The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'the wicker man'
2005/9/14
It looks like the Wicker Man remake is going to be rubbish:
...In the original, Woodward's character was a virgin, making him ideal for sacrifice. That element has been ditched from the remake, because it was thought that while audiences would accept the idea of an American community that practised human sacrifice, the idea of a grown-up virgin was just too farfetched.Other than doing away with the lead's virginity (because nobody would respect a 40-year-old virgin as anything other than a comical schmuck, and certainly not a worthy hero for a thriller) and ripping the story out of its meticulously-researched setting amidst British folklore and Scottish religious weirdness and moving it to America because America Does It Better, the director has made Lord Summerisle a woman (to keep up with the times, presumably) and brought in killer bees. (I wonder if the director had to fight to make it killer bees rather than dinosaurs or something cool and exciting like that.)
Anyway, it looks like the Wicker Man remake will take its rightful place next to the Sylvester Stallone Get Carter (with its all-American message of redemption) and the Californian-set Italian Job. It'll probably eclipse the original more than in the previous cases, though, because of the poor quality of the surviving prints of the original.
2005/8/4
Bloody hell; they're remaking The Wicker Man. They are, of course, relocating it to the US (as all today's stories happen in America); though for some reason, they're setting it off the coast of Maine (presumably because the climate is like Scotland's). IMHO, a US-set Wicker Man would have worked better somewhere around the Old Testament heartland of the south, where people take fire and brimstone absolutism in with their mother's milk, good Christian folk believe that Satan is real and walking among them, black-clad teenage outcasts believe that Satan is way cool and drinking blood will give them super powers; they could have made Lord Summerisle into a David Koresh-like figure, a mullet-haired leader of a devout Christian community that's really a weird pagan cult. Moving it to Maine, in contrast, sounds somewhat unimaginative.