No Man’s Land

Pointed questions: Detective Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) confronts the class of teacher Sister Rose (Molly Parker) in Neil Labute's remake of The Wicker Man. Alcon Entertainment/Millennium Films.

Location, location, location: that maxim is sometimes as true for movies as it is for real estate. Of the many bad decisions that went into Neil LaBute’s disastrous remake of The Wicker Man, the most fundamental is the choice to relocate this very British horror movie to America’s Pacific Northwest. The 1973 original was a scary yet sexy tale of pagans who every year plan a human sacrifice to ensure a more bountiful harvest. Uprooted, the concept does not thrive in its new home. Indeed, every fibre of The Wicker Man seems to reject the transplant, resulting in what may be the most dire and inept of all the remade horror classics that have tormented audiences in recent years, a sad list that includes The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Dawn of the Dead.

The playwright and filmmaker behind the misanthropic likes of In the Company of Men and Some Girl(s) — as well as the occasional mainstream project like the 2000 comedy Nurse Betty and an adaptation of A.S. Byatt’s literary thriller Possession — LaBute maintains only a basic fidelity to the original screenplay by the late Anthony Shaffer (whose other credits included Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and the play Sleuth). Co-producer Nicolas Cage deserves a hefty portion of the blame. After starring in World Trade Center, he plays his second cop of the summer. Edward (Cage) is a California highway patrolman who is traumatized when he witnesses a fiery car wreck that kills a mother and daughter (or seems to; their bodies are never found). While recuperating, Edward receives a letter from his ex-fiancée, Willow (Kate Beahan), who implores him to help her look for her missing daughter. Edward travels to Willow’s home on an island called Summersisle — located, we are told, somewhere near Puget Sound in Washington state. Privately owned, the island hosts a religious farming community (“like the Amish or something,” says one of Edward’s colleagues) whose main product is honey. (Since the film was shot off the west coast of Canada, it would be more plausible if the product were something more smokeable.)

The people of Summersisle don’t take kindly to strangers. As he clumsily proceeds with his investigation, Edward is treated with a mixture of hostility, disdain and bemusement by the island’s inhabitants, which include Molly Parker as an acerbic schoolteacher. Dressed largely in frumpy woolen garb, the women are the most visible members of the society; the men are glum and silent. All the islanders defer to the wisdom of their grand dame, Sister Summersisle, who is played with as much gravitas as Ellen Burstyn can muster while wearing what appears to be Marlon Brando’s wig from Superman.

Dress-up day on Spooky Island: Sister Beech (Diane Delano) and Dr. Moss (Frances Conroy) get freaky in The Wicker Man. Alcon Entertainment/Millennium Films.

Directed by Robin Hardy, the first movie was British to its very core. While still fictional, the original Summersisle was located in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland; the region’s traditional music was represented in the eerie folk score by Paul Giovanni. At the heart of the film was a clash that pitted dignified, God-fearing Puritanism against more ancient forces. Here was an eruption of energies that had long been suppressed, but somehow stayed present in British culture, visible in everything from maypole dancing to Stonehenge. Like every great villain in British thrillers of the era, the original film’s patriarch was played by Christopher Lee, who explained that poor crops had inspired the ancestors of the island’s first inhabitants to worship “the old gods” and invest new power in fertility symbols and rituals. A prude, a Christian and a virgin, the detective — played by Edward Woodward — was appalled by the islanders’ rites, condemning their licentious behaviour and resisting the temptations posed by a nude Britt Ekland. By doing so, he sealed his doom.

The Wicker Man placed sixth in a readers poll by UK magazine Total Film of the best British films of all time; the film’s indelible final image can be seen in real-life form at Nevada’s annual freak-a-thon, Burning Man. LaBute’s affection for the original is clear. “I came to the thing because I loved the first movie,” he told online horror magazine Bloody Disgusting. Cage was equally enthusiastic, having been introduced to the film by Johnny Ramone, to whom the new movie is dedicated. LaBute provides several hints at the original. He alludes to Edward Woodward — who later gained fame on TV’s The Equalizer — in the name of Cage’s hero and the surname of the missing girl. In the first appearance of an alluring young woman (played by Leelee Sobieski), the character is munching on an apple, a reference to the island’s crop in the original.

Some of LaBute’s new ideas are smart ones. For instance, he changes the patriarchy to a matriarchy; Sister Summersisle’s society has a similar structure to the bee colonies seen all around the island. But the removal of the tale’s religious, social and sexual elements deprives it of any primal force. LaBute’s explanation of how this odd community got all the way to Washington state is risible. (Would you believe they’re descendants of Celts who had to flee the Salem witch trials? I didn’t think so.) Since America is hardly lacking in homegrown religions — LaBute himself is a Mormon — he missed a rich opportunity to reinvent the story for the New World. It would be easier to forgive if this Wicker Man were passably effective as a thriller, but judging by the lamely presented scares, LaBute has no feel for the genre’s basic demands. All logic and tension has been sacrificed by the film’s latter half, in which Cage spends much of his time punching out women while dressed as a bear. Oh, how I wish this was an exaggeration. But no, The Wicker Man’s long journey through the decades and across the ocean has led somewhere no one could have predicted, or wanted.

The Wicker Man opens Sept. 1 across Canada.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.

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