Wickerman Introduces New Element to Horror Genre: Tedium

I was promised "The Wicker man" starring Nicholas Cage was only an hour and 46 minutes long. I could have sworn I sat in that movie theater for at least three hours. This miserable, politically corrected remake of the 1973 classic starring Edward Woodward, Brit Ekland, and Christopher Lee is a lame fornication of Planet of the Apes and Monty Python's "Castle Anthrax" skit; an anomic anti-hero stumbles through an iron-fisted New-Age matriarchy where man has been reduced to a state of slavery.

Cage plays Sgt. Malus, a hallucinating, pill popping motorcycle cop who is wracked with guilt for not having been able to rescue a woman and her daughter from a fiery explosion. As the movie progresses, however, the audience wonders if these victims aren't yet another illusion. They keep popping up at unexpected moments, and they disappear when he pops his pills. We wonder, just what the good sergeant is taking, and whether it was a good idea to let him join the California highway patrol to begin with.

A former girlfriend (Kate Beahan), who now lives in a hippie commune called Summerisle, writes him to let him know her daughter Rowan (Erika-Shaye Gair) is missing, and that she needs her help. Undaunted by his superiors' and colleagues' well-meaning advice to just stay home and recover from his traumatic experience at the film's beginning, our intrepid hero Malus decides to travel to the State of Washington without bothering to give the local authorities the touch of a hint. A grouchy seaplane pilot takes the good sergeant to Summerisle, which at first glance appears to be inhabited by women alone.

They look, dress, and act like the kinds of women you'd met at a Grateful Dead concert -- but they're not. What they are is grumpy. Malus cannot open his mouth without someone griping at him. However, he is not really good at dealing with negative attitudes, and that's another reason the audience might wonder why the California Highway Patrol would hire someone like him. It's been quite a while since Eric Estrada and his blond buddy flashed their pearlies on C.H.I.P.S. -- and the public image of California cops has take a bit of a beating since then. Malus's response to every crisis situation is to flash his California badge, despite the fact that Summerisle's women have to remind him more than once that he is in WASHINGTON.

It's pretty clear these gals don't like Sgt. Malus, who, truth to tell, hasn't really impressed anyone with what one might call "people skills". Their responses to his inquiries about the missing girl Rowan range from passive-aggressive to openly hostile.

"Haven't seen her," says one.

"I'm a cop," he replies. "Don't make me arrest you."

"You're not welcome here," says another. "Why don't you leave?"

"How about I arrest you?" says he. "You know, I'm a cop. I can do that."

Poor Sgt. Malus doesn't help his case when he kills a bee. The man is allergic to bees, but how on Earth was he supposed to know the Summerislanders are bee keepers?

(By this point, I was so bored, I couldn't even muster the energy to walk out; I felt like my rear end had been Liquid Nailed to the theater seat. For the next thirty minutes, I was, along with the rest of the audience, force-fed the Summerislanders' weird, but boring religion like a goose being raised for foix de gras.)

Sister Summerisle (Ellen Burstyn), the local queen bee, explains that the colony is descended from an ancient tribe of Celtic feminist beekeepers - and never mind that the old Celts weren't all that feminist to begin with. Searching for a new home, where they could live free from religious persecution, they journeyed to the Americas in the 1600s. The Salem colony seemed like a good place to settle at first glance, but it turned out, the local Puritans had a pretty dim view of feminism. For the next 200 years or so, they sat around, griping about the oppressiveness of male-centered societies. The year 1850 heralded the birth of the New Age movement - luckily - and the beekeeping feminists swarmed into the New Age bookstores, buying up every book by Gloria Steinem, Z Budapest, and Diane Stein they could lay their hands on. Consequently, these feisty women discarded whatever actual Celtic beliefs they may have originally had, founding a brand new ancient religion focusing on "matrilineal Her/story" and "gender balance." But as Pacifica Radio and FOX News have well demonstrated, "balance" is a very subjective notion.

Sister Summerisle's idea of gender balance and equality is to relegate men to slaves. We see them later in the film; they are a sad, henpecked bunch, toiling at hard labor on the forest. They never speak. They never learned how. They don't go to school, not even for football. As such, Summerisle's men are sadly reminiscent of the humans in Planet of the Apes. Or maybe they have simply been bored into a silent stupor.

I couldn't help but expect Sgt. Malus to say something like, "Keep your hands off me, you damn dirty feminist!" But then again, I should expect a one-hour, forty-six minute to feel like an hour, forty-six minute movie -- not a three-hour Chinese water-torture session. I almost slept through the film's only piece of gore. Sgt. Malus discovers that the Summerislanders have murdered the seaplane pilot. Chances are, they bored him to death. Or is that yet another hallucination? Not that I get off on gore, for crying out loud! It is supposed to be a horror flick!

HERE COMES THE SPOILER! If you keep reading, you'll know how the film ends. If you read the rest of this and still go to see the movie, you obviously have too much money to spend. In that case, why not PayPal me ten bucks?

Sgt. Malus finally discovers that the little girl he may or may not be hallucinating is his daughter. The problem is, she disappears every time he takes his pills, which makes us wonder once again: just what is he taking, and should he really be a cop? But it does explain why he was dating the woman who sent him the letter. Walking across the screen in a perpetual marijuana cloud, she is no longer capable of speaking in complete sentences. In fact, the good sergeant has a hard time getting her to speak more than three words in a row.

Little Rowan turns out to be an ungrateful brat. Instead of thanking him for trying to rescue her from a homicidal, but boring cult, she leads him on a wild goose chase, through underground mazes and across blasted heaths, at the end of which, the island's entire population overpowers him, hobbles him (they shoot him in both legs with his own gun), and stuffs him into a clumsy looking, house sized wicker sculpture of the Golly Green Giant. Nasty Rowan is handed a torch, and she promptly sets it on fire.

(Sgt. Malus's death screams roused me from another narcoleptic fit.)

But the movie isn't over yet. Instead, it drags on with a fifteen minute lead-in to a sequel ...

Be afraid, be very afraid!