20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History
2. The Wicker Man (2006)
Starring the late Christopher Lee at the height of his sinister powers and the underrated Edward Woodward as the devout police detective investigating the disappearance of a young girl on the remote Scottish island of Summerisle, the 1973 original Wicker Man was an eerie, macabre piece of genre filmmaking.
It’s a movie that frequently appears in lists of the greatest British films of all time - of any genre, not just horror. I’ve always wondered why it is that a film that’s held in that kind of high regard is seen as ripe for a remake: to take another example, what was the thought process behind Peter Jackson electing to remake his favourite ever film, the 1933 version of King Kong? I can see the logic of feeling compelled to create a sequel, as Bryan Singer did with Christopher Reeve’s Superman films, but why remake something widely considered to be pretty much perfect as it is?
To do a superlative original justice, you have to really pull out the stops and a) create something brilliant that b) pays homage to the first film but c) brings something fresh to the table. Neil LaBute utterly failed on all three counts with his 2006 reworking of The Wicker Man. Far from presenting a compelling, fresh take on a highly acclaimed piece of cinematic history, his script was laughable and the performances throughout (especially that of lead actor Nicolas Cage) risible.
GIFs and clips of Nic Cage’s terrifyingly over the top mannerisms and bug-eyed ranting have become commonplace across the length and breadth of the internet in the last decade. This is a film so witless and inept that it’s been recast by fans of the original as an unintentional comedy, a farce: baffling, considering that this is the same writer/director that gave us the searingly brutal In The Company Of Men nine years earlier.
Fant4stic was terrible, an insult to the characters it attempted to revitalise. Terminator: Genisys was horribly flawed, written by people who didn’t understand the basics of structure and pacing or the high concept of the franchise. The Wicker Man remake is something else: a waste of time from the word go that was somehow made worse in the execution, both pointless and puerile.