2006 horror, dir. Neil LaBute, Nicolas Cage, Kate Beahan:
IMDb. Not the bees! Spoilers.
Very often when someone remakes an old film I find myself
wondering why: did someone have a vision, something new to say? In
this case nobody even managed to get production staff to provide an
unconvincing "I've always loved the original" quote the way they would
for the 2008 The Day The Earth Stood Still. (Well, all right, Cage
said much later that he and Neil LaBute knowingly made the picture
an absurdist black comedy and that it should have been seen and judged
as such. Sure you did.)
Instead, the rights to this film showed up in the library of Canal+,
and a producer put together a deal. After a bit they attached Neil
LaBute.
Whose work I haven't seen much of, but going by plot synopses he seems
to favour unlikable characters and villains who succeed in their plots
by being horrible people. And I think that if you approach The Wicker
Man as that sort of story you are fundamentally not getting what it's
about.
But first we get some actual originality: a car crash which rapidly
turns hallucinatory. All right, but what's the point? We could have
started the film with Edward Malus (the genus that includes
domesticated apples) moping at home after An Incident, when Female Cop
(that's her actual credit, played by Kendall Cross) comes in to check
on him. We don't actually need to see The Incident, because the
details don't matter. But we get it anyway.
I've sometimes been very impressed with Nic Cage's performances, for
example in Pig (2021). But unlike Michael Caine, who always gives
the full Michael Caine no matter how terrible the rest of the
production, it's clear when Cage knows he's in a piece of garbage and
can fall back in simple emoting. Meanwhile Kate Beahan, as Malus's
vanished ex who turns out to have been the sexy bait luring him to the
island, does a decent job of looking vaguely scared and sad… but once
everything has been revealed, she should perhaps be triumphant, or
less scared but more sad if she really did care for Edward, or
something… but instead she just carries on in the exact same
register.
But the thing I really found instructive about this film is that many
many points and moments from the original are re-mounted here: the
seaplane, the wall of festival photos, rubbing out the blackboard, the
fake body in the wardrobe. But none of them works because they have
no context. In the original, Sergeant Howie announces his plan to
search the entire island, and several shots later comes on the child
pretending to be a body in the wardrobe, as she's clearly had time to
hear what's going on and hide; in other words, the islanders all know
what's going on and don't take him seriously. In this film, it happens
immediately after his declaration, with no time to set anything up;
it's just a jump scare. Howie wipes the blackboard because what he
sees on it is, to him, filth; Malus just does it to make room to
write something.
Sergeant Howie overstepped his authority, but was still a policeman
with a job to do. Malus is a California highway patrolman operating as
a private citizen in Washington State; he has no powers at all but
nobody seems to notice.
There's lots of creepiness on screen, but it's all individual creepy
shots, not any sort of prolonged raising of tension. Nothing connects
to anything else. Why hide that this Rowan is Malus's daughter?
There's nothing he does differently for not knowing. Why kill the
pilot, who has done specifically what he has been told to do? ("To
have a jump scare moment", duh.)
You have a budget. You can choose a filming location. Maybe choose one
where the tracks don't have obvious tyre wear from motor vehicles?
The community was established here "in the 1850s", pretty much at the
time of the first white settlement in the Pacific North-West. So who
built the church that they could let fall into ruin? Oh, but the
original film had a ruined church, so we have to have one.
And the bit of doubt from the original is gone. Sister Summerisle (a
sadly underused Ellen Burstyn) has done this before, this isn't the
first time a harvest failure has been followed by a sacrifice and the
restoration of fortune, even in her life never mind historical record.
So she knows it will work; unlike Lord Summerisle there's no room to
wonder whether her faith is real.
The ludicrous "not the bees" scene from the trailer was cut out of the
theatrical release, and only shows up in an alternate cut on the DVD.
(And on YouTube, I'm glad
to say, as it's the main amusement to be had from this thing.)
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.