Don”t bother seeing Paris die

How do you build a three-story building entirely out of wax? And how does it stand for decades in the heat of Louisiana?

And why oh why is this movie nearly two hours long?

In a nutshell: “House of Wax” is pretty darn stupid.

It rips off the title of the semi-classic 1953 3-D movie, and little else. (Well, actually, there is one other thing – one of the villains is named Vincent, homage of sorts to ‘53 star Vincent Price.) The new film isn’t even in 3-D.

As directed by newcomer Jaume Collet-Serra (fresh from ads for beer, PlayStation and cars), and starring the over-exposed Paris Hilton, “House of Wax” follows the sorry template of a zillion other youth-oriented horror flicks: A group of young people stop in the middle of nowhere and soon are targeted by psychotic slashers.

In this case, the slashers are Siamese twin brothers, now physically separated, but psychically joined. They live in a “house of wax” that was supposedly a tourist attraction but long ago lost its appeal. Now they stock it with the wax-coated bodies of strangers who wander in.

The writers – a set of twins named Chad and Carey Hayes – also make two of the half-dozen college kids twins (Chad Michael Murray and Elisha Cuthbert). So, the film has a set of bad twins and a set of good twins. I’m not sure what this says, except some twins are bad and some are good. Alert the media.

And, oh yes, as disseminated in those “See Paris Die” T-shirts, Hilton’s character meets an especially messy end, which was greeted by cheers at our preview screening.