The Wicker Man (2006)

A chain of unlikely events involving a random car accident and a letter from an ex-girlfriend brings a policeman to an island host to a matriarchal society, with bees on it. Everyone on the island is at very least weird, if not aggressively obnoxious and time is running out! Will he find the missing child before The Wicker Man happens?!

The Wicker Man is an Internet Darling and is nearly unreviewable. All the best parts are all over Youtube and lines from the film have already entered the lexicon of imaginary internet people everywhere. It is however well worth watching in full so you can understand the context within which all your most favorite Wicker Man lines are spoken.

This movie is a remake of the feel-good pagan horror musical from 1973 featuring Christopher Lee. Instead of Christopher Lee there is some lady and Nicholas Cage. They took out the songs and replaced them with more Nicholas Cage. Then they added some bees and thought they were done but the movie was still only like eighty minutes long, so they just spliced in ten minutes worth of flashbacks to the car accident at the beginning of the movie to fill things out. This was still not enough so they added some more bees.

This is a remake only in the loosest sense of the word. It has absolutely nothing to do with the original except for there being a Wicker Man at the end. But you really can't blame them because while The Wicker Man (1973) is a great movie, you show that to a bunch of 18-35 year olds now- with its musical numbers and quaint Christianity vs Paganism theme and man made of a hard woven fiber formed into a rigid material usually used for baskets or furniture- and they would laugh whilst texting on their cellphones and tweeting on their twitters. They would leave nasty comments on your precious Facebook page. Or shank you in the kidney on the way out. You never know with kids today.

Nicholas Cage really had no choice. They took all that outdated stuff out and instead you have him running around like a madman, karate kicking ladies into walls, screaming at children, and riding his bike furiously through the streets. And there is a giant conspiracy of course (in order to have a twist at the end) and it is the most ridiculous thing ever, relying on Nicholas Cage randomly coming upon things over a span of several years in order to arrive where he is. It's hilarious and the only thing keeping it together is Cage's madcap antics; played straight, this movie would have been impossible to watch.

So make it a movie night and watch the original and this remake back-to-back. You'll appreciate the class and excellent film making of the first movie, and then you'll appreciate how the remake doesn't even try to translate all that stuff into something modern man could relate to.