To start things off right, our first Worst, Most Despicable movie is The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage.

Right off the bat, you should send up the warning flare seeing the words “Nicolas” and “Cage” in immediate sequence on the DVD cover to alert everyone else that this has tremendous potential to be a really, really awful movie.

I watched The Wicker Man and I can say that of the movie(s) I’ve viewed so far for TWMDMYES, this is the worst.  So my Cage flare was
completely warranted.

Basically, the movie starts out like this.  Nicolas Cage is a cop, a motorcycle cop.  And he comes across a woman and her daughter, whose doll had just flown out the window of the car.  Hmm.  So Nicolas Cage, like a master circus motorcyclist, picks up the girl’s doll OFF OF THE ROAD WHILE STILL ON HIS MOTORCYCLE.

When he goes over to give the doll back, the girls throws the doll back onto the street and when Nicolas Cage goes to pick it up, the woman and daughter’s car gets hit by a semi and their car starts on fire.

It happens.

So then Nicolas Cage tries to free them, but they disappear!  Flash forward to a little bit later and Nicolas Cage’s lady-cop friend stops by.  Then Nicolas Cage gets a letter from his ex-fiance telling him that their daughter is missing.

He finds out (through clever police work and the search engine on a grocery store website) that his daughter is at Summersisle, a mysterious island not unlike every other island.  Only this island is populated by mostly colonial-looking women who call each other “sister” and name themselves after plants.  He’s confronted by a woman, probably played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, named Sister Beech who is a real handful.

Anyway, this happens and that happens, and it turns out that Nicolas Cage has landed himself into QUITE the debacle.  See, his missing daughter is going to be sacrificed as a ceremony in these women’s pagan religion to make sure that they can reap more honey next year.  Oh, I should say that there are a ton of bees on Summersisle for no reason other than to orchestrate the trapping of bees on Nicolas Cage’s head.

Nicolas Cage, then, is obviously kind of mad that these women are going to use his daughter for their own selfish gain.  So he tries to stop them, but by the end, Nicolas Cage and viewers of the movie realize that it’s not his daughter that’s going to be sacrificed; It’s Nicolas Cage, himself!  They tricked him into coming to the island (the real trick is getting people to see the movie in theaters — KABLAM) just so he could be their sacrifice! They all call him “Wicker Man” (yes, like the title!) and lead a procession to a giant, actual man-shaped wicker statue that they put Nicolas Cage in and burn him alive.  Oh, and that’s after they break his knees.

And that’s the end.

Although there are some particularly gripping scenes where Nicolas Cage punches Sister Beech in the face, another where he kicks another girl into a wall and one where he dresses as a bear and punches other women, I don’t know.  It’s a mess (YouTube “Best Scenes from The Wicker Man”).

If that’s not enough, the reason (among many) why the movie fails is Nicolas Cage.  He’s egregiously bad in it.  There are several times when Nicolas Cage sees something that you or I would truly cry, throw up and run away from and he literally doesn’t react.  He’s like the robots in the movie, iRobot.

Anyway, the point is, this movie was the worst.

So tell me, princess, when did you last let your heart decide?  Well, hopefully your heart makes correct decisions and waved the red flag all over The Wicker Man, and if our magic carpet ever makes its way to Summersisle, all three of my genie-wishes will be to get out of there at all costs.

I give it five out of five ‘Ughs.’