The Wicker Man (2006)

Director: Neil LaBute

Screenplay: Neil LaBute

Cast: Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus, Ellen Burstyn as Sister Summersisle, Kate Beahan as Sister Willow Woodward, Leelee Sobieski as Sister Honey, Frances Conroy as Dr. T.H. Moss, Molly Parker as Sister Rose / Sister Thorn, Diane Delano as Sister Beech, Mary Black as Sister Oak, Christine Willes as Sister Violet, Erika Shaye Gair as Rowan Woodward

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

OH, NO, NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEES!

The perfect introduction to this remake is stating I had wanted to revisit the original 1973 directly to make comparisons, but decided against this as that would put Neil LaBute's film under an unfair shadow cast over it, let alone with the problems this has even if it had been an original premise. Contrary to popular belief though, I am going to argue no matter how ridiculous Nicolas Cage in a bear suit punching people out is, the real folly for this was how generic a lot of this film actually was for me to revisit, a slight horror film which missed out much of its loaded premise of a male cop Edward Malus, played by Cage, going to the island of Summersisle of the USA coast to track down a missing girl in a matriarchal commune.

The original Robin Hardy directed film has to be talked of in some form, and in context, that was the tale of a very Christian police office played by Edward Woodward, sent over to Summersisle off Scotland to a pagan community lead by Christopher Lee, a tale of the conflict of Judeo-Christian values and pagan heritage at a time past the sixties of re-evaluating mortality and spirituality. It was not always a canonical masterpiece, maligned as the b-side to a double feature bill and infamously with excised footage buried in a road under construction. Rebuilt to its intended form, it has lasted, and the issue the 2006 film had, with all remakes and sequels attempting to re-adapt these horror classics, is as with adaptations of classic horror literature, that they should be more what you can bring to them, something that needs to be more a concern then being "faithful". Screw remaking a film exactly, Neil LaBute could have really made his own weird folk horror film from an American's perspective, but instead you probably know how this (and laugh as I admit too) at Nicolas Cage screaming about the bees. Even as a huge fan of Cage who says he is one of the better parts of this production, this film became notorious for his career too.

Even without the shadow of the original Wicker Man over this, a lot of the issue I have is how LaBute made a pretty conventional horror film from the mid-2000s, which I sat through many from that time and was put off by their entire storytelling template even now. LaBute was from the American independent boom with films like Your Friends & Neighbours (1998), which suggested the potential for something very idiosyncratic with this film when it was being produced. These were also films however which lead to accusations that he was a misogynist for content in them, starring the likes of Aaron Eckhart as less than morally white male figures. LaBute, in mind to this, positioned himself in a loaded premise of Cage as the lone male in a world of women, where they are manufacturers of honey with any men he encounters mindless drones. Tellingly though, with Nicolas Cage reflecting on how he originally wanted the ending of the film more gruesomely absurd than it became, with him keeping the bear suit on even for the denouement¹, there was a sense that, in another context, this could have been more intentionally ridiculous than unintentionally as it became. The issue of gender politics part of the tonic whiplash this could have used for a point becomes less interesting, or one would hope would be for LaBute as he was the screenwriter as well as the director, because Cage plays his role as increasingly more dubious as he goes on. Considering Cage's character progresses from a heroic figure to become a questionable loose cannon, you see there was a misanthropic edge to all this. The original film had this, where Edward Woodward would be the hero to some, but with others in the cinema likely cheering on the pro-sex, musically vibrant pagans to roast him alive. Even if I became a mindless drone, a man like me would still cheer on the matriarchal cult here, led by Ellen Burstyn, over a man who pulls a gun on a woman to steal her bicycle, even if to rescue his daughter from a sinister cult she belongs.

The issue with the film instead becomes how standard this is, in that you have to wade through a lot of stock scenes of suspense which were the reason I once viewed this as one of the worst I had seen. Cage's character offers a potentially interesting figure, scarred by seemingly seeing a mother and daughter die as a highway patrolman, and reconnecting to an old flame (Kate Beahan) who left his life and whose daughter he is trying to find is likely his too. Cage plays this as a neurotic, as this nods to the question whether this community, said to sacrifice someone for replenishing their harvest, really believe that would happen and would attempt to try it out. Unfortunately nothing is made of Cage's mind in context of this, buying positivity self help tapes and someone with clear emotional issues, a type of character Cage would work with well, as he is very good at playing neurotic and morally unstable figures. I admit a bias to him, but his performances makes sense, already someone who hallucinates and is anxiety ridden, only to become more deranged and eventually expose himself with misogynistic comments. Even before the end, he shows as Woodward a sense of superiority that makes him a literal phallus, and that sense our hero, even if the mission is a noble one, is the wrong person for this. In another work this moral ambiguity, as the first version of this film, would be compelling.

