Beth Boothby (Brittania Niccol) is an American country and western singer who has become a born again Christian, and is engaged to Steve Thomson (Henry Garrett) who she has made a vow of chastity with until they are married in a couple of years. In the meantime her church have opted to use her celebrity to bring religion to Scotland as a missionary, so she has arrived in the Borders and a small village which is part of the estate of Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish). He and his wife are pleased to see the couple, but maybe not for the reasons they might think...
It took nearly forty years, but director Robin Hardy did get to make his follow up to his cult classic The Wicker Man; in the meantime he had penned a novel version of his story, and shot another, unrelated film back in the eighties, but it was this update fans wanted to see. Or at least they thought they did, for once it finally enjoyed a limited cinema release and then on disc the reception was nothing like as impressed as it had been for the original. The Wicker Tree was not really a sequel, it was a reimagining of themes from that previous work, and couldn't help but come up lacking in comparison to the impact the slowly accumulating praise of the 1973 film had.
If anything, rather than a darkly comic, heavily ironic horror story, this appeared more like a demented episode of Monarch of the Glen with its picturesque Scottish scenery and cast of Brits apparently appealing to some kind of fantasy about rural life, one which may turn nightmarish but not so much that it stopped everything seeming green and pleasant and generally back to nature. This was brought out in the clash between Christianity and paganism, something which had been part and parcel of the first effort, but where that was sinister here we had material closer to lighthearted pantomime: a few digs at organised religion here, a bit of sex there, but nothing to truly satisfy.
Ths jokiness was evident in practically the first scenes where Lachlan's butler Clive Russell is chopping up unspecified meat and roars: "Ah'm up to mah oxters in shite!", not a line you'd expect to hear in, well, anywhere really, even typical Scottish television comedy would balk at it, but there it was. But if we were not intended to take it seriously, then that was a fatal flaw because the fans of Hardy's chiller favourite were wont to take it very seriously indeed: imagine if Ridley Scott had made a Blade Runner sequel which was a silly romp and you'd have some idea of why those who might have appreciated this took so much umbrage. Not helping were performances which never achieved any unity of tone.
So you had Nicol as a patronisingly-conceived American airhead in one corner, Honeysuckle Weeks doing all the heavy lifting nudity-wise as the one local who might be on the newcomers' side, and various presumably loveable eccentrics who would see to it that you were more confused by the way this played out than, say, thrilled, chilled or amused. Not much convinced, but Hardy deserved some credit for being one of the oldest film directors ever at the time he made this, so perhaps instead of those Wicker Man fans lambasting what he had done, the source being just as good as it always had been after all, it was best to regard it as a trifle on the same lines, but with none of the heft. Christopher Lee was supposed to have taken the Morrison role but after an accident was reduced to a mere cameo, which indicated that it could be The Wicker Tree was a film which had missed its moment. The fact that it made no secret of how the plot would end was not conducive to suspense, mind you, like a joke you knew the punchline to. Music by John Scott.
