The Wicker Man

Director: Neil LaBute

2006 / 102min / 35mm

The online churls who smugly declared LaBute’s rowdy remake of Robin Hardy’s 1973 UK folk horror classic to be “unintentionally” funny received a definitive and defiant answer from star Cage some years after its release: “There’s a need by some folks in the media to think that we’re not in on the joke. But you don’t go around doing the things that character does—in a bear suit—and not know it’s absurd. It is absurd.” Whatever the case, watching Cage play a sexually repressed Washington State police officer being chased around an island by neo-pagan descendants of the Salem witches until he’s finally fitted with a bee-filled helmet is what we call a damn fine time at the movies.