This film was not helped by when it was made, absorbing a lot of the trademarks of horror films coming from Hollywood I grew up with at the time in the mid-200s, including coming at a time when a theatrical cut and an uncensored "mature" cut existed to sell the HD discs. For what could potentially be a problematic film in subject, it becomes not really about "evil feminists", but one where the feminist cult could be replaced with a vague one with any genders in power. Nowadays Cage's increasingly notorious line readings feels on point, even if he was the only one to read the tone right, to someone losing his mind as he goes, whilst my problems are from that everything else, that did not become on online meme, plays it too safe as a horror film. This leaves the middle acts to the bad habit in horror films I saw from this decade, minus jump scares, of pulling the carpet under your viewers over and over until it loses all weight to them. Be it false attempts to put Cage in peril to the many times he thinks he is seeing his daughter, only to realise he is dreaming, it is the tone of an action film in an inappropriate position, causing one to react as for an action film when we should only accept this pacing tone for a horror action film or a really good haunted house equivalent. This is the problem here as we never really get more about Cage, barely touching his character, or Ellen Burstyn as the leader of this commune of women and how they exist as more than just a sinister entity that may burn children, something explicitly part of the virtues of the original 1973 film even if they had not had the inspired decision to cast Christopher Lee who could provide sympathetic gravitas.

The thing about the original 1973 Wicker Man too, why it likely did not succeed back in the day but has its legacy, is that it is an unconventional and eccentric film. The plot is far less important in the original to its themes, its sensuality, and how it is technically a musical, as famous for its folk music and traditional songs as the performances and shocking conclusion. None of this is to be found in equivalence in the 2006 Wicker Man, and it is telling Cage became the iconic figure here because everything else is safe and/or not standing out at all. [Spoilers] Yes, it is pointlessly lurid, to a sick humoured level, to break his legs and sting him with bees, before putting him in the Wicker Man, but Cage screaming “Killing me won’t bring back your goddamn honey!” is among the few moments of personality, even if I laughed, because it has an energy to it. [Spoilers End] The notoriety of the film does feel over the top with hindsight, especially as whilst Nicolas Cage was able to ride the wave of this, Neil LaBute whilst still thankfully working after this probably took a shot in the chest with this as a big studio film for him, an albatross he would be stuck with. In the end, it is bad, but not infamous, just generic.

 

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1) Nicolas Cage on his legacy, his philosophy of acting and his metaphorical — and literal — search for the Holy Grail, written by David Marchese and published for the New York Times on August 7th 2019.

Wrestlemaniac (2006)

Director: Jesse Baget

Screenplay: Jesse Baget

Cast: Rey Misterio Sr. as El Mascarado, Adam Huss as Alfonse, Jeremy Radin as Steve, Leyla Milani as Dallas, Margaret Scarborough as Debbie, Catherine Wreford as Daisy, Zack Bennett as Jimbo, Irwin Keyes as The Stranger

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

With a premise about a homicidal lucha libre wrestler, someone like me who grew up with pro wrestling as an obsession would be interested in this. Back in the day, I was so disappointed I viewed Wrestlemaniac as one of the worst films I had ever seen. Nowadays, returning to this, I would never say something like that anymore. It is instead a low budget slasher you would have to come to with lowered expectations than I had, though it does start off with real wrestling footage over the credits, which is cool. The review is actually going to be fairly positive, in that in reality, subjective opinion on whether you the reader would enjoy this or not is really the issue here. Instead I like to view this as a legitimate apology to its director/writer/editor Jesse Baget.

