Just been to see the remake of the Wicker Man this evening.
Quick summary: it was bollocks.
Absolutely none of the wit, charm or music of the original. Naturally it's all been moved to America. Whereas in the original the story was based on actual British folklore, the remake scriptwriters seem to have been taking theology lessons from Silver Ravenwolf. Blah blah matriarchal society blah blah our ancestors got burned at Salem blah blah men are evil blah blah.
All the men on Summersisle are emasculated and have had their tongues cut out. All the women look like 1980s Greenham Common protestors and view men as little more than an occasionally useful penis that keeps walking around and getting in the way. By halfway through the movie, you want to shout at the screen, "Okay, we get it! You don't like feminists!"
At the beginning of the film Nicholas Cage's character gets asked by a fellow cop, "Are you going to apply for detective?" It's probably a good job he didn't, since while blundering around Summersisle he displays all the detective skills of a deaf, blind kid with learning disabilities. People keep telling him, "Tomorrow is a festival of DEATH....and rebirth." Somehow he utterly fails to realise that this translates as, "We're going to kill you."
The film also contains the line that caused the entire cinema to burst out laughing, where Cage pulls a gun on a woman with a bicycle and says, "Step away from the bike!" Praise be to Cthulhu, Edward Woodward was never such a dimwit. By the climax, you're pretty much begging for him to get torched.
Oh, and despite having a bee sting allergy, he runs into a beehive and then runs around some more screaming, "Aiiiieeee!!!! I have run into some beehives and one sting could kill me! I must run further into the complex of beehives! Aiiieee!" Fool.
One thing's for certain: by this time next year Nicholas Cage will be doing panto.
