Wicker Pedia.

Brothers and their fathers joining hands and make a chain
The shadow of the wicker man is rising up again.
Your time will come
Your time will come
— The Wicker Man, Iron Maiden.

Summerisle. An isolated ancient green isle off the coast of Scotland. Go for the ribald pub camaraderie, go for the public sex, go for the spurning of Christianity, go for Britt Ekland inviting you to her room by crooning an eerie Celtic paean and dancing around starkers.

The Wicker Cuke

My kinda island.

THE WICKER MAN is fearless. It potently exposes the hypocrisy and stupidity of religionism; unflinchingly makes its only christian character a sniveling prude, and turns its back on horror movie convention, its dread stemming from overturning deep-rooted beliefs and long-held securities, rather than from supernatural scares or hillbilly serial killers.

Police Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) is the sniveling prude, seaplaning out to Summerisle on an anonymous tip to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan Morrison. His stiff, anal retentiveness has the townsfolk laughing behind his back immediately. And Rowan’s disappearance becomes secondary to the discoveries Howie makes about the society he has inadvertently intruded upon.

He senses something unusual about the culture when he walks out of the pub during his first night and sees couples copulating openly in a meadow. The uneasiness builds as the pub patrons sing a ribald song about Willow the Barman’s Daughter (Britt Ekland) while Willow herself flirts among them.

We soon discover Howie is a devout Christian and “saving himself for marriage.” Like all good Christians, he forces his views on others, even if he is the visitor – when he finds two crates of fruit atop a coffin (adhering to the Earth-based faith of the locals), he breaks them up and makes a rude cross from two planks, to the amusement of onlookers.

Howie meets Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), and the mystery of the missing girl deepens, though all is made clear about this heathen society. Not pagan. “Heathen” as in heath, as in Earth gods. “Here the Old Gods aren’t dead.”

From a David Pinner novel, Ritual, screenplayed by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Robin Hardy, THE WICKER MAN illustrates the stupidity of Christianity by showing us how another fanatic religion can look like lunacy to an outsider. It does not portray paganism or atheism as the polar opposite of Christianity – rather, it rightfully shows how Christians (represented by Howie) regard EVERY other religion as opposed to them.

Outraged at seeing teen girls dancing naked around a bonfire, worshipping pathenogenesis (regeneration without sexual union), Howie rails at Summerisle, “Have they never heard of Jesus?” to which Summerisle replies (in that imperious Spock manner), “Himself, the son of a virgin, impregnated I believe, by a ghost.”

Howie rants about the island promulgating fake biology and fake religion – but where does he get the authority to accuse any religion of fakery when he himself follows one of the fakest and most plagiarized?

“When the earth renews itself / When the seed reveals itself
When we are reborn / In every waking dream…”
— Wicker Man, Bruce Dickinson.

Britt Ekland: bringing young men back to religion.

Just as the people of the island regard life-giving aspects offhandedly (freely given sex, nude sexual ceremonies, and it’s most heartening to hear schoolmarm Diane Cilento speak of “maypoles venerating the penis”), they regard death in the same natural manner – as part of their Earth-based faith. It’s more logical than a magic man crucified for nothing – we are, after all, tangible Earth substance. So a human sacrifice is just par for the course when the crops go bad.

On May Day (the 1st), the islanders all dress in realistic animal masks, sway sensually to their disturbing minor tonality music and perform their blood ritual and death games. (Note: an ingenious method of decapitation: holding six swords in the shape of a horizontal Jewish star and then all pulling backwards when someone places their head in the midst of the star, the blades all coming together neatly.)

If nothing else can be said about THE WICKER MAN, where else can we see the mighty Christopher Lee cross-dressing and frolicking madly as if possessed… oh yes, as Saruman in LORD OF THE RINGS… and Count Doofus in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, and oh yes, in any Dracula film from the early 70s…

A very special human sacrifice, Howie was being set up all along: “A man who would come here with the power of a king and find himself the fool, a man who would come here as a virgin; a man who would come here of his own free will…” When Captain Howie is entombed in The Wicker Man, it is still shocking and disturbing, and is not so much a twist, as a logical conclusion to religious zeal – homicide.

He impotently beseeches his captors on the lack of proof for their gods, yet offers none for his, “Can you not see there IS no sun god, there IS no god of the fields?” Well, uh, can you not see that it is not about gods at all but about the followers? Gods don’t kill people – people do.

In the final chilling scene, as Howie burns in the Wicker Man, he calls out to Christ, who, of course, doesn’t do a sodding thing to help. It is not a case of Howie’s god being weaker than the Earth gods (or even working in mysterious ways and letting Howie die for no apparent reason) – it is because there simply IS no one to cry out to.

END

Buzz Fuzz.

In 2004, the zombie comedy (“zomedy”?), SHAUN OF THE DEAD, hit us like a shovel to the face. HOT FUZZ is like that same shovel – to the bollocks. Harder, heavier, grittier and gruesomer than SHAUN, Brit import HOT FUZZ throws down action badder than Hollywood’s baddest bad boys – and it’s a comedy.