They got an actual figure of note to play the titular homicidal wrestler, which does befit what the premise is about, though we will need to clarify one thing. that Rey Misterio is not the figure most, like I did, grew up with in the World Wrestling Entertainment company, nor if you are older and grew up with as the legendary figure of high flying acrobatics in the late World Championship Wrestling. That is Rey Misterio Jr., the nephew of the man starring in this, Miguel Ángel López Díaz, Díaz taking the name Rey Misterio Sr. to distinguish between the two. He is an important figure in his own right, a figure with a prolific list of records and acclaim, and in mind to an aspect of this involving the villain's personal "mask" collection from defeated opponents, a strong record we will get into about how many people he won the masks (or hair) from in lucha libre bouts. He is also the start of the Rey Misterio lineage which, alongside other figures who donned the mask, also includes the aforementioned Rey Misterio Jr., whose accomplishments alone are worthy to making his uncle proud internationally.

Surprisingly he is not the only other figure with a connection to the profession, as one of the figures who stands out in the cast as well is Leyla Milani, who plays the adult film actress Dallas. Milani, an Iranian Canadian actress/host/model, was in the WWE's own Diva Search, a talent competition to find female stars for their programming which, to be brutally honest, has not aged well as a concept in terms of "Diva" was entirely about figures who could be glamorous and seductive for the male heterosexual audience. This is an issue when wrestling fans and promotions have moved to having female wrestlers as credible as their male counterparts rather than figures meant to appeal to that audience only. This is not either to dismiss women who were comfortable to play to a glamorous image as a wrestler or non wrestler, be they manager to valet, or even played up to being explicitly sexual in their personas, who deserve as much respect in what they have contributed to the history of wrestling; instead the bigger issue is that the WWE's track record of how they have portrayed women, and uncomfortable scandals we will not get into to keep this review light hearted for a review about a deliberately nasty slasher, have left a bitter taste. Even in going back to the likes of the Diva Search competitions that company had will be something, especially because of the scandals, that will have new uncomfortable light. Thankfully, Milani's career is quite a diverse one so we do not need to linger on real history that needs to be brought up in a sombre, fully detailed written piece on the WWE's history of gender politics. By the time of this film, she had already become a model on the American version of the Deal or No Deal game show, alongside roles in a variety of other television and film roles, and by the modern day she founded and runs Leyla Milani Hair¹, a luxury hair care company which is adds a nice turn for a review like this to get into. It is certainly a tangent I did not expect to include, but it is a cool one to add.

It is a befitting thing then, in the traditional of legendary wrestlers like El Santo making films in Mexican genre cinema but not taking the mask off, that Rey Misterio Senior took on this role, a slasher film where an amateur porn shoot made the ill advised decision to get lost in the Mexican back roads, and end up at an ominous and abandoned ghost town. Alfonzo the sleazy director and star, three actress (one mostly unconscious from drinking too much most of the role), the camera guy with a knowledge of lucha libre wrestling, and the stoner who lent the van should have taken the warning of the sleazy owner of an abandoned gas station, which got a pop for me as it is Irwin Keyes as the nameless figure. Instantly recognisable, of all things in his list of cameos and turns in many genre and cult films, it is an obscure horror comedy Frankenstein General Hospital (1988) which made him stand out for me since youth, as the Frankenstein's monster. That this is the film, whether its virtues nowadays, I immediately think of when Keyes appears is funny with hindsight for the brief role he gets here.

Keyes warns of an old ghost town where a wrestler who gouged his opponent's eyes out got shoved into, which gets more elaborate for what is a very short film, less than eighty minutes, and director-writer Jesse Baget clearly made with limited resources. Suffice to say, we have a masked wrestler named El Mascarado who just appeared to destroy the Russians at the Olympics in wrestling competitions, likely to have been built from the bodies of multiple luchadores by scientists, but was an ill advised figure to represent his country of Mexico as he murdered his opponents in training. Considering some actual Mexican genre films - The Batwoman (1968) by René Cardona is about luchadores being kidnapped to create a race of fish men - it is a wacky premise you can work with even in a gory slasher premise. What we get is prime example of the 2000s straight-to-DVD era of lower budget genre films, which will inevitably get their Bleeding Skull or retrospective articles to praise them and get nostalgic about. There is certainly an aesthetic to them too now enough time has passed from my younger self hating this, which stands out from the 2010s equivalent in that this visual looks like it was shot just before the clear sheen with high definition cameras of the 2010. With its mix of greyness and moments of dark shadows, it has a grungy feel as a result, and this has enough budget to find a solid location for the ghost town. Set it up well in set design at a lower budget, it is limited to a few cast members and is simplified in the structure, but we do not have a film here like in the 2010s which could have been shot in someone's house, not an insult to those films but showing there was a higher budget here as a comparison.

