I saw once, while looking up movie facts and tidbits to make myself seem like a legitimate critic, rather than some hack sixteen year old who writes reviews for just the sheer fun of it, that this movie double-billed with my favorite movie, Don't Look Now. Both movies share quite a bit in common, a slow build-up to a dramatic conclusion, plot clues on what is to happen that are both absolutely true and misleading, and an artsy style to their direction. However, unlike Roeg's film, in The Wicker Man, you know about the sacrifice of the climax fairly soon in the movie. The only question is how it will happen.

This is, unfortunately, something that bogs down the movie. All you really need to know is that #1: It's a pagan island and #2: The title of the movie to figure out someone is getting burned by the end of this film. So the scenes in which our main protagonist, a police sergeant realizes the same thing are both necessary to the narrative, but absolutely unnecessary from the audience's perspective, seeing as we already know what's going to go down.

Fortunately for the film there is a LOT of other stuff going on. All the characters are interesting, even ones only briefly mentioned. The sergeant is perhaps the most human cop I've seen in a long time. He does his job, he does it right, and he if that means he is not going to get along with these people then so be it. There is also the whole religious thing going on. The sergeant is a devout catholic, but the people of the island are extremely enamoured with the whole pagan culture. The contrast between the two religions is vividly displayed.

The catholic policeman is strict, restrained, and in control of himself at all times. The pagan people are unbridled and free, but also alien, wild, and dangerous. Nothing illustrates this better than the bizarre dance scene (one of many) in the tavern at which the sergeant is staying. His room is adjacent to that of the innkeeper's daughter, one well known for being sexually active. Hell, the town even wrote and performed a song about it in one of the earlier scenes. The innkeeper's daughter dances about her room naked, and the sergeant can see this through his window. She knows this, but continues to dance, even thumping on the policeman's door to get his attention. The sexually repressed man just sweats away the temptation as the music coming from downstairs grows louder and faster. She starts getting really freaky now, pounding on the wall between the rooms frantically while gyrating, and the sergeant grits his teeth, waiting it out. You can see the physical strain on his face.

Besides that, there are many other scenes that compare the two factions well. A favorite of mine is when, during a maypole celebration, all the guys are outside dancing around the maypole and singing, while all the girls are inside in a school. Man, is that unfair. Their teacher asks the class what the maypole represents. When one girl gets it wrong, the teacher tells the students that the maypole represents the penis. And this is where I get a little bit weirded out, because, unknowingly, the celebration of birth that is the whole may festival, has accidentally admitted it's gay. Think about it, why else would it be the guys dancing around the maypole and not the girls? The guys are celebrating the penis. It's the absolute sexual freedom of the pagans that lead to accidental Freudian slips like that one, and the sergeant doesn't like it one bit.

He tells the school teacher that she has no right to talk about penises in a school and in the process he opens a desk. Inside it is a beetle tied to a string tied to a pin. The beetle goes around in circles, tying itself closer and closer to the pin, like a maypole (I don't even want to think about how sexually confused the person who set the beetle up worshipping a phallic symbol is.) The student responsible is asked why she did this and just giggles. This beetle ties into (pun so intended) the themes of fate in this movie. The beetle will inevitably tie itself to the pin. It could just stop, but it feels compelled to keep moving and do all it can to escape the thread tied around it, but, by such action, only makes the string come tighter around its gut. Just as this film's conclusion is as inevitable as it is expected.

And what a conclusion it is. It works on all the right levels, and leaves you thinking all the way to the end. Hell, you'll probably be thinking about it days after you see it, it truly is a spectacle.

All that being said, they were a few thing that pissed me off about this movie.

What was with the film stock? One minute the quality would be fine, then BAM!, the quality would sink to school short film levels of graininess and murkiness. It is obvious that the film was made from two separate stocks, one much higher in quality than the other. But why? Were they trying to save money? If they were, why didn't they shoot the whole film on one stock? It's jarring to an audience to suddenly get slammed with poor quality so suddenly, especially when it switches back and forth several times during the same scene. Couldn't they have edited it in more subtly? Or at least shot the whole beginning fifteen minutes (I believe there was really only fifteen minutes total of the poor film) with the poor stock so as to make only one transition between the bad film and the good film?

Also, could there have been less music? It seems a lot like filler, there were at least five scenes of spontaneous musical festivity, only one of which was truly necessary. In a suspense film like this, pacing is key. All filler scenes of people singing about what a wh*re the innkeeper's daughter is (when did they rehearse that song anyhow?) do is bog down the movie. And I swear, if that guy hadn't stopped singing about barley...

Well, in the end this movie was definitely wasn't as great as Don't Look Now, nor was I expecting it to be. It was not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be, and it is not the classic others say it is, but I can say it is a forgotten suspense film that is worth a view in its own way, although most modern audiences would find it a bit odd. To me, though, that's all part of the appeal. That and Christopher Lee's crazy awesome hair.



This review was done for the Final Girl film club.