The Wicker Man (and here I mean the 1973 original) is a fascinating film – not a great one perhaps, but an intriguing oddity in the canon of British cinema. From a modern point of view it’s hopelessly campy in places, but genuinely chilling in others, more so than most horror films before or since.

For the uninitiated, it follows Edward Woodward’s devoutly protestant police officer as he visits the tiny island of Summerisle looking for a missing young girl. There he finds the locals involved in some oddly pagan practices, many of which involve tormenting him, dancing around in the nude and singing amusing folk songs. As he digs further, so events become increasingly sinister, until a gut-wrenching conclusion that is one of cinema’s greatest shock endings.

Neil LaBute’s remake, on the other hand, finds foul-mouthed, pill-popping Nicholas Cage going to the quite large island of Summersisle looking for a girl who turns out, entirely predictably, to be his daughter. There he finds the locals involved in man-hating and honey-making. As he digs further, so events becoming increasingly dull, until a preposterous conclusion that might make you laugh and will certainly ruin any chances you have of enjoying the twist in the original.

As a remake, LaBute’s version is a horrible travesty. What it gets remotely right, it steals shot for shot; where it invents, it falls flat time and again. A good example is a scene that appears in both films, where our protagonist visits a schoolhouse full of creepy Village of the Damned-style girls. There’s a slow build of tension, the policeman suspecting that the children know more than they’re letting on. Finally he goes to a desk that he believes belongs to the missing girl and looks inside. In the original, he finds a beetle tied to a pin by a length of thread, which – incapable of turning around – slowly plods towards its own destruction. It’s a brilliant visual metaphor for our hero’s predicament, which the remake replaces with … a crow. Which is a brilliant metaphor for everything that made The Wicker Man a good film flying right out the window.

On its own merits, however, Wicker Man (2006) is merely boring and ludicrous. Very little happens, and LaBute’s script manages the almost-impossible by being hopelessly expository yet communicating next to nothing. The cast spend too much time wrestling with gibberish to build any character, particularly Kate Beahan as Cage’s ex Willow, whose only personality trait seems to be the inability to finish a sentence.

There really into much good to be said about it – it’s plodding, stupid, entirely unscary and wildly nonsensical, (to pick one example from many, Cage finds the island, with its pre-industrial, electricity-free pagan society by – yes! – looking on their website.) LaBute has even managed to exorcise the nudity and the daft folk songs, which were about half of what made the 1973 film so much fun.

But, in the interests of a fair review, it should be said that the location photography is quite nice, and staring at the trees provides some distraction from whatever nonsense you’re supposed to be watching. And LaBute has succeeded, at least, in making the original look like a masterpiece of Citizen Kane proportions, which I guess is a virtue of sorts.