Review #340: The Wicker Tree (2011)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #13 - The Wicker Tree (2011)
The Wicker Tree is about a pair of Texan missionaries- an apparently world-famous singer named Beth and her cowboy fiance Steve- who go on a mission trip to Scotland, where Beth is supposed to sing some Christian songs and lead some worship services for the people in a small community there. (At least... I think that's what their goal was, the two of them are apparently planning this trip to be two years long but after one single performance at a Scottish church in the city they're seemingly free to go bugger off into the countryside at the request of a couple they meet, so I'm not entirely sure what was intended at the start.) They attract the attention of a couple who lead a religious cult, and the cult attempts to seduce them in order to eventually sacrifice them in a pagan ritual to grant their village fertility and prosperity, exactly as you've seen in other similar folk horror movies like The Wicker Man or Midsommar.
In case the title didn't tip you off, The Wicker Tree is very, very much a cheap rip off of The Wicker Man (likely the original, though this movie initially started production shortly after the Nicolas Cage remake released). It doesn't follow the exact same story beats, but it kind of does, and is similar in a lot of other ways too. The lead characters are devout Christians completely out of their depth in this pagan environment, and the end ceremony involves a giant tree made out of wicker, and although it's not expressly intended to shove a person inside and burn it, a person definitely ends up getting burned in it. Beth is chosen to become the May Queen without realizing what that entails, and Steve is seduced into impregnating one of the women in the village (so this shares some plot points with Midsommar, though this came out first by a few years). I think the lesson to take away here is that this story is incredibly well-worn territory, and whichever movie you watch will probably hit the same story beats as any of the other movies.
The thing about this one, though, is that even though it's fairly well-made compared to some of the others I've seen, it's still not great. The characters are all caricatures, I noticed some editing errors that really shouldn't have made it to final release, and this movie spends so much time talking about the ins and outs of Christian doctrine (like when Steve spends several minutes of screentime using a card trick to explain his faith in the Bible) that I would have thought this was actually a Christian film- if it weren't so unabashedly horny. There's a scene in this movie where Beth meets someone for the first time, and within one sentence of meeting them she's already brought up the fact that she and her fiance are trying to remain pure until marriage. The person she tells this to then spends the next scene theorizing what Beth and Steve's genitals are like, and how easy it would be to seduce them both. There's also a running subplot between a female cult member and the male police inspector, where she's agreed to give him information regarding the cult if he can break the record for most number of orgasms in one day. You know, typical movie stuff.
Anyway, I could tell a lot of work went into this one- it certainly looks better than most of the movies on this list- but in the end it just wasn't very good, and there are two and a half other movies I know of that tell the exact same story but do it better. So, maybe watch one of those instead.
Overall Rating: 5/10 Stabs in the Groin
Unnecessary Cameos: In case the inspiration of The Wicker Man wasn't obvious enough, one of the characters (Daisy the cook) is played by the same actress who played a cook named Daisy in the original Wicker Man film. Also, the cult leader in this film was originally set to be played by Christopher Lee (who played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man)- but he suffered an injury during another film shoot so his role was recast. He does, however, still have a cameo in this film, in a scene that seems to have no purpose except for Christopher Lee to walk on set and say a few lines.
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