The 100 best horror films, horror movies, the wicker man
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Review

The Wicker Man

3 out of 5 stars
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Time Out says

Robin Hardy’s bizarre 1973 cult classic is the oddest of the ‘Summer of British Film’ weekly reissues. Set on the Western Isles of Scotland, it poses a burning question for investigating mainland Sergeant Edward Woodward: could a missing 12-year-old girl have been sacrificed in some creepy, ancient fertility rite by the libidinous, pre-feudal inhabitants? Anthony Shaffer’s script – written at the end of an annus mirabilis in which he also wrote ‘Sleuth’ and ‘Frenzy’ – brews together a heady concoction of police procedural and post-Hammer horror with a pagan pastiche of counter-cultural faddishness, with scenes of dancing naked pregnant women in stone circles or a ranting, windswept Christopher Lee in drag beautifully filmed by Harry Waxman and accompanied by Paul Giovanni’s risible ’60s-style folk revival soundtrack. Essentially, it’s an insane guilty pleasure, still enjoyable for its delightfully eccentric casting – Britt Ekland’s fine Scottish accent and Hammer star Ingrid Pitt’s dour librarian – and for the funniest, creepiest pub scene in British movies outside of next week’s reissue, ‘Withnail & I’.

Release Details

  • Rated:18
  • Release date:Friday 24 August 2007
  • Duration:84 mins

Cast and crew

  • Director:Robin Hardy
  • Screenwriter:Anthony Shaffer
  • Cast:
    • Edward Woodward
    • Britt Ekland
    • Diane Cilento
    • Ingrid Pitt
    • Christopher Lee
    • Lesley Mackie
    • Walter Carr
    • Lindsay Kemp
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