So I watch the 2006 remake of the horror classic The Wicker Man from 1973 and guess what it sucked, like nearly all of Hollywood's remakes do. The original movie is a classic film that blends a mystery and horror seamlessly, the basic premise of the plot is that the lone cop is sent to an isolated island to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. The island is inhabited by pagan weirdos who deny the girl's very existence and that's where the hunt for clues begins.
The main character in the old was a devout roman catholic who never married and has chosen to live in celibacy. He is sent to island because the local cops receive an anonymous letter telling of about the missing girl. He behave's as you would a devout catholic to behave towards a group pagan's, he is an asshole. This is understandable since his beliefs were almost constantly put into question and he is literally the fish on dry land when he goes to this remote place with customs vastly out of his comfort zone. This is something that most of us can relate inspite of not sharing the ideas and beliefs of the character.
In the remake Nicky Cage plays a cop who very obviously suffers from PTSD and is called to investigate the disappearance of the girl by his ex-fiancee. He is still an asshole and treats the locals with contempt. Why? What's his problem? The roman catholic vs. pagans I can sort of understand, but Nick is just being an ass, maybe its his PTSD acting, I mean it already causes him hallucinations, but still. The second problem is that in the original the cop is doing an official inquiry, so he has the full force of the law behind him, Nick on the other hand is doing an investigation of his own OUTSIDE his jurisdiction, so why exactly don't the islanders just tell him to fuck off? They have no reason to let him go around turning it upside down, unless they have an ulterior motive, this should have been the first indication of how the plot is going to turn out. Not only is Nicky's character an asshole but he is also an idiot.
Most of the film is spent on watching the cop go around the island collecting clues, the old version again handles this much better. Its an investigation, the horror and shock elements come when he encounters something related to the islands cult that he doesn't understand. The new one feels the need to add Nicky's PTSD driven hallucinations into the mix. Its not suspenseful when you know of great its not real.
In both films central to the plot is the pagan religion of the islanders, in the old one it was done with a bit of subtlety. The Islanders were basically an average small English village who just believed in a different religion, but like all Hollywood remakes always have to supersize an aspect of the old one , this one had to supersize the religion aspect. This time the island has a fertility cult made mostly out of women, in fact we never see a male islander speak. It all comes of as just weird, why do all the men in an island full of hot women who believe in a fertility cult look so miserable? That would be any bachelor's dream destination. Ergo everything is not as it seams.
Now for the SPOILERS, so stop reading if you want to watch the film and still enjoy the film. I think the new one might be more enjoyable if you don't know how it ends. You have been warned.
So it turns out that the whole missing girl thing was just a ruse to get the protagonist on the island. The islanders rely on agriculture for survival and since the last years harvest was an abysmal failure and to insure a good harvest they need a human sacrifice, so they lured the cop there to be the chosen one. Yet again the remake decided to go for the supersized route, in the original the cop was just doing his job and he was largely selected because the cult needed a virgin christian, in the new version, Nicky gets lured to the island by his ex-fiancee who apparently got on with him just so that she could get pregnant and later their past relationship could be used to lure him to become a human sacrifice. Oh and the missing kid, turns out to be Nicky's daughter. For fucks sake, so the islanders need for human sacrifices is so great that they send attractive young women to seduce men and have their children, so that years later they can be lured on the island to be killed. Do they have like a data base on these guys?
Even the sacrifice scene was supersized in the remake, in the original the 100 or so islanders basically just tell the cop that you are going to be sacrificed and then they get on with it. The chosen method of sacrifice is burning the man alive inside a giant wicker man, hence the name of the film. In the remake, the islanders first break his legs, almost kill him with bees(Nicky is allergic to bees and the cult is big on bees) and then hoist him up to the head of the wicker man to be burnt. Just a side note here, when your legs are broken being hung upside down by your legs must hurt like hell. Not only does this film indulge in needless gore, but it also forgets the whole gore literally in the next scene. For fucks sake.
The thing that really bugged even about the original, they ritually murdered a cop. Generally cops tend to go through hell and high water when one of their own goes missing or is assumed to be killed. Gee, we sent Jimmy to the weird island with the religious weirdo's to investigate a missing girl and we haven't heard of him in three weeks, I wonder what is going on. In the remake this aspect gets even worse, generally missing children in this day age lead to massive police operations, hell the Americans even have a system called the Amber Alert to mobilize the media to aid in the search. So why exactly doesn't Nicky just report the girl missing and bring the hammer down on the issue. Also murdering a police officer for religious purposes would cause an unbelievable shit storm in the post 9/11-world.
This is the thing that I hate about Hollywood in the 2000s. They really don't have any original ideas anymore, they are just making remakes, prequels and squeals of old good films, usually without much success, not that they really need to put any effort into it, the audience goes to see it because they liked the original and are generally disappointed. Hollywood you make a big stink about how much money you are losing to online piracy, well I am very hesitant to pay 10 or so euros to see anything by you guys since I mostly end up disappointed beyond belief. Its not that you are any better than the online critics who make their own videos which use clips from your films to make fun of the said film, when you mostly repackage other people's ideas in the first place. At least the online critics inject creativity into what they do and generally provide better entertainment than you guys. I would rather watch spoony, Nostalgia critic or the Nerd rage about your films for 20-60 minutes than actually pay to see most of them myself.
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