A shining peak has become a murky trough. What was once dubbed “the Citizen Kane of horror movies” has become Confessions of a Window Cleaner. The sublime has become the ridiculous.
But do go see it anyway. The 2006 version of The Wicker Man is one of the funniest, most rib- tickling films you’ll ever see. Exquisite in its ham-fistedness, Neil LaBute’s update begins, fittingly, with a car crash and ends with the credibility of everyone involved, including its star, Nicolas Cage (in the role once played by Edward Woodward), going up in smoke as the hero is burnt to death in a giant wicker effigy.
In between, the modern movie with which Scotland is most closely entwined is taken to bits and reassembled with its legs poking out of the armpits. Call off the hunt for the worst film of the decade; it’s here already, sending out its smoky black clouds of hilarity.
As one of British cinema’s pre-eminent cult classics, you may already know the original. Sergeant Neil Howie is a devout Christian police officer in the west Highlands who receives an anonymous letter revealing that a teenage girl has gone missing from Summerisle, a privately owned fiefdom off the coast. Howie visits to find an island where Presbyterianism has been abandoned in favour of a rump-slapping brand of paganism.
Tormented gradually by the island’s mysterious ruler, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), Howie’s doomed investigation ends when he discovers he has been the victim of a fiendish plot to secure a human sacrifice for the fertility gods after a disastrous harvest. The Wicker Man builds to one of the most celebrated climaxes in cinema, during which Howie is burnt alive in a 30ft-high wicker colossus, with the islanders singing folk songs as he toasts.
Advertisement
Appropriately, though, for a film concerned with the life force and the claims upon it made by Christianity versus the old ways of the pagan countryside, The Wicker Man possesses a life force of its own. Hacked to the bone in the cutting room, consigned to a despondent release in the provinces and then slated by critics, it has nonetheless staged one of the most remarkable Lazarus acts in cinema history over the past decade.
With its florid acting and Scandinavian nudity, its air of laughing evil and theological debates, it is a film that refuses to lie down and die; a movie on the dangers of religious cults that has inspired a cult of its own.
With a people’s-choice slow-burner such as The Wicker Man, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood looked its way, just as it had done with The Avengers, Get Carter and several other British cult classics.
Any remake was always bound to be a difficult proposition, though, with so much of the original film’s appeal lying in the sinister otherworld that was stitched together from the location filming in Dumfries and Galloway and its tart dialogue.
Suffice to say that although the remake follows the story arc of the original closely and even recycles chunks of its dialogue, the new Wicker Man has gallons of gooey American sentiment pumped into its crevices.
Advertisement
The narrative also has comedy where the menace used to be and, with the removal of the clash of faiths, no meaningful sense of confrontation, causing the viewer’s interest to dissipate by the end of the first reel.
In true American fashion, the hero, now called Edward Malus, has a back story. A motorcycle cop, he is a man in turmoil after failing to save a girl from a fatal road accident. When a mysterious letter arrives from Summerisle concerning a missing girl, Malus sees his chance for redemption.
Hopping aboard a seaplane to Summerisle, Malus finds that nobody has ever heard of the missing teenager. In the original, the Summerislanders were a motley band of Scottish character-part veterans and roped-in locals, giving them a weirdness that stayed within the bounds of familiarity.
Now, however, they are eye-rolling inbreds direct from Deliverance. Without the erudite jousting of Howie and Summerisle, the film becomes nothing more than a tedious chase movie.
Quite simply, it is beyond awful; a hysterical, steroid-enhanced pastiche of the thoughtful theological seminar that was the original film. In one way, the remake is proof of the original’s deathless spirit, its ability to resurrect itself, to live on in the public memory. Its life force, however, receives a deep wounding in what proves to be one of the most farcical and misconceived treatments in cinema history.
Advertisement
The Wicker Man is now on general release
HOLLYWOOD CRIMES AGAINST SCOTLAND
Advertisement
Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde
A hopeless chick-flick adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror classic with Sean Young.
Advertisement
Greyfriars Bobby
The Disney version of this tale of canine loyalty has the dog refusing to leave master Jock’s grave, when in fact it popped to a restaurant for lunch every day.
A Shot at Glory
Robert Duvall’s epic about life in Scottish football’s second division anticipated Gretna by six years, but was deemed so laughable that it was never released.
The Evil Beneath Loch Ness
A barmy flick in which Patrick Bergin plays a marine biologist hired by an American television network to investigate a series of mysterious diving accidents around the infamous loch.
Postmortem
Charlie Sheen plays a Glaswegian cop who receives a postmortem report on a person found dead the next day. Spooky? No, just poor.