Warner Bros. PicturesAt the end of the 1973 movie The Wicker Man, a man is burned alive inside of a giant wooden effigy while townspeople sing and dance. It is a profoundly bleak, unsettling moment. The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man ends in much the same way, only instead of being disquieting, it is an absolute hoot and a holler when the titular wicker man — with Nicholas Cage inside — goes up in flames. Rather than be a worthy adaptation of a seminal work of folk horror, it's one of the funniest unintentional comedies ever made.The 2006 Wicker Man, which celebrates its 20th anniversary today, is a cinematic travesty when compared with the original film. Directed by Robin Hardy, the '70s movie followed Sergeant Neil Howie, an uptight, moral Christian police officer who travels to a Scottish island commune to investigate a missing person's report. Once there, he finds the community, a group of pagans led by an eerily charismatic Christopher Lee, who claim to have no knowledge of the missing girl; instead they slowly rope him into their May Day celebration. Somewhat corny folk songs (including one that's literally about corn) gradually give way to something more sinister, culminating in the reveal that the people of Summerisle lured Howie here to sacrifice him so that their crops would flourish. That several of the most upsetting scenes take place in the daylight, surrounded by flowers, only heightens the impact of the horror, and the collision between Howie's stiff-upper-lip British repression and the darkness underlying the free-loving lifestyle of the pagans is thematically rich.Considering that so much of folk horror is about respecting what's lurking underneath the earth, it's perhaps fitting that The Wicker Man remake trods the same ground as the '70s movie, yet seemingly has no reverence for what lies beneath. The remake, directed by Neil LaBute, moves the action from the Scottish isles to an island off the coast of Washington, but while the Pacific Northwest may be an aesthetically similar setting, it has no connection to the sort of folklore and tradition that made the very British original work. The United States has plenty of folk horror inspiration — consider The Witch, which takes the Puritan settler nature of this country and finds delicious terror — but the '06 Wicker Man doesn't really engage with any of that. Instead, it puts a blockbuster sheen over a '70s British film that was so effective in part because of its quaintness.There are some plot changes, too. Cage's character, policeman Edward Malus, is called to the island not out of duty but because his ex-fiancée, Willow (Kate Beahan), who is from there, sent him a letter saying her daughter is missing. Rather than heighten the stakes, this invented personal connection feels forced and instead has Cage already suspicious and twitchy when he first arrives on the island. The impact of what happens to Sergeant Howie in the original comes in part from seeing how his stoic belief in law, order, the Christian god, and modernity crumbles when confronted with these free-loving, human-sacrificing pagans.Cage can be very fun when he's playing unhinged, as seen in The Rock, Face/Off, and the underseen '80s movie Vampire's Kiss, but it's the wrong energy for The Wicker Man. The cop needs to be the straight man, not somebody who runs around punching multiple women in the face (while dressed as a bear on one occasion). A supercut of the most absurd moments in The Wicker Man went viral on YouTube mere months after the film came out.Nick Cage in The Wicker Man, being normal. | Warner Bros. PicturesNone of these moments are presented as "jokes," necessarily — The Wicker Man does not in any way bill itself as a horror-comedy like Evil Dead 2 or Slither. There is a deliberate intensity to them which backfires hilariously. In a 2022 interview, Cage tried to claim that the comedy wasn't an accident. "I know people had fun with that even if they thought the comedy was not intentional,” Cage told IndieWire. “I’m going on record right now: That is not a fact. Neil and I both knew how funny it was."Cage typically seems pretty self-aware about his image, so there's a chance this isn't revisionist history and he really did set out to make a comedy. If that's the case, it clearly didn't work out the way he intended, and the rest of the movie doesn't really support these baffling laugh moments. It's a tonal mess whose only possible path to cinematic success is a place in the "so bad its good" category, which is not a place that any filmmaker aspires to be from the onset.So, while The Wicker Man makes a mockery of a powerful, essential piece of horror cinema history, it's not not entertaining. Yes, the original ending is haunting, as Howie's screamed psalms and prayers to God get drowned out amongst the flames. In the remake, however, Cage screams about bees getting in his eyes, as if viewers couldn't see that, yes, there are bees around his eyes and also the rest of his head. It's a stupid affront to a great movie. And, in its own way, that's great, too.The Wicker Man is streaming on the Howdy Amazon Channel.