AT THE PHOENIX cinema, East Finchley, director Robin Hardy was fielding questions on his 1973 cult movie The Wicker Man, questions he’d most likely been asked dozens of times before. Yes, the film was initially a B-movie support to Don’t Look Now. Yes, Britt Ekland had a body double because she thought her bum was a bit “slopy”. No, he hadn’t seen the re-make, due in British cinemas this week, “but” — he left a short, but quite deliberate, pause — “I have read the script”. The chill that filled the auditorium couldn’t have been more pronounced if Christopher Lee had walked in with a tray of ice cream.

The second Wicker Man is directed by Neil LaBute, no mug, someone who made his name with Your Friends and Neighbours and In the Company of Men, both darkly shocking films. It stars Nicolas Cage and Ellen Burstyn, both good actors. Still, it’ll be awful, an embarrassment. Without seeing the film, everyone who has seen the original knows this to be true.

At the turn of the Eighties, remakes were not ten a penny. John Travolta starred in Brian De Palma’s reworking of Blow Up as Blow Out, The Postman Always Rings Twice was newly scripted by David Mamet, and the barely known Jim McBride fathered an audacious take on Godard’s Breathless. All have their advocates. All three took the originals and made them afresh for the glossy Eighties — tougher, bleaker and (arguably) sexier.

What has changed since is the reason for remodelling old movies. If you have a good idea, no one is complaining. King Kong could be churned out every ten years and the special effects would be more modern, more realistic each time. High Society always fares badly in off-hand Hollywood histories, but if you’re going to have the nerve to remake The Philadelphia Story, throwing in a bunch of Cole Porter’s best songs isn’t such a bad place to start.

The Wicker Man, on the other hand, has a soundtrack so influential it has spawned a British folk revival almost single-handedly. A folk legend in itself, the mastertapes were believed to have been used as ballast in the construction of the M3 until they were finally discovered, restored, and released on CD in 2002. Tampering with the soundtrack is akin to remaking A Hard Day’s Night or Jailhouse Rock with McFly at the helm.

Labute could justifiably be called lazy: The Wicker Man is a great yarn — reheating it for an American audience largely ignorant of Hardy’s original is guaranteed to garner some praise and profit. Strangely, no directors seem to want to remake films that were stinkers to start with. LaBute, Tim Burton (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and Gus Van Sant (the pointless replica of Psycho) are hardly stretching themselves. If they turned their hand to improving lousy films such as the Madonna movie Shanghai Surprise, I’d be all praise. But when Hollywood plunders its past, it tends to pick on likeable trash (Mission: Impossible) or comedies where the original has long passed its sell-by date (The Nutty Professor). No one is about to refilm the 1970s gangster movie The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

There is also the fear that the original will have been dumbed down. Retuning The Avengers with Uma Thurman as Mrs Peel wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. Yet it was no surprise when the movie ignored the TV Peel’s scientific background, mastery of fencing, love of sculpture, and subtle superiority to the womanising John Steed — all the things that made her so alluring in the first place. What remained in the movie was a woman in a catsuit.

This could be read as simple Hollywood-bashing; Little Englanders protecting their heritage from men with Lacostes tucked in to their pants. Still, as long as the likes of Sylvester Stallone are let loose on movies such as Get Carter, you have to laugh. Of course, the results are risible: Stallone replaces the racecourse scene with a golf course scene, wears shades throughout in spite of the relentless drizzle and, unlike Michael Caine’s thoroughly brutal Carter, comes over as a thug with a heart of gold in near-incestuous scenes with his niece.

Clearly, though, Stallone loved Mike Hodges’s original movie. On a trip to Britain he revisited the multistorey in Gateshead where Bryan Mosley met his end. Stallone was shocked to hear that the car park was due for demolition and made a passionate plea for its preservation. Bizarrely, it worked. They should attach a blue plaque — “saved by Sly”.

Stallone, then, was indulging himself, fooling around with one of his favourite films. It can’t have occurred to him that anyone who had seen the original would call his bluff. He couldn’t hope to match the steely-grey coldness of the original, the unbelievably stark backdrop of Newcastle of the early Seventies. He didn’t even try. Far better directors have engaged in similar follies. The Coen brothers’ Ladykillers was loud and hysterical, while The Limey, Stephen Soderbergh’s sequel to Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, featured Terence Stamp spouting faux cockney-isms such as “Oi trousers, keep it handy!”

This is what rankles. These remakes are an arrogant form of tourism and, as such, reinforce the clichéd notion that America feels it has the right to use the rest of the world as a cultural pick’n’mix. The Wicker Man will, as a result, get people’s backs up. When Robin Hardy read the new script, he duly noted that the location had been changed from a remote Scottish island to the West Coast of America, and that much of the pagan imagery was gone. He expected as much, but one thing about the script made him think Neil LaBute had missed the point of his original movie. It wasn’t funny.

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