a photo of the survivor, whom he recognizes. He rushes to tell the others, but is confronted by the revenge-seeking ghost of Santos, who makes him fall into a fit of hallucinatory panic. The others think Murphy has gone mad and lock him in a drained aquarium; Epps later finds him drowned.
Epps meets Katie's ghost, who reveals what happened on the Graza. The sole survivor of the Lorelei convinced ten members of the Graza's crew to murder the passengers, as well as the rest of the crew, for the gold. After it was accomplished through food poisoning, shooting, and other methods, the purser stabbed the chief steward in the back, then shot dead seven other complicit crewmen with a submachine gun. Francesca put a pistol bullet through the purser's head. The mastermind behind the massacre kissed Francesca, then telekinetically released a suspended hoist hook, lifting Francesca in the air by her impaled head, and branded her palm with a hook-shaped symbol using only his hands. The man turns out to be none other than Jack Ferriman, who is actually the spirit of a deceased sinner tasked with provoking people to sin, then killing them and ferrying their souls to hell. Epps induces that Ferriman has lured the salvage team to the Graza to repair it, and decides to sink it to thwart his plan. Munder is crushed to death under the ship's gears while scuba-diving in the flooded engine room. Epps tells Dodge to keep Jack on the ship's bridge while she sets explosives. Ferriman provokes Dodge to commit the sin of murder by mocking him as a coward for never acting on his feelings for Epps. When an irate Dodge levels the shotgun at Ferriman, the latter warns that after killing somebody, Dodge will go to hell. Dodge shoots the charging Ferriman in the heart.
Epps is setting explosives when she is confronted by Dodge. He tells her that he has killed Ferriman and that they can salvage the gold to start a life together, but Epps asks why Dodge has not asked her where Munder is. Realizing his ruse failed, "Dodge" morphs into Ferriman, who has killed Dodge. Ferriman needs the Graza afloat to continue using it as a soul trap. Having accumulated the required quota of souls aboard the ship, Ferriman will ferry them to hell. He offers to spare Epps's life in exchange for her not interfering, but she detonates the explosives. Ferriman is blown to pieces in the explosion and Katie helps Epps escape the sinking ship. Katie and the other souls trapped on the ship ascend to heaven.
Epps is found by a passenger ship and returned to land. Having been rolled into an ambulance on a gurney, she gives a scream of horror and dismay when she sees three wooden boxes with gold being carried onto the ship by six crewmen, overseen by a resurrected Ferriman, who turns his head to her and telekinetically closes the ambulance doors.
THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LOOK AT MY LISTING ~ PLEASE CHECK OUT MY OTHER ITEMS.