As I had recently watched The Wicker Man from 1973, I thought it only fair to rewatch the remake. I remembered very little about the film from when I first saw it when it was released in 2006 apart from the ‘bees’ scene that became a meme years later. Would the film be worthy of reappraisal?

The action switches from the remote Scottish island of the original to an island off the coast of Washington state with Nicolas Cage playing cop Edward Malus who hears from his ex-fiancee that their daughter Willow is missing. They now live on Summersisle as part of a community of neo-pagans. They are led by Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn). Edward decides to journey there to try and find their daughter.

Whilst I watched the remake I kept thinking that all of the grit of the original had been replaced with gloss. The whole film feels like a perfume commercial stretched from two minutes to two hours. I kept expecting a voiceover to announce ‘The Wicker Man by Marc Jacobs’ or ‘Oh no, not the bees! By Yves Saint Laurent’.

Everything that I love about the original (the vision, the mystery, the sinister folk soundtrack, Christopher Lee in a dress) has been removed for the sake of making money at the box office. This is a film made for a demographic who only watch films in multiplexes, wouldn’t know a good movie if they fell over it and buy CDs by Adele. Morons in other words.

But I think that the worst crime of this remake is that rather than being bad, it’s even worse than that. For most of it’s running time it’s just bland and utterly mediocre. That’s the worst kind of cinema right there for me.

Something else that made me roll my eyes royally was the fact that most of the folk of Summersisle are female because, y’know, women. I’m supposing that this is to represent some kind of allegory for feminism whilst Cage’s character symbolises the patriarchy. Yet, I kept thinking that this movie was made in 2006. Just imagine if this remake was remade now. The misandry would be off the chart. Thank God for small mercies.

Another thing that made me all punchy were the scenes that were reminiscent of the original but handled fucking terribly. The scene where Cage goes to see the photographer who takes the pictures of the harvest festival every year made me want to eject the remake from my Blu-Ray machine, throw the disc out of the window, slip in the Blu-Ray of the original and sit back and relax. The remake stages this scene with the subtlety of a sledgehammer even down to the heavy leatherbound book on the photographer’s desk that is called ‘Rituals of the Ancient’ with the title being in a mysterious font. But then the filmmakers realise they’re making a film for audience members with an IQ in minus figures.

Similarly, the scene where Cage goes to look for his daughter by barging into someone’s house and a girl falls out of a cupboard. In the original, this scene is both brilliantly staged and scary as fuck. Here it’s just bland and irritating all at once. It was also one of many scenes that reminded me that I could be watching the original instead.

Even if you saw the ‘Oh no! Not the bees!’ sequence in it’s meme form you might think that the entire film is made up of similar over-the-top scenes that could make the film very entertaining whether these scenes are intentionally funny or not. But no, apart from the last ten minutes, the film is a Hollywood snoozefest. The film’s climax is terrible even if it is considerably livelier than what comes before. Even the bees are bad CGI.

Another thought that kept popping into my head was that the original would have been made on a fraction of the budget of the shitty remake. More modest budgets seem to force filmmakers to apply themselves in creative ways to get their vision on the screen whilst bigger budgets just foster laziness and lack of creativity.

Whenever I saw Ellen Burstyn on the screen I kept thinking ‘You’re miles away from home, Ellen’ whilst reminding myself that she had been in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, two of my favourite films. I thought the same thing when I saw her in the trailer for the new Exorcist film (which is going to suck massively, mark my words).

Even the film’s credits pissed me off with ‘For Johnny Ramone’ being placed before the cast list. Don’t drag such a legend’s good name into this mess.

Verdict– Please just watch the original. There are many different cuts but every one I’ve seen is just as brilliant as the others. This remake is anodyne, lacking in depth, and worst of all, boring. It’s 102 minutes you’ll never get back. And if you really want to watch a good ‘bee’ movie watch The Swarm or The Savage Bees instead.