10 Spectacularly Wrong Movie Reviews

8. And The Wicker Man, Too

Remakes, on the whole, tend to be a heck of a lot worse than the original. Psycho's actually an exception, since it's more just stunningly unimaginative and unnecessary; most modern redos of old films are simply naff, pale imitations of their source material that nobody should bother watching. That is 100% the case with noted playwright Neil LaBute's take on The Wicker Man, the cult classic British horror film from the seventies which traded more in a subtle, creeping sense of dread - along with a twist ending that everybody saw coming because of the poster - than on gore or shock value. Edward Woodward's repressed, virginial Catholic police man visiting a small Scottish island where a little girl had disappeared was swapped out for Nicolas Cage and bees. No, not the bees! They're in our eyes, and so on and so forth.

It made for a pretty good YouTube video, but not a good movie. Especially in comparison to he original, which was so restrained and disturbing, in favour of Nicolas Cage shouting a lot and some ham-handed political commentary on contemporary gender roles. Most reviewers agreed, making the new Wicker Man a pretty decisive critical failure - except in the eyes of Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who poo-pooed any controversy and labelled it a "profoundly disturbing, blood-chilling suspenser", thought that the feminist critique was pointed and smart (it's not), and claimed that LaBute had "matched" the original. It did not. It's is a load of rubbish.