wicker man burns

For my money, Nicolas Cage’s perfect role was as the intellectually challenged repeat offender in The Coen Brothers’ anarchic comedy ‘Raising Arizona’. He’s one of those male leads who never convinces me as a tough guy – the more macho he tries to be, the more ridiculous he looks.

A case in point is ‘The Wicker Man’ , a misguided remake of the 1973 cult classic, where he is woefully miscast as a hard nosed Californian cop investigating the disappearance of a child in a closed, female dominated community.

His default option recourse to police weaponry and disturbing habit of thumping women are so ludicrously over the top that the scenes become unintentionally hilarious. As one Youtube viewer commented: “I hadn’t realized how empty my life had been til I’d seen a woman sucker-punched by a dude in a bear outfit”.

Cage delivers lines like “You have permission to stand out the fucking way!” and the funniest moment comes when he forces a woman on a country road to dismount from her bicycle. He points his gun at her as if confronting a rabid terrorist rather than an unarmed school teacher before ordering her to “Step away from the bike!” This line is so crass that it has been adopted as the slogan for the Wicker Man online hatelisting group which invites participants to register their loathing for the remake.

You can see this memorable scene, along with others in this excellent YouTube montage:

In the movie, Cage has an allergy to bee stings and a neurotic obsessive disorder which means that he cannot be separated from his jacket and tie for long periods. When he emerges from near death by drowning in an underground well (still looking remarkably un-wet!) his first action is to put his jacket back on to restore his clean shaven well turned out demeanor. He blunders about the island like an SAS cop in a convent (“I don’t get this place!”)

In the original movie the Island based community used the pretext of celebrating the goddess of fertility to bonk en masse in the fields and you also got the chance to marvel at Britt Ekland’s naked booty dance. In the remake, a chaste kiss between Cage and his ex is the extent of the carnal excitement.

Another glaring difference is in the use of music. Paul Giovanni’s original score evoked both the bawdy sense of revelry and the traditional Celtic rituals at the heart of this alternative island culture. In the updated version the maypole stands unused and in the procession scene the primitive instruments being played are drowned out by the bland orchestrated soundtrack.

This celebration of paganism is also eliminated in the remake, a measure of how mainstream cinema nowadays mostly filters out any controversial references to religion. Christopher Lee’s charismatic performance as Lord Summersisle in the original made the power he held as a occultist master of ceremonies highly believable. For the remake this role is taken by Ellen Burstyn as Sister Summersisle, a mother goddess is a more benign figure – more quaintly eccentric than demonically crazed.

In short, the movie is a bona fide turkey which pales in comparison to Robin Hardy’s still remarkable 1973 version which remains one of the UK’s most unique and uncompromising pieces of cinema.