In his lifetime, Robin Hardy directed a genuine cult classic in 1973’s The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, he made only two other films. Worse, the last of them was The Wicker Tree.
While the quasi-sequel is based on Hardy’s 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, who’s he kidding? If you’ve seen the original Wicker or its bug-nuts Nicolas Cage remake, you know exactly where this new one leads, even without the benefit of Edward Woodward as your guide.
In The Wicker Tree, that role falls to young Christian country starlet Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol, apparently a for-the-better one-and-doner). With her purity-ring cowboy fiancé (Henry Garrett, Red Tails), Beth accepts a two-year missionary position in Scotland. She’s even tailored her message to her audience: “Jeezus was braver ’n Rob Roy!”
Not everyone in the pagan village is happy to host the Americans, but town employer/nuclear magnate Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, Aquaman) and his wife (Jacqueline Leonard) put on game faces and trade insults behind her back: “I bet she smells like a dairy.”
If only there were … oh, some kind of, I dunno … “May Day festival” planned for which they could trick the hicks into, um, “participating.”
Hopes that Hardy may approach the material with a wicked sense of humor rise early with a glimpse of Beth’s Britney Spears-esque pop-tart past (via a video for “Trailer Trash Love”), but when you later see well-to-do Scots line-dancing at a posh party, those hopes have long been torpedoed. So go any chances of the filmmaker beating the odds by capturing lightning in a bottle twice. While technically competent, the movie doesn’t go anywhere approaching the unexpected; this Tree takes root, but never sprouts.
Hardy’s on the record for calling his final film “very horrifying.” That’s very generous … and perhaps very delusional. The Wicker Tree offers some gorgeous scenery, a super-brief Christopher Lee cameo, a sex scene with a toy horse’s head and nothing else of note. Folk horror is rarely so wearisome. —Rod Lott