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Disowned by the company which produced it, cut to pieces and its negatives allegedly buried beneath the M3, THE WICKER MAN is - depending on your point of view - either one of the finest British horror films ever, or some sort of bizarre musical travelogue through the Scottish islands. Personally I'd go for the former, and this DVD set allows those of us in the UK to finally see the film how it was intended to be seen. Well, almost (there's still no "apples" scene for example, although Christopher Lee's comments about the film's "original" length are almost certainly an exaggeration). A two-disc set, disc one has the original theatrical version of the film, which compresses Sgt. Howie's visit to Summerisle into one night, while the long version, tagged as Robin Hardy's director's cut, is on disc two. The film's treatment - whether deliberate or otherwise - means that the reinstated material in the long version (e.g. the first appearance of Christopher Lee on the first night) is of a significantly worse quality than the rest of the film (which is surprisingly good given what's happened to it over the last three decades). The short version of the film is nice to have, but it's unlikely that many will bother to watch it for anything other than curiosity value. The long version extends Howie's stay on the island to two nights, so we get Lord Summerisle sending Ash Buchanan up to Willow's bedroom (as well as Gently Johnny being sung downstairs), while her attempted seduction of Howie is moved to the second night. This version works a lot better, playing up the islanders' conspiracy in events far more than the cut version does. As you'd expect there's a full-length commentary, with Mark Kermode moderating Woodward, Hardy and Lee. There's some good comments from all three (including those about Britt Ekland's dubbing) and Kermode tries to get to the bottom of the film's butchering by British Lion, but Lee's know-it-all personality and tendency to recount unrelated stories is a bit of a drag. And after all these years, you'd think he'd be able to manage to give his whole "it's still out there, somewhere" conspiracy theories a rest just for a change. If that sounds harsh, it's just frustrating to him someone droning on about something that they have no actual proof about when we could be hearing something else instead. The other extras include THE WICKER MAN ENIGMA, a documentary on the film and a 1970s US TV interview with Christopher Lee and Robin Hardy. The former is good, but doesn't really contain anything that fans won't have heard before, while the latter is an interesting curio, but suffers from having very poor picture quality. As with many DVD extras, you might watch them a couple of times, but nothing more, especially since they're on disc one and most of us would spend our time watching the long version of the film on disc two. However, the full - or at least, as full as we're likely to get - version of the film is the main reason for buying this set. This extras are a nice add-on, but the discs' main content is great, despite its treatment at the hands of moronic film company executives. BACK TO THE TOP |
THE WICKER MAN: |
