The Wicker Tree (2011)

Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) is a former Shania Twain-style country artist who has been born again and now sings for Christ.  She and her fiancee Steve (Henry Garrett) leave their home in Texas to minister to the small village of Tressock, Scotland, and find themselves warmly welcomed by the locals.  Particularly, Sir Lachlan (Graham McTavish) and Lady Delia Morrison (Jacqueline Leonard), who sponsor a concert in Edinburgh to showcase Boothby's talents.

In Tressock Beth and Steve find out they have their work cut out for them.  The village largely worships the old gods and view Christianity with a lighthearted disdain.  Still, the pair try their best to fit in, agreeing to be the May Queen and the Laddie for the village's annual spring celebration.

However, things aren't as picturesque as they seem.  Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks), who tends the horses for the Morrisons, takes a shine to Steve and quickly leads him astray.  As for Sir Lachlan, he owns the local Nuada Nuclear Power Plant, which a number of years before had an accident that has left the men of the village sterile.  And, while Steve thinks that being the Laddie is a fun horse race and Beth thinks being the May Queen means wearing a pretty dress, it is soon obvious that the villagers have darker intentions.

The Wicker Tree is indirectly a sequel to the classic British horror film The Wicker Man, also directed by Robin Hardy.  Things do get a bit confusing, especially with Christopher Lee's cameo, but it is clear that though the mythology is similar, the places are markedly different.  Still, as in the first, the local pagan community is being manipulated into violence for political purposes.

Based on Hardy's novel Cowboys for Christ, many fans of the original movie absolutely loathe this one.  I think many forget that, though The Wicker Man is a superior film both due to the caliber of actors involved and the general unsettling nature, it was barely a work of cinematic genius.  Many of the most memorable elements, like the end shot, were happy accidents.  It is a great horror film, but the memory most have of it overcomes many of its shortcomings, most of which carry on into The Wicker Tree, and the tendency to hate anything new these days just magnifies them.  For me, I found the film quite entertaining in its own way with a number of effective touches.

Still, it is interesting to see an independent director from the 1970s make a film in the modern age, and Beth and Steve come across more as naive than self-righteous.  That might be part of the problem; despite the silly way the characters are presented, they are not people you want to see suffer the same fate as Edward Woodward in the original.  Well, the fate is not the same, at least.

The Wicker Tree (2011)
Time: 96 minutes
Starring: Brittania Nicol, Henry Garrett, Graham McTavish
Director: Robin Hardy


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more