First a bit of background
story before we go into the movies. The Wicker Tree (2010)
stood in my shelf for over a year before I now finally watched it.
Reason for this was that once it came out I of course rushed to get
it, but I decided to watch The Wicker Man (1973) before it to refresh my memories of it. That was actually a bad
mistake, The Wicker Man is pretty much a perfect movie so it raised
the bar so high that I knew the sequel could never live up to it. So
I decided to give the sequel a better footing and put it back to the
shelf to wait for a better time. Well the “better” time was now
as I'm trapped at home with a nasty flu. But first a few words about
the original and unfortunately the remake as well.
One of the best horror
movies ever made and a movie which would most likely be in my all
time top 10 list if I ever had to make one. I can't praise this movie
enough, it's perfect in every aspect and especially the mood is just
something unbelievable. It does what most horror movies tend to
forget nowadays, it builds up tension slowly but surely until it gets
scary as hell before the absolutely devastating ending. A brilliant
masterpiece that can stand multiple viewings despite the easily
spoilable plot.
100%
Even though the best thing
to do with this movie would be to just forget it's existence, I'll
put it here as well, kind of like a warning to stay away from it. I
haven't seen this since it came out so can't say how it would work
today, but then again I don't want to ever watch it again. It's one
of the worst remakes ever, missing every single aspect that made the
original so brilliant, and all in all just a horribly bad movie.
0%
Sequels are always hard
and nearly every time fail to live up to the expectations. This
however had all the things on paper that could make it good. It's
written and directed by Robin Hardy, the same man who wrote and
directed the original so there was a good possibility it would be
something like the original. Even though I had very little
expectations, mostly just hoping that it would at least be somewhat
entertaining if nothing else, I was still disappointed. This
continues the story of the village 37 or so years later, though it's
left a bit unclear whether it actually is the same town as Summerisle
was on the original as this time it's called Tressock, but it's very
similar none the less. A young American gospel singing couple (Henry
Garrett and Brittania Nicol) travel there to spread the word of the
lord and much to their surprise they are warmly welcomed there. Well
the town's folk of course have other plans for the naively simple
couple and things go along similar paths as the original. The less
you know the better. The story in itself was actually quite good and
intriguing, but unfortunately everything around it and especially the
way it was told didn't work at all. Both Garrett and Nicol were
rather bad, though then again their roles were so one dimentional
that even better actors might have had trouble with them. But that
didn't bother much as that's the way they were supposed to be, it fit
the story and gave it a bit of dark comedy as well. The real problem
acting wise is the rest of the cast, they were all quite bad.
Especially Graham McTavish who didn't fit the role in any way. Only
one who at least tried to put some effort into it was Honeysuckle
Weeks. But the acting didn't ruin the movie it's the story telling
which did it. There's an attempt to a similar tension building as in
the original, but this time all the attempts for dark comedy broke
the tension as in the original they fit right in most of the time
even helping to build the tension. And the mood from the first one
was nowhere to be seen. It just proves how hard it is to recreate the
incredible mood from the original when even the creator of it can't
do it again. Another thing that troubled me was that the movie was
quite amateurishly made, some scenes looked like they could be from
some cheap soap opera. So even though the story was nice, this is in
no way a good movie, rather bad actually. This probably works better
as a book and Robin Hardy seems to be a better writer than a
filmmaker, so I guess I'll give the book a try some day.
33%
No comments:
Post a Comment