, an upstanding officer of the law driven by his own devout moral rectitude. After receiving a letter concerning the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, Howie dutifully takes a seaplane to investigate. But <b>the local<br />
townsfolk claim never to have heard of the girl</b>, Rowan Morrison, and her<br />
alleged mother clams up and claims her daughter is fine.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>As Howie investigates further, <b>his conservative notions are offended by the rampant sexuality he encounters<br />
everywhere</b> — be it at the local inn, where the<br />
owner grins with crooked approval when his daughter Willow (Britt Ekland, above) joins in the<br />
lewd sing-a-longs and rowdy festivities, or in the elementary school classroom, where teachers talk openly about the<br />
“generative force” of a phallic maypole.<o:p></o:p> When Howie visits the patriarch of the town, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), he learns that the community has reverted to paganism<br />
during the past century. Isolated from the rest of the world, they’ve become<br />
completely dependent upon the earth to provide their sustenance, and this reversion<br />
to a simpler way of life has brought with it a reversion to a more primitive belief system. All of this deeply offends Howie, but he’s convinced there is a cover-up, that the young girl in question is still alive, and that he is thus duty bound to continue his investigation.</p>
<p>That things end badly is an inevitability, and depending on how much you’ve heard about the film throughout the years (the ending was spoiled for me before I watched it), or of Neil LaBute and Nicolas Cage’s remake from last fall, you’ll be less surprised than audiences of its time, which is a shame. <b><i>The Wicker Man</i> is frequently if loosely described as a horror film, but that’s not really the case. Its rhythms are sleepy, and it’s designed to elicit unease as much as anything else</b>. There’s much drunken carousing, with songs about corn rigs and barley and the like. The locals leer and stare blankly, and the camera lingers on their faces and the surrounding landscape. This dawdling had me teetering on disengagement — given that we don’t really get to deeply know any of these other characters — but what keeps your intellect engaged is <i>Sleuth</i> and <i>Frenzy</i> writer Anthony Shaffer’s carefully crafted, symbolically layered screenplay, as well as Woodward’s slightly peeved, clench-jawed performance. <b>Context matters to varying degrees in revisiting older films, and it’s a lot with <i>The Wicker Man</i>, which I still think could have used some tighter editing and a bit different filmmaking technique. Still, this film burns itself into your memory</b>, no matter the decade of its viewing, or pre-revelation of its secrets.</p>
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Anchor Bay’s two-disc special edition treatment of the title, meanwhile, is flat-out superb, at least with regards to the extras. The transfer of the 1.85:1 widescreen presentation unfortunately suffers lots of bad color matches, as well as some grain, and ghosting in grey areas. Additionally, while the theatrical version of the film comes with Dolby digital 5.1 surround and Dolby digital stereo 2.0 audio tracks, the extended version is weighed down by a sub-par mono track. Furthermore, there are no optional subtitles, which makes the thick brogue difficult to parse, even when cranked up to holy hell.
A pleasure, then, that the supplemental material at least presents a properly robust and contextualized portrait of the title. As mentioned, two different cuts of the movie are included herein — the 88-minute theatrical version, and a 99-minute extended version. The differences between and reasons behind these differing versions are intricately parsed in an extremely interesting audio commentary track on the latter cut, with director Robin Hardy and lead actors Woodward and Lee. Hardy actually lost 20 cans (!) of completed film after the shoot, and Lee expounds upon his own rich conspiracy theory that involves several of the producers and the movie’s original distributor. Essentially, there’s less religiousity and character background in the shorter version, which robs the movie of some of its three-dimensionality. Another interesting bit of trivia: scripter Schaffer apparently lifted Sir Walter Raleigh’s gallows speech for the film’s much-discussed finale. (I guess that’s public domain…) Oh, and Ekland had butt and voice doubles for her own, much-discussed attempted seduction of Woodward’s Howie. The front, though? That’s all her.
A superlative behind-the-scenes/retrospective featurette anchors the first disc, meanwhile, featuring interviews with Woodward, Lee, Hardy, Shaffer, actress Ingrid Pitt, producer Peter Snell, U.S. distributor John Simon, filmmaker Roger Corman, art director Seamus Flannery and many others. TV and radio spots, the theatrical trailer and 11 minutes of rarely seen footage round things out, along with obligatory talent bios. B (Movie) A- (Disc)
, for whom accumulated worries start to get the best of her. Her anxieties manifest themselves in delusions and visions of increasingly horrific proportions. Believing that she’s going insane, Danika seeks psychiatric help from Dr. Evelyn Harris (Regina Hall).</p>
<p>The few loose thriller elements of the film don’t particularly hang well together, but Tomei’s solid performance — she’s never hysterical, merely confused and worn down — and t<b>he script’s concentration on seemingly pedestrian family matters that slowly take on increasing importance help imbue <i>Danika</i> with </b><b>an involving and smartly pitched tone</b>. If it seems very much like a small screen production — not necessarily in production value, but area of exploration — that’s less a crack than simply an honest assessment; like with any number of episodic entertainments, you could walk in halfway through this production and still find some reward, all without pining for what you missed. A few of the film’s third act “shock inclusions” are dubious, but <b>the final twist ending is a nice little doozy</b>, something to be appreciated.</p>
<p>Presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, <i>Danika</i> comes with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track, Spanish and English subtitles, an unbilled 2.0 English stereo track and <b>a lightly accented audio commentary track with director Ariel Vroman</b>. Composer Gilad Benamram also sits in on this track, but is mostly quiet until Vroman occasionally prods him with a query or set-up regarding a musical composition or cue. <b>Vroman talks openly and honestly about the movie’s 25-day shoot</b> (with downtown Los Angeles largely subbing for Baltimore, save for some captured footage by a skeleton crew of three folks), and if the calling out of various continuity flubs is sometimes charming and goofy, the frank discussion of the movie’s changes in the editing room paint a portrait of a less convincing and convinced auteur. He namechecks the aforementioned <i>Jacob’s Ladder</i> as an influence, along with Roman Polanski’s <i>Repulsion</i>, but I’m somehow doubting that those films were re-jiggered in post-production to the degree that it sounds like this one was.</p>
<p>Also included as bonus features, alongside previews for other First Look releases, are <b>a staid collection of black-and-white storyboards</b> and <b>an 11-minute making-of featurette</b> that includes interview snippets with Bierko, Vroman, producers Lorena David and Mark Roberts, and screenwriter Joshua Liebner (a Los Angeles schoolteacher)… <b>and no Tomei?!</b> That’s criminal, really. <b>C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)</b></p>
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