Very rarely do films today fall under the category of Hilariously Bad. I’m talking the kind of film that doesn’t even need commentary from the Mystery Science Theater guys. That kind of Hilariously Bad. But I have found that film, like a gem buried beneath the filmic sands of time. That film is The Wicker Man. Now, before a member of Wesleyan’s legion of film snobs speaks up, I am not referring to the 1973 British horror classic starring Edward Woodward. I am referring to another kind of horror that emerged from the depths of hell 33 years later: its remake starring Nicolas Cage, the man who at one point won an Oscar and got bitch-slapped by Cher (who then won an Oscar for keeping her pimp hand strong), and now stars in cinematic classics like Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous. But even those movies pale in comparison to the sheer level of awful that Wicker Man 2.0 manages to rise to.

So why am I watching such a terrible movie? One single reason. This quote: “NO! NOT THE BEEEEEEES AAAARGH MY EYES AAAAARRRRRGH”. The history of film has birthed iconic quotes like “we’ll always have Paris” or “you ain’t heard nothing yet”. The Wicker Man continues this legacy with “NOT THE BEES”. Why this hasn’t won the film any accolades we will never know. Other highlights of this cinematic masterpiece include Nicolas Cage having precisely two emotions: Angry and Attempting To Look Sad, the screenwriters assuming that a community run by women would spend inordinate amounts of time telling their daughters that penises are worse than Hitler and Satan combined, and Nicolas Cage donning a bear suit and sucker-punching women. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

And believe it or not, there is some semblance of a plot beneath this madness. Shall I keep it short and relatively simple? Nicolas Cage is a cop who gets Nicolas Cage’s version of PTSD (furrowing his brow a lot and popping pills periodically) after he failed to save a creepy blonde kid from a burning car. He gets a letter from an old flame telling him that her creepy blonde daughter went missing. What a twist. Turns out said old flame lives on a remote island ruled by women called Summersisle. On Summersisle, he unravels the painfully obvious mysteries of the island and learns a valuable lesson about matriarchal societies: if you leave women to their own devices, they’ll dress like rejected extras from Big Love and talk constantly about how much they hate penises. But all of this development moves at a glacial pace and doesn’t even have anything remotely funny to punctuate the slow-moving plot. Things happen, but you wouldn’t know from watching the movie.

Don’t get me wrong, after about an hour of sheer pointlessness and attempts at thrills that didn’t so much send chills down my spine as beat me over the head with the “ISN’T THIS SCARY?” stick, this film lived up to its promise of unintentional hilarity. Nicolas Cage indeed dresses up as a bear and punches a woman in the face. He also steals a bike from a woman at gunpoint. And at the end (trust me, I’m not spoiling anything), he gets a swarm of bees poured onto his face by the women who were probably tired of him punching them in the face, and he screams the aforementioned “NOT THE BEEEEEES” line. After making me sit through an hour of broken promises about the comedic value of this film, I sort of felt like he deserved it.

But let’s pick apart the main problems of this movie. Problem number one: the complete and utter lack of acting of any kind in this movie. People pause in the middle of sentences either because they think it’s dramatic or they never bothered to learn their lines. Facial expressions, like a coherent plot, are conspicuously absent from this movie. Sure, we get obvious “I’m Angry” faces or “I Feel Vaguely Disturbed” faces, but not much else.

Problem number two: the pointless filler scenes. You know how sometimes dramatic TV shows will have filler episodes when the writers can’t think of anything for the characters to do and end up saying “Fuck it, let’s have them bitch about their problems and do stuff completely unrelated to the overarching story for an hour”? Every other scene in this movie is like a filler episode. Like the screenwriters would write a scene, then just have Nicolas Cage trudging through the woods or yelling at a random woman for a few minutes. I spent the better part of an hour into this movie waiting for the funny stuff to happen, and all I got was filler scenes. By the time the funny stuff happened, I already felt betrayed and the full effect was lost.

And finally, problem number three (I won’t go through the infinite other problems I have with The Wicker Man): the screenwriters racked up about twenty unfortunate implications about women in this film. My personal favorite is that left to their own devices, women like to form pagan societies that ritualistically murder children if the bees they raise don’t make enough honey. Couldn’t the writers and director have just made this a half-assed morality tale about the environment and global warming decimating bee populations without bringing their warped views of women into it? I’d take a two hour long episode of Captain Planet starring Nicolas Cage over this dreck any day. In fact, considering movie execs allowed The Wicker Man to be made, I wouldn’t put it past them to greenlight that.