Well this isn't nice to read today:

By Brian Orndorf

(AXcess News) Hollywood - Left mentally scarred after witnessing a roadside accident killing an innocent woman and her daughter, police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) cannot shake the images of the day out of his head. When a puzzling note from his former fiancée (Kate Beahan, "Flightplan") arrives begging him to help find her lost daughter, Edward soon books passage for the remote Washington island where she resides. Once there, Edward begins his investigation, poking around a matriarchal society (run by Ellen Burstyn) where he doesn't belong, and losing himself to the madness that is uncovered with every new step.  

On paper, it seemed like a sure bet. A "Wicker Man" remake, starring Nicolas Cage, and directed by Neil LaBute? Count me in. Then came the awful one-sheet, the humiliating Labor Day weekend release date, and finally, the absence of a proper and respectful press screening. Now that the picture is out in the world to be seen...well, all the dodging makes sense now.  

As much as it's revered in horror circles, I don't believe Robin Hardy's 1973 feature "The Wicker Man" approaches the "classic" status some have bent over backwards to stamp on it. It's an atmospheric movie, lead by a thundering lead performance from the great Edward Woodward (and the sly one from Christopher Lee), and includes an unforgettable climax that disturbs and provokes, like the best cinema of the 1970s should. It's a cult treasure that tends to run a little loopy if not put in proper context, but its tendency to overheat was its greatest downfall.

Neil LaBute (who also scripts) doesn't have much luck updating the story for modern audiences. The switch from a free-flowing Scottish pagan community to the matriarchal system is the largest alteration, but that robs the film of the primal sexual appeal the original held. In other words, no midnight orgies on the campground, and no nude Britt Ekland musical numbers here, my friends. LaBute has ripped all the sexual subtext and tension right out of the story, electing to turn to bees to put across the theme of pollination, or a lack thereof.

LaBute is a talented filmmaker, even if his button-pushing films rarely hit their intended targets. Yet, "Wicker Man" consistently eludes his good judgment, and soon the film is a real chore to watch. By robbing the film of its lust and eerie pagan undertones, the remake just becomes a series of impotent PG-13 suspense set-pieces, built on an ice cold mystery that never reaches a fever pitch.

Even good old reliable Nicolas Cage fumbles badly here. I normally adore when the actor goes overboard, but in "Wicker Man," Cage's instincts fail him. This is wildly miscalculated performance, and you can see in his desperate face that Cage was fully trusting LaBute to not make him look like a fool. As the actor goes bigger, LaBute doesn't know how to use the performance, and when Cage is left without proper support, the results are ear-splitting. I give Cage credit for even attempting to walk in Woodward's shoes here, but with LaBute slapping around the story so he can call it his own, the character is left a raving maniac instead of the frightening portrayal of bewilderment and sexual repression that it should've been.     

When "Wicker Man" finally gets something going in the iconic final act, it brings along with it a host of unintentional laughs. The original film did such a masterful job getting under the skin, layering dread with bleak precision. In the remake, LaBute has Cage beating up women with karate kicks, and placing an insulting coda on the film that screams of studio intervention of the worst kind. This is not progress. I rate this film "D-".

Damn! And here's another one:

Nicolas Cage stars in subpar Wicker Man remake

Soren Andersen
What a botch Neil LaBute has made of his remake of “The Wicker Man.” The 1973 original, a British chiller by director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer (adapting his novel of the same name), is a classic example of a horror movie with a potent sting in its tail.

Its mood smoothly moves from faintly unsettling to intensely disturbing to downright shocking in a manner that really gets under the skin. The ending is one of the great “gotchas” in the history of horror. Nightmares manufactured here.

The British “Wicker Man” is all about the buildup. It’s an artful tease that traffics in creeping dread. LaBute’s version is all about letdown. The longer it’s onscreen, the duller and sillier it seems.

Relocating the action from an island off Scotland to one off the coast of Washington (a British Columbia isle stands in), LaBute sends a haunted cop played by Nicolas Cage on a hunt for a missing girl. He’s haunted by having witnessed a terrible car crash in which he believes a mother and her young daughter were burned alive. He views his search for the vanished child as a way of redeeming himself for his failure to rescue the crash victims.

The island is home to a pagan cult of bee-worshipping women headed by a serene but faintly menacing Ellen Burstyn. In this matriarchal commune, the women dress with 19th-century simplicity, wear no makeup and live in log dwellings. And they don’t take kindly to strangers, particularly male strangers. The few men native to the island, clearly second-class citizens, don’t speak.

These people are clearly hiding something. They’re rude to Cage and deny all knowledge of the missing girl. This, despite the fact that the child’s mother (Kate Beahan), a cult member and strangely reticent former girlfriend of Cage, insists she exists and has a photo to prove it.

Cage blunders about seeking clues, flashing his badge and trying to browbeat the natives. Sometimes he’s a Boy Scout, at other times a bully. Mercurial to the max, he grows ever more grating the longer he’s around. Sporting unnaturally black hair, makeup that makes him look like a waxworks figure (a trait shared by everyone else in the picture) and an unnatural wide smile he turns on and off like a flashlight, Cage is in full weirdo mode.

And what’s with his punching of women? He socks three, a symptom, perhaps, of the raging misogyny often evident in LaBute’s work, particularly his first feature, “In the Company of Men.”

By changing the cult from a patriarchy, which it is in the original (Christopher Lee played the leader of the sect) to a matriarchy, LaBute gets to portray women as man-hating devious evildoers fully deserving of punch-outs from a beleaguered male.

And by changing the cop from a self-righteous innocent to a more worldly man, LaBute robs the ending of its truly perverse power. In the original, innocence and inexperience lead the cop to a singularly unpleasant fate. Lacking that, Cage merely seems like a victim of circumstance, and that doesn’t resonate nearly as strongly.

The combination of Cage’s jittery performance and the eerie but enervated hostility he encounters at every turn drain “The Wicker Man” of whatever sense of foreboding LaBute may have hoped to build. By the time the cultists start putting on animal costumes in preparation for the big finale the picture has become ridiculous.

Do yourself a favor. Rent the original. Accept no substitutes.