The Wicker Man

[DeathsHand]

The remake is apparently (surprise?) a piece of unintentional cheese (with scenes featuring Nicholas Cage running through the woods in a bear suit while punching women in the throat and kicking them in the wherever, which apparently have most audiences bursting into uncontrollable laughter), so as a fan of the original, I'd like to direct people's attention towards that version of the story, seeing as many critics and a majority of the general audiences admit to never having seen it, with some not even realizing it's a remake, despite the original's reputation as a classic (or at least cult classic) film which was voted the 6th best British Film of all time by umm... Some publication which has an opinion so obviously and vastly superior to your's and everyone else's...

Starring Edward Woodward (who?) and a young(er) Christopher Lee, it's horror so unconventional by today's standards that it's really not even a horror film at all so much as it is just a mystery (despite the remake's marketing campaign featuring a creepy little girl on the poster who happens to not even exist in the film)...
Did I mention it's also part musical?

The story behind the making of the film itself is also fairly interesting... The film's production studio was bought out by another fellow who thought the film was a piece of trash... The movie ended up going through some substantial cuts, and when it was finally released, it's 102 minute running length was edited down to 88 minutes...
What's more, not only did Christopher Lee agree to work without compensation for the sake of getting the movie made, but when he got word of the fact that many critics weren't interested in reviewing the film, he personally urged them to please do so, offering to buy them their tickets himself...
And to top it off, the original negative of the film has been lost (it's speculated to be in a landfill underneath a highway)... The longest existing version of the film is still 3 minutes short of it's original length, coming in at 99 minutes... And the extra 11 minutes salvaged from this version were of fairly poor quality, as they were from a print later discovered shoved away in a vault...

It's the little movie that could... And it didn't deserve what is apparently one of the worst remakes of this recent hollywood trend... If anything good has come out of it, it's that they have re-released the original film on DVD...
So check it out, if you havn't seen it already...