Plot- A letter from an old flame lures Cop Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) to Summerisle, to investigate the disappearance of a missing girl. Malus finds the island community unwilling to cooperate with his enquiries and suspects the girl is going to be scarified. As he races against time to save her, he becomes perilously entangled in the island's secretive world of rituals and deceit.
Remakes are always going to be compared with the original, and only work successfully if the first effort is largely forgotten by the public consciousness. The primary difficulty with this film is that it is a remake of Robin Hardy's 1973 cult British horror, so the films climatic finale comes as no surprise to most. Ellen Burstyn's portrayal as Sister Summerisle does not stand up against Christopher Lee's memorable performance in the original, and the same can be said of Cage's OTT performance when pitted against Edward Woodward.
This film follows the basic plot outline of the first, but the filmmakers have attempted to add a few new twists, turning the missing girl into a love child Malus hadn't known existed. However, we still don't sympathise enough with Malus for this film to work and find. They've also tried to give Malus a personal attachment to the island, by creating a back story with Willow (the missing girl's mother), but this relationship also fails to be convincing.
The fertility obsessed pagan community of the first film has been replaced by a matriarchal beekeeping pagan community, and Malus just so happens to be allergic, a coincidence which adds little to the films plot. They even throw in an elderly set of identical twins, which happen to speak in unison and have two good eyes between them; which serves as a good example of how in this instance the communities weirdness is simply annoying and clich. The changes in the plot seem ill thought out, and the overall film lacks the rawness that originally made Woodward's plight and sacrifice so haunting. This film fails to engage, let alone sustain suspense or scare us (MPAA rating PG-13, says it all), and we can barely wait for Malus' sacrifice to begin so ours can end.
Verdict- There was no need for this film to be made, and watching is nothing more than a bad waste of time. 1/5