The Wicker Tree

A Christian country singer and her cowboy boyfriend go on an evangelizing mission to Scotland. They abstain from sex until they are married. They end up in some country small town run by a rich couple who own the local nuclear plant. The town's inhabitants are pagans who worship a variety of gods and the sun. But the rich couple sponsor concerts which gives our country couple the chance to sell their religion. And the town goes along with it.

Strangely, there are almost no kids in the town. One friendly local lady is desperately trying to get pregnant by the local cop. She also ends up seducing the cowboy.

May Day is also approaching and our singer is elected May Queen and the cowboy her Laddie. But we get hints that something isn't right in this town. For some reason that isn't clear, the singer is almost poisoned by the butler. Since that doesn't work, he ends up drugging her and preparing her body in oils for some purpose which we discover later but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. At least the surprising fate of the cowboy is explained a bit better.

The Wicker Tree oddly doesn't manage to capture the strangeness of the pagan towns people at all. And there is no sense of the dread in the least. The movie doesn't know how to generate any excitement or build- up toward the resolution. Our country couple is too goofy to be taken serious. He's the kind of cowboy who sleeps with his cowboy hat on. She doesn't contribute much to the story except for songs and innocence. And there are a lot of songs in this movie. Most are actually pleasant even though I despise anything that resembles a musical. In one of the few smart lines in the movie she asks the pagans if they don't have a song for what just happened. If you want to make a movie like this you can't just settle for lameness and mediocrity. The themes are interesting and suited for something edgier, darker. If anything it's an opportunity to make a unique stronger movie.

Just saw a screening of this spiritual successor to The Wicker Man at the London FrightFest. Director Robin Hardy's film (based on his own book 'Cowboys for Christ') shares many similarities with the cult British horror classic that he found success with in the 1970's, but The Wicker Tree is different enough to stand-out on it's own and not be classified as more of the same, even if the basic plot-lines are almost identical. This time around it's about a born again duo of evangelical country & western singers who have come to Scotland as 'redeemers' to convert an isolated pagan village to the path of Christ. However, where The Wicker Man was at turns as equally dark as it was intriguing, The Wicker Tree is a far more satirical affair, with jibes aimed at the genre and the background and beliefs of the protagonists.

Christopher Lee makes a brief appearance as an old man in a flash back, who may or may not be intended as an elderly Lord Summerisle, but while his ill-health prevented him from taking on the role of the main villain his shoes are well filled by Graham McTavish, who provides some much needed fire and brimstone in contrast to the rather stilted performances from the two lead characters, although there were some good performances from the supporting cast, most notably Clive Russel as the butler Beame and Honeysuckle Weeks as the promiscuous pagan Lolly.

I found the setting and direction to be excellent and again Hardy has created an intriguing pagan culture that I would loved to have seen more focus upon, but while we all know what the outcome of the story is going to be at the outset of the film it often seems to concern itself more with poking fun than with captivating and intriguing, or even scaring the audience. It got a good share of laughs throughout and even a round of applause at one point, and I enjoyed it in that respects, but as a horror film, as a film doomed to stand in the shadow of The Wicker Man, I found it to be lacking.

...and NOT in a good way. THE WICKER TREE is one of the most awful sequels in existence, a completely terrible movie made all the worse by the fact that THE WICKER MAN is one of the best British horror films in existence. I truly have no idea what Robin Hardy was thinking when he wrote and directed this; it looks like the man's talent left him many, many years ago.

This time around, the action is set on the Scottish mainland, where a couple of American evangelists have turned up to preach their usual guff to the residents of a village. The American characters are one of the worst things about this; the acting is horrendous and they're saddled with the kind of goofy charm of an American PIE movie, not a supposed horror movie like this. They're completely at odds with the rest of the production.

Elsewhere, the main thrust of the story of the first film is copied almost word for word, with a couple of (poor) twists to differentiate things. There's time for an extensive sub-plot to graphically portray what the "riding of the laddie" is all about, but I wonder why they bothered because it's hardly profound. Christopher Lee was meant to star in this but had to pull out due to ill health, with the reliable Graham McTavish (RAMBO) stepping in; Lee still appears but only in a brief greenscreen cameo. For once I'm glad he didn't appear for longer and debase himself with a leading role here.

