What Went Wrong With The Wicker Man Remake?

I love the 1973 Wicker Man. I love the atmosphere and tone of the movies, I love Anthony Schaffer’s excellent script, I love the performances, particularly Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Howie and Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle. I love the mythos behind the production and distribution. The fact that Britt Ekland had to be dubbed and have a body double which begs the question why cast her as Willow, especially as she hated the bleak Scottish weather. The famous legend that the negative for the original cut is buried somewhere under the M4 motorway. It is amazing with the whole journey Robin Hardy’s film has come through, despite various cuts, that it is still so beloved and is deemed one of the greatest horror films ever made.

If you want to learn more about this movie that everyone seems to have a story about, heck out Mark Kermode’s excellent documentary called Burnt Offering: The Cult of the Wicker Man. It is a fantastic watch and an absolute treasure trove of information about the movie. We, however, will be delving into Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage. The remake so infamous that it is still used as an example of how to not revise a classic film. Is it really that bad though?

The plot follows Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) as he receives a letter from ex-fiancée Willow Woodward (Kate Beahan) that her daughter Rowan is missing. After witnessing a traumatic road accident in the film’s prologue, he thinks it is the right time to resume his police work after a period of depression. He flies over to the island run by Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn) and conducts his investigation into Rowan’s disappearance. His presence is unwanted by the local matriarchal society who take an instant dislike to Edward and make his investigation almost impossible. As he gets deeper into the mysteries surrounding Rowan’s disappearance and the island, things start to take an unfortunate turn for the police officer.

It's interesting writing the plot like that because if you change some of the details and not mention the final third of the movie, the set-up doesn’t have to be associated with The Wicker Man at all. The setup is competent enough to warrant a film of its own about a female cult that ensnares a male police officer with the bait of a missing child to find. It didn’t have to be a remake in the first place with some changes here and there. If the film wasn’t called The Wicker Man, not as many audiences would be able to see the ending a mile off and might have been a pleasant surprise. Sure, people might have compared it to the original, but Midsommar shows us that there’s plenty of room for more great horror movies about cults.

Rather than take a stealth remake approach, LaBute does lean heavily on the source material in some scenes. This is apparent when Edward questions the local schoolteacher and pupils regarding their lost classmate. Much of the dialogue is identical to the 1973 script and, as a result, you just want it to go quicker and move on. It’s not a great look if the audience is waiting for a scene to end. There are small changes to some elements of the plot that try and give it a unique twist such as a bad honey harvest instead of fruit harvest being the catalyst for an island sacrifice. But it’s not enough to watch it in a double bill with the original.

The biggest change, apart from location, is the matriarchal society that inhabit the isolated island. Director Neil LaBute has been known by critics as being a misanthrope and misogynistic. It is up to the viewer whether to determine this is the case. If you take a movie like In The Company of Men (1997), a black comedy about two co-workers who try to break the heart of a deaf woman for their own chauvinistic amusement, sure it is difficult to watch as Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy) toy with Christine (Stacy Edwards) but by the end of the movie, the roles are reversed and the she has the upper hand. Now, whether that is LaBute saying that women always get the upper hand, I don’t know, but all I know is that movie is a better context for his views on gender politics than the remake of a classic horror film.

In LaBute’s version of The Wicker Man, women are everything on the island. The men have been reduced to mute slaves living in fear. It is suggested that excess boys that are born on the island are disposed with and only the best stock are kept alive. Many of LaBute’s movies place women and men as competitors, as rivals, and I just don’t think it works here. It leads to the main complaint against the film which is its absurdity in the third act. Everyone knows this is the movie where Nicholas Cage punches women while dressed as a bear. You can try and engage a conversation of gender politics, but when your movie descends into complete madness, no one seems to be paying attention to that anymore.

The final half an hour of the film is frantic, bizarre, and chaotic and have led to it notoriously being called, “Unintentionally funny.” LaBute has said that he did intend to make it a black comedy, but it’s just straight-up silly. The character of Edward goes from being a relatively reasonable man to a lunatic. This character development does match with his psyche. He has been constantly getting flashbacks to his past, found out the girl he is looking for is his daughter, left overnight in a well filled with water, and been stung by bees which almost sent him in anaphylactic shock.

He has had enough and during the Festival of Fertility, he commandeers a bike at gunpoint, steals a bear outfit, punches some women, kicks LeeLee Sobieski in the head, and screams “You bitches!” at the top of his voice when he is captured, their plot is revealed, and his fate is sealed.

When you compare it to the reveal in the 1973 movie, Howie is still trying to work everything out in his head. He is trying to find an escape route and even the God he loves so much cannot help him. It is much more impactful when he looks upon the Wicker Man and utters “Oh Jesus” under his breathe rather than screaming “You Bitches.”

Another issue with the final scene is censorship. Unfortunately, The Wicker Man was victim to something many films of that era were. It was cut in an attempt to garner a PG-13 rating in the US or a 12A certificate in the UK. This annoys audiences already because you are trimming scenes that they want to see and have sometimes been advertised in the trailers. It also looks like a cynical money-grabbing exercise to show you favour box-office receipts to your movie and will compromise the integrity of your art to achieve that. The film already suffers from the lack of creepiness and chilling tone of the original and now scenes that may give the audience something to squirm over are being deleted.

When the islanders have caught Edward, we see him being taken up to the Wicker Man beaten and dejected. He cannot walk and has bee stings on his face. This is because scenes where his legs are broken, and a cage of bees are put on his head were cut out. Apparently, these scenes would have sent the rating sky high and deem the film unsuitable for general audiences. But it is a horror film and making it more palatable so more people can see it is not good form. You can find the scenes on YouTube or the extra features of the DVD, and they aren’t too bad at all. The bee cage scene has become quite a famous meme even though it was cut from the final edit. I don’t think any audience respects a movie that pulls its punches like this.

It's a shame that The Wicker Man ended up like this as it had a decent leading man and a competent setup. It wasn’t liked by the director of the 1973 version, Robin Hardy or Christopher Lee who were actually in contention to make a semi-remake of the original film with Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Astin called The Riding of the Laddie. With any remake we must ask do we need it? Does it offer something new or improve the original? In this case, stick with the marvellous original film rather than this misjudged offering.

What The Critics Said - 15% Critic Score on Rotten Tomatoes

Just a note: This movie was not shown to critics which is usually a damning inditement. It shows that the director and producers don’t have a great deal of faith in the finished product and fear that critical retribution will be a financial disaster for the movie.

“Neil LaBute's utterly misconceived remake of Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film is a boring, fright-free catastrophe.” Nigel Floyd – Time Out

“To his credit Cage plays it with an admirably straight face, even when mugging a woman for her bear costume. But then he must have known from the beginning he was backing a loser.” Neil Smith – BBC

“It's never as scary or suspenseful as it aspires to be, but it might just be the greatest bad movie of the year, with its clunky writing resulting in some surprisingly entertaining kooky moments.” Christy Lemire – Associated Press