"The Wicker Man": Terrible Enough To Reach Cult Status?

Cheesy music, an after-school special-feeling, a bug-eyed Nicolas Cage running around the forest looking drugged … “The Wicker Man” had it all. Especially, if by “all,” you mean “every unintentional comedy aspect a movie needs to eventually become a possible cult classic in the future.”

The initial scene is very strange, and the choice of director Neil LaBute to film it in such a confusing manner—and then return to it multiple times without every truly explaining what happened—sets the tone for a movie with more holes than the Dean Dome during a UNC-Dook game. With a woman and her child (or not) struck by an 18-wheeler (or not), this is too pivotal scene for LaBute to choose to gloss over.

Yet initially at least, Cage is goofy, awkward and odd enough to pull off his role as California highway patrol cop Edward Malus. As a loner who is devastated over the accident involving the woman and child, he is pitiful. But then he receives a letter from a long-lost love who begs for his help in finding her lost daughter on an island in the Puget Sound. When he arrives and attempts to enter the secretive, strange commune of Summersisle, his efforts to locate the child are thwarted at every turn. In this village populated by several sets of twins and citizens with crazy eyes, Malus keeps hearing hissing shadows and blurs of a child running away. After she leaves him a mysterious note, Malus finds his former fiancé, Willow (a pretty, troubled Kate Beahan), but she doesn’t tell him that the girl, Rowan, is his daughter until 45 minutes into the movie. With some not-so-subtle stutters, stammering and tortured faces, Willow immediately calls into question whether or not she is somehow involved in Rowan’s disappearance.

When Malus is provided with some mead, we are left to wonder if it is poisoned, since everyone makes an unexplained, strange face when he drinks it. Then he kills a bee by smashing it with the mead glass, and the horrified reaction by the townsfolk tip us off that bees and honey hold lofty status within this commune. The omnipresence of bees and beekeepers is made more of a major plot point due to the fact that Cage happens to be extremely allergic, even carrying vials of adrenalin with him everywhere he goes.

Among the numerous not-so-believable, troublesome aspects of the film and its plot points are the fact that Malus and Willow keep making references to how many years it’s been since Willow ended their relationship and returned to the commune of her youth … yet if Rowan is only five or six years old, it couldn’t have been too, too long ago. The perception is that we are supposed to believe that they have been apart for quite a long time, but the presence of Rowan and the reality of her age destroy that idea quickly. Malus acts drugged (I figger Cage must have been drugged to not only act in this one, but produce it) and hallucinatory throughout much of the movie, but it is never detailed whether or not he is seeing or imagining things at times or whether some of the strange events are actually taking place. There are too many other odd occurrences and unexplained events for me to detail, but suffice it to say that this flick sort of goes off the track at several different times.

Ellen Burstyn (“I am the spiritual heart of this colony”) is very good as Sister Summersisle, and the scene in the classroom in the middle of the woods strikes the desired chord of horror and creepiness. The actual legend of the Wicker Man; finding the crow in Rowan’s desk; the "neo-pagan," female-dominated nature of the commune; the shivers-inducing twin harpies; the beauty of the landscape transposed against the awful secrets of its inhabitants; the references to ancient rituals and roots in Salem witchdom; and the jarring nature of some of the accident scenes and visions all play well in the horror theme of this film. However, when the highlight of the flick is when Malus punches a woman directly in the face, you know that you’ve found a movie with some head-shaking issues and obstacles that are hard to overcome.

This is a movie without a true identity—it is as if LaBute decided to put “Stepford Wives,” “Pleasantville” and “Children of the Corn” in a blender, added a dash of Nathaniel Hawthorne, sprinkled a bit of M. Night Shyamalan on top and wanted to see what came out at the end. Begrudgingly, I admit that Malus’s final scene was creepy, echoing similar revelations as the ones that accompanied “Planet of the Apes” at the end. Yet the question becomes and remains whether you can take movies that range from “Planet of the Apes” to “Scarlet Letter” to “Children of the Corn” to “Pleasantville” to “The Village” to “Stepford Wives” and expect anything coherent or satisfying to emerge.

Even the final scene, involving Willow and Sister Honey (a naturally creepy LeeLee Sobieski), leaves some questions up in the air. Is Sister Honey continuing the horrific tradition of the commune? Or do the tears in her eyes and the sweat on her brow indicate that she is trying to break free?

This is one of those flicks where the preview is better than the movie, as evidenced by the popularity of the 35-year-old original, British version of the film as a cult classic. I wasn’t aware that this was a remake until after I watched it (apparently, there was a rather humorous and memorable scene involving Britt Ekland that was sadly not replicated by Beahan in this one), but after seeing the potential this movie had to be a good fit in the horror genre, I wasn’t all that surprised. In fact, a sequel to the 1973 version had been slated to begin shooting in Scotland this spring, but was scrapped in April.

The credits were kicked off with the line, “For Johnny Ramone.” I’m not sure what message it sends that such a crappy flick would be dedicated to the legendary guitarist of the Ramones (reportedly, Cage and Johnny were good friends), but I do know that Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam wrote the song “Life Wasted” while returning from Ramone’s funeral. And that makes sense to me in a full-circle kind of way, because when “The Wicker Man” ended, I found myself humming, “Time wasted …”