By way of a tribute to Edward Woodward, who died today, here's the climactic scene from the classic 1973 film The Wicker Man. Just to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, this is the bit at the end where the locals re-enact an ancient fertility ritual by putting a policeman and some chickens into a giant man-shaped basket and setting fire to it. Looks like the chicken might be a bit overcooked by the end, to be honest.And here's the equivalent scene from the less-celebrated 2006 remake, starring Nicolas Cage.
I haven't seen it, but from these couple of montages (the second one admittedly deliberately cut together for comedy effect) it looks buttock-clenchingly awful, and seems to feature Cage overacting even more than in the rivetingly terrible Face/Off. Who would have imagined such a thing were even possible? I suppose one might conclude that Cage is just hamming it up in any old shit these days to pay the bills.
3 comments:
This is one of my favorite films of all time (the original, that is). Might help to have some primordial soup to quench the flaming end sequence, however.
Have you seen (or even heard of) Zandalee? Cage is extremely hot and cold - like, bulkier, sulkier David Schwimmer but by god this looks like him at his cold best (worst?) http://www.avclub.com/articles/nicolas-cagetastic-case-file-143-zandalee,31280/
Christ, that looks fantastic, by which I mean shit. It's a tricky one, though, isn't it? There's a fine line between "so bad it's good" and "so bad it's just really bad".
It's hard to knock a film featuring Joe Pantoliano in a dress, though.
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