The Wicker Tree (2011) - 2.5/4

Some people are very consistent in their obsessions. Robin Hardy appears to be one of those. He wrote and directed the horror classic, The Wicker Man, a very strange film with otherworldly cadences. That film concerned a Christian police inspector who is sent to some remote hamlet on a British isle, somewhere off the coast of Scotland. There he encounters an infuriating lack of Christianity. Under the rule of the gentlemanly Lord Summerisle, a fictitious brand of Paganism has propsered and the villagers couldn't be happier. The inspector not so much.

I suppose there could be some ambiguity read into The Wicker Man as to just which side Hardy is on. I'm not sure he's on any side, strictly speaking. There's no doubt to me that Hardy holds the Christian inspector, and his brand of Christianity, in contempt. He's our protagonist and first-time viewers enjoy the island's mystery through him, giving him some sympathy. His moral behavior also lends him considerable dignity. Hardy gives the inspector a martyr's death and villainizes the Pagans thoroughly, of course, and this has no doubt led to multiple interpretations. There's an apparent fondness for the Pagans and their now morally taboo ways, but they are cast as the villains of a horror movie--many of them stubbornly cruel simpletons.

The Wicker Tree is a kind of sequel to Wicker Man, but in many ways a rinse-and-repeat. This time, it's a lot less subtle and a lot more fun. Instead of a morally righteous British Anglican born and raised in good values, what we get is a white trash country music gal. She used to play up the farmer's daughter slut look and looked damn good doing it. Then she found Jesus, and all Nashville said, "Dang!" She's Born Again and using her celebrity to spread the Gospel, in this case to a certain Pagan island off Scotland. She also drags her gosh darn cowboy boyfriend (cowboyfriend?) with her, as he pretends to like his chastity ring.

This is where The Wicker Tree gets good. Because the Pagan village is not full of pagans, it's full of horny pagans. My favorite kind of pagan. Everything in the village is about sex. Every innocent little sea chanty, pub ditty, or lullaby the characters sing, line of poetry they recite, is all thin innuendo. Now, our country gal is too blonde and dumb to grasp anything's going on. But her cowboy, while certainly dumb, happens to have a penis, so he's picking up on it. Particularly the part where a gorgeous and naked pagan girl asks him to strip and join her in the radioactive pond.

There actually is a plot to The Wicker Tree, though it's kinda convoluted and not that important to enjoying the film. Lord Summerisle's successor is a knighted businessman whose specialty is nuclear energy. Somehow his nuclear power plant ties into a pagan ritual that involves crowning a May Queen, killing her 'Laddie'--who must ride a horse--and then burning her at some wicker contraption. Failing the first rule of good missionary work, our Nashville refugees do not bother to learn any of the culture they've come to destroy, and so gladly accept the May Queen and Laddie titles.

Now this bimbo country star is so dumb, I don't feel much sympathy for her. "Dear God, thank you for making my voice so good, and my looks okay." She really says that. The cowboy I kinda like. He's stupid too, but open to the point of naivity. He just does what he's told. You get the feeling it wouldn't take much to convert him to Paganism. The point is, there's none of the ambiguity here that you had in Wicker Man. Clearly Hardy thinks these Born Again Christians are morons. American Christianity is even more contemptible to him than the British kind. For him, it's a Christianity of ignorant rednecks repressing their sexuality. He's all too happy to throw them into a sexually liberated environment of amoral hedonism and watch them be destroyed by it. The pagans remain villainized barbarians who impose their beliefs on the unwitting Christians with brutality. But before this horror formalism takes over, you sense he really likes these horny pagans as much as I do. They're a good lot before they kill you.

So that's The Wicker Tree. For anyone who's seen The Wicker Man, there aren't really any surprises. That's part of the reason it's not too well regarded. Another reason is that its tone is so different than the original, less austere and mysterious, less otherworldly, and more earthy, crass, "Dionysian." Hardy still comes across as a self-taught filmmaker with his own odd cadences, but Wicker Tree is really a b-movie that has fun with sex and violence. It's a riot.