robin hardy the wicker man the final cut

‘It’s about an American company, not unlike the Mouse House or Universal, who decide to do a historic theme park in the Shetlands based on Norse sagas.’ ‘This third film will really stick it to the gods,’ he says. ‘They just missed the point,’ shrugs Hardy, who recently directed his own sequel, The Wicker Tree, and is now working on a threequel. Hardy holds less fondness towards the infamously dire 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage, whose ‘worst scene’ reel (‘Nooo, not the bees!’) has had millions of hits on YouTube. But now, Hardy has given his blessing to a new-release, 94-minute ‘final cut’ derived from an old print of the 1979 US theatrical version. On completion, the studio’s managing director, Michael Deeley, called it ‘one of the ten worst films I have ever seen’, hacked 20 minutes out and released it as a B-movie on a double bill with Don’t Look Now.Įver since, there’s never been such a thing as a ‘finished’ cut as the original print was lost/buried/hidden/cursed. He finds a thriving pagan community, led by a lusty, wild-haired Lord Summerisle (The Lord Of The Rings’ Christopher Lee in his favourite role), that enjoys orgies in graveyards, teaches reincarnation and phallic symbolism in school, dances naked over fires and, like the Christians, believes in sacrifice – just of a very different, scary nature… The story is an elaborate game played on Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), an earnest virgin ‘Christian copper’ who catches a plane to remote Scottish island Summerisle to investigate a missing girl. This is why, 40 years on, The Wicker Man still remains so radical and refreshingly peculiar. ‘We went behind all those clichés of the horror story – all that Roman Catholic medieval propaganda,’ says Hardy.

Robin hardy the wicker man the final cut