The Wicker Man (Remake) (2006)

Starring: Nicolas Cage, with cameos from James Franco and Aaron Eckhart
Grade: C

It may be bad in the obvious sense, but it is still pure entertainment. That’s still worth something in my eyes.

Summary

After we see police officer Edward Malus (Cage) and his partner at a diner, we see Malus go through his daily duties as a cop, pulling people over. Eventually, Malus sees that a car dropped a doll, so he pulls the car over to give the doll back to the little girl that dropped it. He speaks with the mother for a bit and hands the doll back to the daughter. Despite agreeing with Malus on how it won’t happen again, the daughter tosses the doll right back out of the window while they talk. Malus, a very patient man, goes and grabs it once more but when he goes across the street to retrieve it, a semi-truck crashes directly into the car, killing the mother. The car starts to be engulfed in flames, so Malus tries to save the girl. However, as he tries to grab the girl (who just stares at him despite the car being on fire), an explosion sends Malus to the ground.

Sometime later, Malus is at home. He’s had a decent amount of time off since the incident, and he’s got prescription medication because of it. A co-worker drops by to give him some mail and to see how he’s doing. He asks her if they found the bodies from the car wreck. Sadly, she says no. Plus, the car wasn’t even registered. After she leaves, Malus looks through his mail and reads a letter from his ex-fiancée, Willow Woodward (Kate Beahan). She acknowledges that their long-ago break up was on her but currently, she has a daughter that has gone missing for the last two weeks. She doesn’t know who else to turn to besides Malus. Willow lives on Summersisle, a small island off the coast off Washington state that specializes in organic bee products. There’s no way Rowan could have left the island because she’s so young, so she has to be there. Willow has also received very little help from the citizens of Summersisle, so she can only turn to him. After Malus does some initial research, he goes to his partner at the department for advice. He’s skeptical and suggests calling her first but apparently, there’s no phone service on Summersisle. Despite his partner’s doubts, Malus decides to go through with his mission. He takes a boat to a certain point and then pays some pilot that delivers goods to Summersisle, to fly him there.

After landing and trekking through some forest areas, he wanders onto a populated part of the island, immediately being questioned by a citizen. Right away, she mentions that the island is private property, and he can’t be there without permission. Malus explains he was invited and how he’s a cop who’s investigating a missing child from a resident that lives there. The woman then tells him to talk to Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn) because she’s very particular about anyone landing there. As they talk, people start to come by to back up the woman. Then, she questions if the pilot flew him there, sounding extra suspicious as she asks. He doesn’t really answer and shows them a picture of Rowan, though they don’t even look at the picture. They just say they don’t know her, even after he says she’s the daughter of Willow, a resident they do know. After they tell him where to find Willow and he starts to leave, one woman says Rowan isn’t Willow’s daughter. Malus goes to some bar/hotel type of area and approaches Sister Beech (Diane Delano) to ask if he can stay there for the time being. Though she’s not very accommodating, she relents. Willow is there too, and she is sent to show Malus to his room. Before he leaves though, he orders a drink and is served mead. One of the ingredients is honey as Beech explains. After he takes a sizable gulp, he gets the attention of everyone there (all of whom are women) and tells them he’s there on official police business for a missing person’s case. Though Beech mentions he’s a cop from California and not Washington, he doesn’t waiver on his seriousness in solving this case.

He then slams his cup on a bee to kill it. Everyone in the room freaks out, including Beech, but Malus explains he’s allergic. He goes to his room but for some reason, Willow doesn’t talk to him. She just hands him a letter and leaves. In the letter, she explains she’s being watched and wants to meet at some place on the outskirts of town to talk. She also says to believe nothing he sees or hears.

Later, Malus meets up with Willow, and they discuss why she left him so many years ago. She was scared of taking that next step and decided to come back to Summersisle, a place where she grew up. Malus asks why Rowan’s father hasn’t been involved, but Willow explains she only trusts Malus. She doesn’t know who took Rowan, but she knows she’s still alive, so Malus makes a promise to her. If she is still alive, he will find her. Before he can ask her any more questions, she says they will meet up soon, but she has to leave because clearly, she feels as though she’s being watched again. That night at the hotel, Malus notices some stuff missing from his bag, so he leaves his room to question some people. However, he stops after a few steps once he sees Sister Beech meet with some women on the lower level, including two creepy twins that speak at the same time. They ask Beech if Sister Summersisle will join the group, but Beech tells them “No”. Then, she asks them if they will be ready for tomorrow, a “time of death and rebirth”. They both agree wholeheartedly, speaking of the Wicker Man’s return. As Malus stands there confused, a worker (Leelee Sobieski) walks by and he asks her if she knows if someone unpacked his bags because he’s missing some tapes, but she pleads ignorance and leaves.

Perplexed at what the fuck has transpired over the course of five minutes, he goes back into his room to sleep. What he doesn’t realize is that the weirdness has just begun.

My Thoughts:

It’s not like the first Wicker Man was amazing or anything, but it’s safe to say that this remake isn’t on the original’s level. Though the idea of this film is still the same, and still carries a lot of similar scenes to the movie that preceded it, there’s something so off about this film that it becomes a parody of itself. So, though it’s not the horror film it portrays itself to be, if you treat it like a horror comedy, this remake still has very high entertainment value.

It might be the king of unintentionally funny movies.

