Wicker's World

 I'm writing a film. Its somewhere on a continuum of The Wicker Man, Rosemary's Baby and The Company of Wolves. But its funnier than all of them. Though, The Wicker Man is pretty funny in parts. That's its power - Summer Isle is a wonderful, jolly, lusty place to live - a community free of guilt and peppered with an unlikely combination of lovable old coves and sexy young women. It would be a brilliant place for a holiday - as long as nobody fucks with their apples. 

I've seen the remake - horribly mishandled, botched to oblivion and not even THAT funny, and the sort of sequel, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Tree. 

The Wicker Tree is an odd one. Its based on the director's book Cowboys for Christ, and sees an American country singer and her boyfriend come to a Scottish village to convert the locals to Christianity. Everyone in the village is infertile for some reason - nuclear power or something - and eventually they chase the singer's boyfriend and eat him. Christopher Lee turns up for a minute to do a spot of Watercolour Challenge and has no bearing on the rest of the film. Honeysuckle Weeks - very much the Landlord's Daughter in this scenario - tries to have sex with a policeman a lot, and can't do a Scottish accent. At one point she's subtitled, but I think that's just Robin Hardy's sense of humour. 

There's rather a lot of Hardy's knockabout lust for laffs in this - people being stabbed in the bollocks, that sort of thing - and it does rather undermine the seriousness of the endeavour. As does the total lack of plot. I quite like the film. Or at least I've warmed to its crapness - the bit where Hardy directs a pop video is remarkable - but it does rather point out that humour and laughter can be sticky bedfellows - like Honeysuckle Weeks and her ass headed copper. Think that's a Midsummer Night's Dream reference? Its not.