It is a film, by coincidence, that manages to still be strong in content but with the ironic hindsight that this not be as extreme as other films of this time period. Saw franchise films were out and about at this time, and "torture porn films" were popular enough that, with a trailer on the same British Revolver release DVD I viewed for this review appearing, even Saw found itself so popular to have a low budget film clearly inspired by them like Are You Scared? (2005) exist. Wrestlemaniac comes at an interesting point where there was a greater easing of some nasty gore in British film classification, and means that the films which got the eighteen certifications, the highest outside of porn classification, had to be much more brutal or have content which was more an issue for the classificators, a real turn of time from our notorious Video Nasties era of videotape censorship. It leads to some unintentional results out of the film's hands as, whilst there is some gruesome stuff here, it is odd to have the amateur porn premise as an initial construct as, with a film that was rated as suitable for fifteen year olds in the United Kingdom to see, it merely leads to one scene of a little female nudity. The script is more interested in vulgar one liners off the back of a sex comedy and some cursing, and does not feel sleazy for the possibility of that premise at this time, nor years later, at all. It feels less like this was a compromised part of the film, but that Wrestlemaniac found itself in a shift in horror films of that era where those Saw films, or Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), were theatrical releases that got nasty and wide distribution.

It is a slasher film, and not of the post-Scream (1996) era of self reflection, but a throwback to the older eighties ones, specifically so many which came out off the wave of Friday the 13th which got their hands on one good location as this does, and did their best with what limited production they had. A Doom Asylum (1987) came to my mind this viewing, barring the broader comedic beats, in terms of one location of the titular asylum, some actors and some gore. Slashers even the eighties had archetypes and stripped down plotting, let us not lie. They are charming for their fans, but the basic structure of them, with the acclaimed exceptions or those who deviate, have the same pace of this in setting up the archetypes and then letting the killer pick them off, this one not even needing a weapon, and more boss in using his bare hands as a result. The aesthetic differences, and how the characters are written, are obvious twenty years on from the eighties here, though even the nastier tone is not really that distinct to a time period of when the film was made.

The immediate thing to point out, that I should have not expected, is that this was an actual lucha libre slasher film even with an actual luchador in the main role. No one is killed with flying head scissors or powerbombed into a bed of spikes. Forgive the use of actual wrestling move terms for the non-fans for a moment, but the closest here is death by backbreaker and a top rope (top off a barrel) body splash, but not much else. It is a masked hulking brute in the centre just in a lucha mask, which means that this really does not play to the ideas of the medium. Wrestling in cinema is surprisingly not large, as beyond the luchador films which would include filmed bouts, usually it is real pro wrestlers in acting roles but not expecting them to bring their skills from the squared circle into the scenes. The only true nod to the medium is the concept of mask vs. mask wrestling types. Except the versions where a wrestler, non-masked, sacrifices their hair on a match, the loser would be forced to unmask if both or one put their masks on the line, a tradition especially significant in Mexican wrestling which did cross over at times over the years in other companies around the world. Here however our killer, when you do not have a mask, compensates for this by peeling his victim's faces off. This does, alongside present the idea of Achilles' mask, does mean that the film is still gory especially when it gets to the "mask" collection.

It does everything it wanted to do as a film, including an abrupt choice of final girl which does change things up. Alongside a score full of drones and tense electronica which is distinct, by composer Jim Lang, this does something as well which does require a HUGE SPOILER WARNING NOW. That being that this is the rare slasher film where the villain wins. Going to find himself in the van left after this, heading outwards into the world even if involving ripping more faces off, it comes less as nihilistic but an abrupt change of pace I have to praise the film for, with SPOILERS ENDING NOW. Truthfully, Wrestlemaniac is just not my film in taste. In the right context, I could see people liking this, and it did not deserve to be buried by my younger self. Film making is hard, and as the time has passed and I have seen more of the lower budget films being made over the decades, Jesse Baget is like many from this time onwards, directors who plug away with work and went through the trends that were popular or considered practical as a director in this area of straight-to-DVD/straight-to-streaming era of cinema. Even cult figures of the eighties, the golden VHS age, like Jim Wynorski or David DeCoteau eventually did this, and that goes from making horror films to either making a Christmas film or a cute animal film by the time you enter the 2010s. In the case of Baget, he did a film in 2014 that was both at the same time, named The Three Dogateers, which meant that he did one better.

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1) Leyla Milani Hair's main website.