There’s a series of moments in this movie that elicit a lot of laughs, like Malus’s reaction to the school children trapping a bird in the desk, his night terrors and daydreams about the girl from the opening abruptly getting hit by a semi-truck, and of course the climax that found Nicolas Cage trying to save the day in a bear costume. The decisions that were made, and how they were presented, were legitimately funny. I almost don’t believe that the people that made this film intended it to be scary because there’s no way some of these scenes didn’t look and sound ridiculous beforehand. As “campy” as some consider these scenes to be, if you look at it through a comedic lens, or just don’t take it seriously going into it, you’ll enjoy the experience. The classroom scene is great and seeing Nicolas Cage try to get to the bottom of things as everyone tries to walk around every question he has, is a lot of fun. Once he gives a haymaker to Sister Beech, you’re dying laughing. It’s like all the characters are in a horror movie, and Cage is playing a normal audience member walking into the world they created and reacting accordingly. He’s the only sane person in an island full of insane people, and he’s just trying to understand what’s going on.

It’s honestly worth the watch because of how crazy it gets.

Now, as entertaining as Cage is, he isn’t enough to save this obviously poorly-made film. The actress playing the diner in the opening set things off with some horrible acting, and it just started rolling from there. The defining moment that changes Malus’s demeanor, the semi-truck incident in the beginning, was so out-of-nowhere that it was hysterical. Things only get funnier when he refers back to it numerous times throughout the film through flashbacks and dreams. Additionally, it’s implied that the bodies couldn’t be located. What are they even trying to say here? That he imagined it? That someone took the bodies? There’s no payoff to this. On top of that, once he gets to the island and starts interacting with his first group of citizens, he asks to see what’s in the bag that two guys are carrying because it’s dripping blood or something. He looks at it and looks dumbfounded. The group just laughs at him. We are never showed what’s inside of it though. Why? What was in there? The ending also had the unanswered question of Willow’s very remorseful look. She was obviously affected by what went down, with that sad expression she carried for most of the film looking even more evident in the climax. Was she actually sad? She looked like it, but it was forgotten about completely after the “Six Months Later” sequence. Why even make her look regretful then? Have her smile and laugh it off like how it happened in the original if you weren’t going to address it! That simple look almost redeemed her for a moment. In addition, there’s one scene where Willow asks Malus to meet her somewhere and these are her exact directions:

“There is a place out beyond the point. Meet me there in an hour”.

How the fuck does he know where to go? These are the worst directions I’ve ever heard of! He’s never been on this island! You have to be very thorough with your directions for any normal person, especially since GPS on your phone wasn’t a thing back then. There are so many things in here that make you scratch your head, and this is just the beginning.

Compared to the original film’s focus on men being the domineering presence of the island (and the penis being venerated), women are the focus of Summersisle. This was an interesting decision and honestly, I was on board for it. It’s a nice reversal to separate itself from its predecessor and had potential to be something truly outrageous. However, it was all hype. An easy thing to do, to really show us the horrors of how they treat the men on the island, was to show us firsthand how they treat them. Sister Summersisle explains that men only exist to help procreate but not much is known before or after this job is done. It just looks like they are forced into slave labor. This sucks for them obviously, but it’s kind of boring. Why don’t they show a scene depicting a male’s life on this island? What if they were taught in the school’s classroom that their main job in life is to help make children and position their women as royalty or something? Furthermore, how do they stop men from uprising? There has to be some type of extreme measures being taken so men don’t overpower the women on the island and try to take it from them, right? When Malus tries to get the men to stand up and fight, one guy just grunts at him. What’s stopping them from rising up? There has to be some reason why they look so defeated. To really increase the horror, they should’ve said that the men are castrated after procreation, or their tongues are ripped out or something, to show why they don’t talk back. As disturbing as that may sound, it would’ve added a very appalling but important element to the story, giving us an extra level of conflict for Malus to hopefully overcome.

Unfortunately, it ended up being a super disappointing decision that didn’t give us anything new to see that the original didn’t do better. This includes Ellen Burstyn’s Sister Summersisle, who was nowhere near Christopher Lee’s portrayal of Lord Summerisle in the first film. She just didn’t have that presence about her that Lee had. Also, why change the name of the island from “Summerisle” to “Summersisle”? Is it just because they switched from males to females? There has to be a better reason than that. This seemed unnecessary otherwise. Though on the other hand, Summersisle rolls off the tongue better than Summerisle, so they got that going for themselves.

Side note, you know the infamous “Not the bees!” scene? Yeah, that’s only in the unrated DVD version, not the actual version of the film.

The remake of The Wicker Man struggles with a battle between deciding if the film is indeed a horror film or secretly a comedy. Here, the filmmaker and the audience seem to completely disagree on what this movie is better at, but I assure you it’s pretty hilarious as a comedy. It’s too bad the producers didn’t see this beforehand because if they realized how funny this movie actually is, a great editor could’ve recut this into a deadpan horror comedy in the vein of The Naked Gun series. Sadly, the actual final product is kind of shitty because they took it too seriously. However, it’s not the Cage’s fault. THAT I can promise you. His acting always shines in movies that are fucking “out there”.

Honestly, 2006’s The Wicker Man is so ridiculous it’s still worth the watch. It would be a great date night movie because of its outrageousness.

You’ll have loads to talk about when the credits roll.