Don’t most modern moviegoers know The Wicker Man at least by its reputation? There’s Nicholas Cage, a bear costume, women getting punched out, the bees, and a lot of the sort of crazy that most people expect of Nicholas Cage these days.
I haven’t seen that one and don’t plan on seeing it anytime soon, but Netflix did have the original 1973 movie. That I will check out, and gladly so.
Police Sergeant Neil Howie comes to the island of Summerisle to investigate a missing girl. It’s not an easy case, mostly because no one on the island, including the missing girl’s mother, seems all that worried about her. Howie, however, is the sort of man who won’t quit an investigation no matter how many roadblocks are thrown up his way. Normally, that would make him the right man for a job like this, but Summerisle is a different story. The residents here practice a very old, pagan religion, one that involves outdoor sex, a general belief in reincarnation, and a general disbelief in death. Howie is a very devout Christian, and when he isn’t standing up for the law, he is asking why no one is teaching the local children about the one true God and His only son Jesus Christ. Sure, Howie may look a little too long as the various women cavorting all over the island, but he still insists on his judgmental ways when push comes to shove. Howie is saving himself for marriage, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone that.
That is especially true for the innkeeper’s daughter Willow (Swedish actress Britt Ekland, though all of her dialogue is dubbed by other actors). On Howie’s first night on the island, Willow seems to attempt to cast a love spell on the man to come over to her room for a good time. It doesn’t work, but she tries and Howie does seem to be tempted through the wall. If there’s anything supernatural going on in this movie, that’s about it. Though Wikipedia tells me Ekland had a body double for these scenes. Not because she refused to do the nude scene, but because she was pregnant at the time of filming. So, that happened.
As it is, no one Howie meets is particularly helpful, or so it appears. Even Lord Summerisle (a smiling Christopher Lee) can only make suggestions that Howie maybe forget the whole thing, but Howie doesn’t, and that seals the policeman’s fate.
That’s an interesting twist to this movie. Howie is doomed to be a human sacrifice at the end of the movie, but if he’d either listened when people told him not to stick around, or if he had given in to his baser biological instincts, he would have survived the movie. That he was there willingly and a virgin sealed his fate. Oddly enough, the very people looking to end his life were also telling him exactly what he needed to do in order to live. Only Howie’s own self-righteous stubbornness kept him hanging around. Then again, that same self-righteous stubbornness made him a rather unlikable protagonist. Sure, by the standards of the mainland, the islanders were a little weird, but they weren’t hurting anybody…aside from the sacrifice that’s coming, and he had plenty of opportunities to call it quits or even just not realize everyone, including the missing girl, was in on the plot from the start to get him there.
And then there’s Lee’s Lord Summerisle. Lee has a reputation as an actor, and his Summerisle seems to be an exception to that. Summerisle spends more or less the entire movie smiling and in generally good spirits. The dour, most doom-and-gloom type that seems to fit Lee’s oeuvre is nowhere to be seen. Given Lee’s image, that may make Summerisle even creepier as the audience would be forgiven for expecting the other shoe to drop well before it does. That said, this movie came about in part because Lee wanted to break away from the sort of work he was known for. In which case, good for him.
The Wicker Man may not be the most horrifying of horror movies depending on how much the audience connects with the moralizing busybody Sgt. Howie. But it is well-crafted, well-written, and have a burning candle that looks like a human hand at one point. I think I’m better off for seeing this one rather than anything involving bear suits and bees.
Grade: A-
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