Well, the reviews are in and dude, they, like, suck.

Jason Pitzi-Waters at The Wild Hunt concludes his Wicker Man Remake Watch by telling us that Witches' Voice hated it. And the other reviews I've read about the movie are undoubtedly more entertaining than the movie is.

Ruthe Stein, movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, had this to say in her review:

Don't go into the woods is an admonition that should be heeded not just by prepubescent girls but also by actors. Nicolas Cage's finest hours are not spent frantically running through a forest in "The Wicker Man,'' especially when he must do so dressed in a bear suit. The reason for his laughable getup has to do with a pagan ritual portentously known as the Day of Death and Rebirth.

The movie itself is a kind of rebirth, or remake, as they say in the biz. The original 1973 version has become a cult classic. It is totally creepy, while the new model, while well intentioned, is only occasionally so. It's hard to sustain a scary mood when suddenly something unintentionally funny happens, such as Cage's cell phone ringing in a desolate area where reception would be highly unlikely.

My personal favorite, however, is a review by Gina Carbone for the Portsmouth Herald:

Sometimes you should listen to the local “Mean Girls.”

“That was worse than ‘The Village,’” one Alpha girl said, walking out of “The Wicker Man” in Newington. “Note to directors, ‘Don’t make horror movies about, like, the Amish.”

Disregarding the fact that nobody in either film was Amish, she has a point. But I might rephrase it as “Don’t remake cult classics about the modern culture clash between pagans and Christians, remove the religious subtext, add misogyny masked as female empowerment, substitute bees for suspense, try to market it as mainstream horror with an A-list star and be surprised when it, like, fails.”

I'm laughing my ass off all the way to the movie theater - to, like, see something else!

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 6:08 PM