robin hardy the wicker man the final cut

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. 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. 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. The 102-minute cut was also the only one that really made any sense at all. There were three different edits of 'The Wicker Man' floating around the home video market in the 1980s, but 102-minute version, the longest, was by far the most coveted, mostly because it was the only one where everything set up in the film's prologue is tied up neatly in its conclusion, giving 'The Wicker Man' a quirky kind of symmetry. The news sounded too good to be true, because we'd been down this road before with 'The Wicker Man,' a film whose video releases are just as arcane and complicated as the 1973 pagan horror film itself. Upon seeing it, director Robin Hardy anointed it as 'the final cut.' A digital restoration was going to hit the big city art houses in September and October, with a gorgeous Blu-ray release to follow. A 35-minute 'release print' had been discovered in the Harvard Film Archive of all places.

'Restored Cut of 'The Wicker Man' is Coming to the U.S.!' so much hypertext informed me.

The news was posted to my Facebook wall through links to articles in Badass Digest and.

Robin hardy the wicker man the final cut