Former child actress Honeysuckle Weeks turns up, unrecognisably aged and forced to strip for the majority of her running time; you have to feel for her that things have come to this. But it's the tone of THE WICKER TREE that is so very, very wrong; that a sequel to one of the classics of British CINEMA, let alone the horror genre, made by the same writer/director of all people, should totally miss the mark and become this kind of mess. All you can do is shake your head and cry.

The Wicker Man is one of the greatest and most original films you will ever see. For years I have anticipated this spiritual sequel, and so it's no surprise that I was very disappointed. It seems as though, despite years of rumours and hard work, once Hardy got around to making it, all the life had been sucked from him and the film. The Wicker Tree sees two born again Christians travel from America to Scotland to preach the word of Jesus. Unbeknownst to them, this is a place of pagan rituals and sacrifice. This film was certainly trying to parody moments from its predecessor at times. With some heavy handed moments of comedy. Unfortunately, The Wicker Man is one of those films where you laugh nervously at it. It may be easy to lampoon, but it also has fear interlaced with the weird. Here, everything seems slightly amateur and repetitive. The score has nothing on the original, and the songs are barely memorable. We are also given two protagonists that we don't care about. They are comedic clichés of how super American Christians are. All they want to do is spread the word of Jesus in a cheesy cornball manor. Unlike Howie, who was a devote Christian fighting to find a missing girl. The Wicker Man seemed to triumph despite its flaws. Those are what added to the memorable quirks which happened organically. Here they are forced into the film, which means that some actors seem unsure as to whether this is a comedy, horror, satire, or thriller. It's none of these. I may revisit it one day without the expectations, but it makes me want to watch The Wicker Man again.

Did we really think writer/director Robin Hardy could better "The Wicker Man", that masterpiece of horror, which along with William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" defined the genre in the 1970's? It was a tall order, but he did come up with one surprise - he more or less repeated himself.

A couple of born-again Christians, 'Cowboys for Christ', Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) and Steve Thompson (Henry Garrett), cross the Atlantic on a mission to spread the Lord's word to the spiritually challenged flock in Scotland. After meeting a local laird, Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish), they are directed to Tressock, a community that has an infertility problem caused by a leak from a nuclear power plant.

The innocent couple become central to the town's May Day festivities, involving human sacrifice to get the community's seed germinating again. All conspire against them except for Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks), the head groom on Sir Lachlan's estate.

We know how it will end because there was no mercy for Edward Woodward in the first version so we don't expect any for Beth and Steve in this one.

The problem with knowing the basic premise is that the only tension comes in seeing how the ritual will be carried out. However, for some reason, Hardy holds back - we see nothing that compares to the anguish of Edward Woodward locked in his blazing wicker prison in the 1973 film. The Wicker Tree itself is an artistic looking number, but it doesn't project the menace of the giant wicker cage of the original.

Where the "The Wicker Tree" breaks from "The Wicker Man" is in the attempts at black humour; the naive Beth and Steve are treated as somewhat comic characters, as is Beame, Sir Lachlan's head man, who is involved in a number of jocular bits of business such as being stabbed up the kilt with a broken glass; it's hard to know quite how to take this movie as it changes mood at odd times.

The film doubles up on a couple of elements from the original, namely the number of sacrifices and the amount of nudity. Honeysuckle Weeks sheds her "Foyle's War" khakis and everything else for a couple of airy romps, including a brave effort in a chilly Scottish stream.

Although it's nice to see Christopher Lee back for a little homage, the biggest problem with "The Wicker Tree" is that it pays just too much homage to the original movie. The most important sacrifice of all would have entailed letting go of the old plot and heading off in a new direction.

Instead of a lop-sided remake, maybe a follow-up to the original would have been a better option - by 2011, the number of disappearances on Summerisle would have reached epic proportions with the supply of wicker also running dangerously low. At least that approach may have provided a few surprises.