The Wicker Man (2006)

[bonanzataz]

I really dont think theres much to say here because its evident that Nicolas Cage and Neil La bute are taking the piss.  You cant tell me the hilarious voice over at the end ("owww!! my legs!") and the 'nightmare' with the little girl aren't digs at the audience.  They are winking here. 

yeah, you don't spend $40 million to make a movie that's intentionally bad. i honestly don't think labute wanted to fuck up his chances at making a studio film ever again. the movie was never so bad it was funny. yes, i laughed at the aforementioned parts and the parts where he's beating up the sisters. that's about it. the rest of the movie i was absolutely bored. i never cared for one character, i was never intrigued as to what was going to happen as it was painfully obvious. had i not seen the original, i still could have figured out what was going to happen way early. labute is a guy that makes movies about chauvinistic men and manipulative women and he changed it around so the island is just run by women. i'm sorry, but the whole movie just stinks of empty symbolism. it's not saying anything clever about society, nothing relevant anyway. was this trying to be a clever horror movie about gender politics? there was not one well constructed sequence in the whole film. it was just dead. dead in the water. just a completely bland picture. the only thing that kept me awake was i wanted to see how bad it really was. and it just kept getting worse. and that horribly blatant expository dialogue! "you better keep those bees away from me. i'm allergic to bees." well, nick, it's a good thing you just happen to be on an island whose main export is honey! and that whole sequence at the end where ellen burstyn explains how nicholas cage was meant to be on the island and it takes up five full minutes of explanatory dialogue. so yes. i was correct when i said this movie was going to use horror movie cliches, but who would have thought horror movie cliches would be THIS boring and THIS sparse in a hollywood horror remake? i counted the crow popping out of the desk, one really shitty dream sequence, and the discovery of three mildly mutilated bodies, two of which were still alive, one of which was shown in the trailer. other than that it's just nicholas cage walking around and asking questions and me waiting for him to die. the very end of the movie is an insult. girls from the island seducing more police officers at a bar? is this supposed to be scary or clever? it's like, don't go to bars and pick up girls, b/c you never know if they belong to some freaky deaky cult. or, "all girls are fucking witches, i hate em i hate em i hate em!!!!" -labute

gt, usually you defend yourself really well, but i just honestly have NO idea how you thought this was in any way better than the original. i'm not by any means saying the original was an amazing movie, but i thought it had some pretty cool shit in it. this one takes away all of the really cool shit and adds one really boring twist, leaving us with a shallow, stagnant plot whose climax is easily reached after the first 10 minutes on the island. and the original's soundtrack kicks ass. the original is just incredibly unique and has its own language while this movie just recycles tired old cliches. the original wasn't about finding the girl. the original was about discovering what went on on that island. what are the inhabitants like? how do they live their lives? why do they perform said rituals? why do they love lord summerisle so much? finding out how people live their lives on the island in this film is like:

NIC CAGE: Hey, what's life like here?
ELLEN BURSTYN: Well, we are strong powerful women and we only sleep with men because we need to have babies.
NIC CAGE: Really, that's crazy.
ELLEN BURSTYN: Well, you would say that, you stupid stupid man. we're gonna perform rituals b/c we don't like men and we want some daggone honey.

and then cage karate kicks her in the sternum.

avoid this movie. just do it. it wasn't worth the five dollars i paid for bargain tuesday. it wasn't even worth this long a post. i just hated it so much i needed to vent.

[modage]

sounds like a rental.

[bonanzataz]

sounds like a rental.

just promise me that you'll get really drunk beforehand.

[SiliasRuby]

sounds like a rental.

just promise me that you'll get really drunk beforehand.

But that takes the fun out of watching all the medicore movies.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

("owww!! my legs!")  

SPOILERS

That's basically what sums up my dislike for the movie.  It wasn't filmed so horribly, but all the lines were just horrible and the ending was kind of dumb.  I liked that he wasn't saved, so that was shocking, but the night at the club where the girls just come onto the guys was pretty weird and then the sound of the fire as if we had forgotten what had just happened.

Visually it was all right and I haven't seen the original, so it was at least interesting, it just developed in a particularly clunky way.

[Ghostboy]

So on the basis of that YouTube clip, I put this on my queue and just watched it last night. It's pretty terrible. The weird thing is that I don't think it had to be terrible. The original is very dated, but an interesting and disturbing take on the story could definitely have been made. Something like Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. But LaBute seems to think that it would work best as a straightforward horror movie, and the results are just about as stupid as can be. It's not scary in the slightest, and all of the attempts at scares are laughably bad. Most of them rely on the characters being unable to see things outside the frame of the film (like the scene with the dead girl from the YouTube clip). At a certain point, Nicholas Cage falls through the floor of an old barn, and there's about a minute of him hanging by his fingernails...which of course has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever, but was inserted just because the movie was getting pretty boring and LaBute must have felt the need to shake things up. All the dream sequences are retarded, especially when he starts having dreams of other dream sequences (done, I think, because they ran out of footage). The script is entirely wretched, full of contradicitions and terrible stretches of logic.

I listened to bits and pieces of the commentary track, and LaBute and co. take everything so seriously. It was embarassing to listen to.

It's beautifully shot, though. I'll give it that much.

[Garam]

The filmmaking is generic 70s filmmaking with a generic 70s soundtrack.

What the fuck...The Wicker Man has a pagan-y folk soundtrack all the way through. It's as ungeneric as possible.