The same team that brought us SHAUN (writer-director Edgar Wright and writer-star Simon Pegg) have found their havoc stride with FUZZ, which does for law enforcement what SHAUN did for the dead – bring it to life just to beat the living cliché out of it.

Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a London supercop transferred by the London brass (fed up with him singlehandedly making them look bad) to an indolent Sandford village, which he treats as rigorously as London, arresting minors in the lackadaisical pub, making detailed written reports on speeders, adhering to “official vocab guidelines” and wearing his vest on foot patrol. Angel discovers just how indolent the village is when his first assignment is to chase down a swan, reported by Stephen Merchant (EXTRAS) as Mr. Peter Ian Staker (“P.I. Staker? Piss taker? Oh, come on!”).

Detective Poffy Hollywood

Ragged by fellow officers for his big-city élan and partnered with plump, oblivious action-movie fan, Danny (Nick Frost), Angel becomes dubious over the village’s drowsy façade after three Sandford residents have fatal “accidents.” His friendship with Danny becomes his only lifeline as he uncovers a provincial conspiracy to retain the village’s award-winning bucolic aesthetic – through murder. [Dun dun DAAAAHH!]

Whilst paying homage to Action Film canon (John Woo, Michael Bay, Richard Donner, Clint Eastwood), Pegg and Wright’s forte is in taking the piss out of the conventions: “Is it true that there’s a point on a man’s head where if you shoot it, it will blow up?”; after a villain is dispatched into a refrigerator, “Did you tell him to cool off?”; a music swell will suddenly cut short when the action onscreen takes a turn that the audience and, it would seem, the film-makers were not expecting; or Angel will pull a rugged hero-face into the camera when he screeches a squad car to a halt – then he will pull that same face when he screeches a bicycle to a halt; or Danny badgers Angel with excitable questions that he believes a big-city cop should have lived through: “Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” “Ever been in a high-speed pursuit?” “Have you ever fired a gun whilst in a high speed pursuit?” – all of which happens in due course to the unsuspecting dynamic duo with film-makers’ tongues planted wickedly in cheeks.

Admittedly, it is hard to follow a surprise hit with a “planned” hit, because we the audience now expect the laughs. And we expect them with a lot more shits and giggles. (In that respect, it might almost have been favorable for FUZZ’s intended audience not to have seen SHAUN.) Suffice to say, FUZZ seems a tad more “forced” than SHAUN. It doesn’t help that American marketers insist on giving us ten different thirty-second trailers containing ten gags each, specifically to spell out that FUZZ is a comedy, to American audiences whose sensibilities have been blunted by this type of actioner that actually takes itself seriously. Thus, adding the “expectancy quotient” to the deadened “advertised gags,” we are left with an uphill battle to jocular nirvana.

Which indicates how good FUZZ is, to still pull off a goodly wallop of jock.

Oft-times, British humor does not translate well to American audiences, the prime example that bridged that gap being Monty Python. But we realize Python did not succeed entirely when supposedly reputable media like The Hollywood Reporter still employs empty vessels like Ray Bennett: “When the two start flying through the air with automatics kicking, you’d bet they would give anything to be in a Robert Rodriguez film and not in a comedy at all.” Uh – is there any point explaining parody to someone who is not equipped to comprehend it? Danny’s character almost represents the fumbling-for-apprehension American psyche, when he blurts explanations to callback gags and specifies the movies that HOT FUZZ actually spoofs.

Like SHAUN, editing is performed with the gale-force of ripping gonads, editor Chris Dickens placing FUZZ spectacularly and squarely in its actioner genre for maximum parody – if it wasn’t a comedy, it would be an A-List B-Movie.

To show us the ridiculousness of impact sounds, Wright over-uses them, with every person who enters from offscreen warranting a THOOM! and every jumpcut walloping the speakers; with each shootout, chest-throbbing gunshot foley, with each car chase, hair-pulling tire screams.

Not only do Wright and Pegg knock down movie conventions (Angel elocuting like Eastwood in avenger mode; camera swooshing around the two bad boys like Michael Bay in-de-hizz-ouse), they envelope-push social convention as well, molding Angel and Danny’s relationship into an ambiguously gay-ish interaction, yet never actually stooping to facile gay jokes, but skirting the ambiguity itself for the laughs. Angel is also the world’s first openly-atheist hero (without that fact being a plot point); there is also no female love interest forced into the plot for pap Romantic Ending Protocol.

British comedic mainstays, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy and Steve Coogan all cameo in the first ten minutes, then are sadly missed. Replaced in Sandford with other Brit cameos: Timothy Dalton’s suspicious grocery store manager, Jim Broadbent’s sinister Police Inspector and a double-decker busload of familiar faces.

The allusions are innumerable and definitely require a second viewing for their lightning passage (STRAW DOGS, Dire Straits’ Romeo and Juliet), but familiarity with POINT BREAK, the LETHAL WEAPONs and SHAUN OF THE DEAD itself will get you over the “British humor” hump.

And really, if you don’t get it by now, after Python and BLACK ADDER and FAWLTY TOWERS and LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS and ALI G and EXTRAS… I have here a shovel.

Present me your bollocks.

END