"The Wicker Man": The cut may be final, but the film is still incomplete | Features

So when I found out that Videoscope in Palo Alto, CA (or maybe it was Mountain View), had the 102-minute version, I meticulously copied it tape-to-tape on the two-hour speed to ensure maximum quality before returning it. This was back when I was happy to cram "The Slime People" (1963), "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955), "Yog Monster from Space" (1970) and "Fiend Without a Face" (1958) all onto one cheapie Kodak videocassette on the crappier six-hour speed, picture quality be damned.

Once armed with my very own copy, I became an evangelist for "The Wicker Man" as intense as Edward Woodward's Christian cop in the film. I forced (or at least cajoled) friends to sit down and watch every last minute of this, the only complete version of it that you could find on the entire San Francisco Bay Area peninsula. Most of my friends were all just as won over by its death and duality mixed with sex and Scottish song as I was. Many of them made their own copies of my copy, the analog equivalent of going viral.

While that tape with "The Slime People" et al had long since gone into the dumpster, I kept that copy of "The Wicker Man" through several moves as if it were some runic script on a piece of old parchment that had to be passed down from generation-to-generation. As VHS gave way to DVD, there were a few special editions of "The Wicker Man," but all of them—even the 2-disc set from the reputable Anchor Bay—fell far short of the the version that I had preserved on a hand labeled videocassette.

Unfortunately, this newly restored version that's making its way through a limited theatrical release right now is just 92-minutes long, dashing my hopes that I could retire that old home-recorded tape. In his Salon.com review of the new print of "The Wicker Man," Andrew O'Hehir paraphrases director Robin Hardy to assure us that most of the missing 10-minutes contain "irrelevant back-story scenes on the mainland" and "an extended conversation on the cultivation of apples."

"It fulfills my vision," the 83-year-old Hardy said in a press release quoted in O'Hehir's piece and just about every other article on this new, but still truncated version.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmn52RqcKzsdJoq6GdXay2pLfEq2SmmZ5iwamxjJysrWWdlsZursRmnaKmkaF6o8HTZquhnV2btq25jKKqZquknrmtecinmqiloKGytbE%3D