Quartile rating: 4.5/10 · 1 rating
A sheriff investigating the disappearance of a young girl from a small island discovers there's a larger mystery to solve among the island's secretive, neo-pagan community.
The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man is widely regarded as an unintentional comedy and a catastrophic misfire. The plot faithfully lifts the structure from the 1973 original but strips it of all its folk-horror atmosphere, replacing pagan eroticism and communal menace with a muddled matriarchal cult and a bizarrely misogynistic undertone. Nicolas Cage's performance is legendarily over-the-top, producing iconic bad-acting moments (the bear suit, the bees) that undermine any dramatic tension. The cinematography is flat and televisual, lacking any of the visual distinctiveness of the original. As a remake of an iconic film, Novelty is essentially nonexistent — it adds nothing new and actually regresses from its source. The ending, while retaining the basic shock of the original, lands as campy rather than horrifying, robbing the concept of its power.