THE WICKER TREE (2012): Cowboys for Christ take on heretics from the Highlands

 

The Wicker Man remains one of the most sublime mystery-thrillers ever made, and director Robin Hardy has long been promising a sequel, even before we were treated to the abysmal 2006 remake via Neil LaBute.  Now it has arrived in the form of The Wicker Tree, and, sad to say, it is a big letdown.  Though it boasts the same director as the original, it's a dull, ham-fisted, thrill-less retread with lousy performances and no surprises.  I might even go so far as to say that the LaBute film is better.  At least that one had Nicolas Cage chomping on scenery, Ellen Burstyn decked out as Braveheart, and a fresh take on the story which brought it into modern-day gender politics rather than religious fervor.

The new film follows pretty much the same arc as the original.  Pop singer Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), once a boot-stompin' beer-drinkin' man-crazy "Redneck Woman"-style country singer, has found Jesus, reformed her ways and committed herself to chastity until marriage.  She takes off for Scotland along with her similarly chaste boyfriend Steve (Henry Garrett) to preach the Word, and finds herself in a small secluded town where the townspeople take to her very nicely.  Too nicely.  And their oddly pagan springtime celebration is coming up soon...

No points for guessing what the town is up to.  The two lead characters certainly don't.  One reason why the original worked so well was that its main character (a policeman played by Edward Woodward) was no dummy, but was closed-minded, boorish, and curious enough to get into the plot over his head anyway.  Beth and Steve, contrarily, are two dim bulbs who make every wrong move even when everything is spelled out for them.  The original film was about how religion blinds smart people to the truth; this film is about naive people who do stupid things.

For a film whose predecessor was constantly surprising, The Wicker Tree has considerably little suspense and no surprises at all.  The film has no thematic element that wasn't explored in the original, nor any particular plot point that differs.  The only thing new about the film is the character of a local prostitute (Honeysuckle Weeks--yes, it's her real name) who falls in love with Steve, I think, or at least feels sympathy for him and tries to help him, I think.  Her "warnings" to him, suitable for sloppy horror films like this one, are needlessly ambiguous when she might have just come out and told him what the danger was.

The one redeeming aspect of the film is the return of Christopher Lee, who played a cult leader in the original and appears briefly here as the same character.  His cameo has almost nothing to do with the story, but look at him.  Pushing 90, he looks great and can still act.  Even with a two-minute appearance his presence is deeply felt.  For the rest of the movie we are dearly missing him, as well as Nicolas Cage, and the angry bees.

* out of ****