Nicolas Cage and Neil LaBute's Glorious 2006 Desecration of The Wicker Man One of the Best Bad Movies Ever Made
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2006’s The Wicker Man marked an unfortunate turning point in Nicolas Cage’s career. In the years and decades ahead, Cage would become more meme than man, a laughingstock whose raging eccentricities perpetually threatened to overshadow his extraordinary talent and remarkable achievements.
The Wicker Man is Cage’s Battlefield Earth, his greatest and most enduring fiasco. Failure does not do justice to Neil LaBute’s notorious remake of the 1970s folk-horror classic. It is no mere failure! It is something much greater and worse than that, a spectacular disaster that angrily demands to be in the mix when the worst movies of all time are being discussed, as well as the best-worst.
While The Wicker Man utterly failed as an atmospheric horror film about the evils of women it succeeds phenomenally as an unintentional dark comedy of hysteria and unhinged misogyny.
The Wicker Man is a laugh riot for the ages precisely because it has no idea that it’s funny. Its perverse and complete lack of intentional humor is precisely what makes it such a gas.
Writer-director Neil LaBute’s reputation as a David Mamet-like master of dialogue and storytelling took a massive hit here it will never begin to recover from. Before The Wicker Man, LaBute was the theatrical wunderkind and indie arthouse darling behind In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. After The Wicker Man, he was the idiot who put Nicolas Cage in a bear-suit and had him killed for honey.
LaBute went on to write and direct such movies as 2013’s Some Velvet Morning and 2015’s Dirty Weekend, both of which sound imaginary and made-up. I’ve certainly never heard of them and
The auteur and the thespian play everything completely straight. The massive chasm between the serious, profound movie Cage and LaBute deluded themselves into thinking they made and the unrelentingly bonkers b-movie they actually created makes The Wicker Man not just an accidental laugh riot but legendary.
Cage claims that The Wicker Man is supposed to be funny but I don’t believe him any more than I believe Tommy Wiseau when he similarly claims that The Room is a dark comedy and not an achingly, embarrassing sincere drama that the world will never stop laughing at.
Cage remains proud of The Wicker Man. At one point he said he’d like to remake it as a J-horror movie in which his character is a ghost and I gotta say, that might work because the characters here are otherworldly. They would make more sense as pod people, space aliens or ghosts than as flesh and blood human beings.
Like The Shining, The Wicker Man tracks an ostensibly ordinary man’s descent into madness and hysteria. But since the ostensibly “ordinary” protagonists are played by Jack Nicholson and Nicolas Cage, two of the most effortlessly and intensely eccentric actors ever to grace the big screen, it’s evident from their first moment onscreen that they’re out of their goddamn minds, and will only be getting progressively nuttier.
The Wicker Man’s catalyst is pill-popping, deeply traumatized cop Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) receiving a letter from ex-fiance Willow Woodward (Kate Beahan) informing him that her daughter Rowan (Erika Shaye Gair) is missing.
Edward learns the hard way that if a beautiful, willowy hippie chick has sex with you it’s probably only as a pretense to lure you to a secluded pagan island for the sake of human sacrifice.
Ladies, am I right, fellas?
Edward’s unique and poignant madness is that he thinks that the world should make sense. He is a man of logic and reason, a ramrod straight believer in law and order who wants answers and wants them immediately but has entered a mysterious, maternal realm whose rules and rituals are completely foreign to him.
In no small part because he is played by Nicolas Cage, Edward begins the movie on edge. Something is extremely not right about him and the pills that he consumes like Tic-Tics clearly aren’t doing much for his Anxiety or his PTSD.
Over the course of the film he will unravel further and further until he is frothing-at-the-mouth mad in ways that instantly and permanently thrust the film into a place high atop the pantheon of movies that are so bad they’re great and unmissable.
In the sleepy island Edward where Willow now lives our hero encounters a matriarchal pagan society where women hold all the power and men are useless beyond their breeding abilities.
The vibe on the mysterious island is subtly but unmistakably, “Go away outsider before we kill you.” That’s generally a good sign that you’re not wanted and should leave while still alive but Cage’s increasingly apoplectic lawman isn’t about to leave without getting answers.
Alas, the fish out of water’s investigation strategy involves snooping around while wily, evil women go about their evil lady business and shouting questions at pagan cultists who could not be less impressed by him.
he has fun!
Edward does not save his incoherent rage for adults. When he pops up in a classroom looking deranged and suspects that the little girls with tight-lipped expressions are not being wholly honest with him, Edward sneers unbecomingly, “You little liars! Rowan Summersisle IS your classmate, isn’t she?”
The police officer does his damnedest to come off as a coldly efficient authority figure. Instead he comes off like an overgrown child with no control over himself and his emotions. Cage doesn’t go from one to ten here in terms of energy and intensity: he starts off at ten and by the time the film has reached a climax he is somewhere deep in the millions, a level of insanity and intensity no actor has reached before or since.
The Wicker Man has audaciously manic-depressive rhythms. It alternates between quiet scenes rich in mood and ominous portent and manic highs. Cage’s crazed intensity stands out in even sharper relief because every other actor in the film is so muted and sedate that it feels like LaBute fed the supporting cast powerful tranquilizers but got his star fucked up on crystal meth.
It’s not just that Cage expresses more emotion than the unhelpful women he’s forced to deal with in his Quixotic, cursed quest to find the child or discover what happened to her. He’s the only person expressing emotions beyond annoyance at an interloper’s presence and vague regret from Cage’s ex at having lured him to his doom—all for some damn honey!
Throughout the film the women of the island wear Mona Lisa smiles that betray nothing and send Edward into a rage. The Wicker Man operates on the comic principle of escalation; it just keeps getting crazier and funnier as it leaves the world of logic and reason behind and embraces a world of pure madness.
It’s a testament to how gloriously, thoroughly strange The Wicker Man is that even when you’ve seen it over and over again, as I have, and know every beat, twist and and line of dialogue it still somehow manages to be a continual surprise, and not just because it ends with a dedication to, of all people, Republican guitarist and songwriter Johnny Ramone.
It doesn’t matter how often you’ve seen The Wicker Man: Cage angrily inquiring, “How’d it get burned!” over and over again, as if the answer to that question will fix everything and soothe his frazzled mind and spirit never stops being funny.
I will know that I am dead inside if I don’t at least chuckle watching Cage steal the bicycle of a mask-wearing, smugly superior teacher played by Molly Parker at gunpoint, then ride away inelegantly, sweating profusely and just barely holding it together.
Once Cage starts kung-fu fighting duplicitous women then gets inside a bear suit and begins ineptly trying to stop the inevitable and save himself it’s all over: The Wicker Man boasts a laughs-per-minute level on par with the best comedies ever made.
Billy Wilder wishes he could have made a movie with laughs this big.
In my role as a Nicolas Cage super-fan/historian and bad movie lover I have probably seen The Wicker Man five times and it’s always fresh and funny and gloriously bizarre and re-watchable.
It’s like a song you know by heart and never get tired of listening to.
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