28. THE BLACK AND THE YELLOW: We’re partial to this palette, so please enjoy a film that includes this visual motif.
There is bad cinema, there is high art, and then there is that sacred, lightning-in-a-bottle overlap where absolute absurdism collides with a $40 million budget. Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake of The Wicker Man doesn’t just cross that line. It dropkicks a bear suit straight through it.
Our story begins with Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a PTSD-afflicted traffic cop who receives a letter out of nowhere from his ex-fiancée, Willow (Kate Beahan). It turns out Willow lives on a secluded island off the coast of Washington called Summersisle, where a closed community of neo-pagan women lives under the authority of Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn). Willow’s daughter, Rowan, has mysteriously disappeared, and she needs Edward’s badge to find her.
Once Edward lands by seaplane, he quickly realizes something is off. The island economy is built entirely on honey sales, which are currently tanking. The local women give him evasive answers, speak in cryptic riddles and act like Rowan never existed.
Edward discovers Rowan’s sweater, a suspiciously freshly dug grave holding a burnt doll and a schoolteacher (Molly Parker) telling him point-blank, “She’ll burn to death” before catching her tense. Naturally, instead of calling for backup or taking a breath, Edward turns the detective work up to a frantic, sweat-soaked sprint.
Original director Robin Hardy hated the idea of this remake so much he had his lawyers strip his name from the marketing, and Christopher Lee publicly scoffed at touching the original, saying, “I don’t believe in remakes. You can make a follow-up to a film, but to remake a movie with such history and success just doesn’t make sense to me.” But this is the same man who was in The Howling II and another sequel to The Wicker Man, The Wicker Tree.
Director Neil LaBute—known for his dark, cynical stage plays (In the Company of Men)—shifts the original film’s religious conflict of Christianity against Paganism into a bizarre battle of the sexes. But rather than delivering sharp gender satire, the film morphs into an unintentional parade of absolute madness.
Then there’s Nicolas Cage just, well, going wild.
This bombed at the box office ($38.8M against a $40M budget), snagged five Razzie nominations and earned a rare “F” CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences. But man, it’s really something else. I have no idea what that is, but when you have Cage getting blasted with bees and dressed as a bear as he attacks people, it starts to feel like something special.
Cage said, There is a mischievous mind at work on The Wicker Man, you know? You know what I mean? And I finally kind of said, “I might have known that the movie was meant to be absurd.” But saying that now, after the fact, is OK, but to say it before the fact is not, because you have to let the movie have its own life.”
