The Wicker Man (2006)
“Not the bees!!! Arrghhhh my eyes!!!!”
While the original 1973 film is commonly considered a genre defining folk-horror classic, the 2006 version has earned an entirely different reputation. Director Neil LaBute turned a story about old world paganism clashing with strict christianity into a mess about scary misandrist women, and bees. None of the pieces of this story work together at all. The sound effects are wild, the score is way too melodramatic, and any sense of atmosphere or claustrophobia is wiped out by cheap jump scares.
2006’s The Wicker Man is so memorable, so meme-able, thanks to the absolutely unhinged performance by Nicolas Cage as Detective Edward Malus, and I believe that this movie fails because the director did not lean into the brilliant chaos that he had before him. So many of the meme-able moments feel like Cage trying to fill a bland, empty space, as if he was missing any guidance or direction. Though his “not the bees!!!” scream at the end has become an iconic Nic Cage moment, the full scene is sadly only available on the unrated Blu-ray/dvd.
The movie thinks that the “horror” of Summersisle lies in the female supremacy and their objectification of men, so it positions Cage, a strong-willed big city police man, as the hero. But simply swapping a patriarchy for a matriarchy doesn’t really say anything, unless the point is to call out the horrors of autocracy itself (it doesn’t). The original film focuses on the clash between equally powerful belief systems, and the horror lies in the protagonist’s realisation that his beliefs have failed him. In 2006, we don’t learn anything about Malus’s beliefs, only that he is a man surrounded by women who have no use for him — a horror for some, I guess. Also there are bees, and that’s a metaphor for… something, I dunno, it’s wild!!
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