"Something bad is about to happen. I can feel it," intones traffic cop Nic Cage as his search for a missing girl reaches crisis point.
Savvy cinema-goers might come to the same conclusion ahead of screenings of this American remake of the Scottish-set 1973 spine-tingling classic.
Gone are the dark religious themes and sinister eroticism that ensured Robin Hardy's black treatise on pagan ritual a place in the hallowed pantheon of British horror.
In comes Nic Cage on a boneshaker beetling around an island run by a deranged wing of the Women's Institute decked out in Laura Ashley's Victorian collection.
Yes, it's another classic case of Tinseltown picking on a film that can't really be improved upon, filleting out the themes that made it interesting and putting out the casting call to poor old Nic.
He plays a Californian traffic cop, traumatised by an accident in which a young girl and her mother died, who gets a mysterious letter - in gothic script - from an old flame.
She describes how her daughter has gone missing...
and pleads with Cage to journey to the remote Summerisle off the bleak coast of Washington State.
On arrival he could be forgiven for thinking he's landed on a chillier version of the Isle of Lesbos - the place is run entirely by women with the few men present being mute travesties of the gender. Andrea Dworkin would snap up a time-share there.
Horror needs to feed off reality... and there's not a hint of that here with dumb dialogue delivered by Nic to uncooperative fillies straight off the pages of Spare Rib.
Apart from Stepford Widows in period costume, Nic also runs into a colony of killer bees, a couple of creepy blind twins and - in possibly the movie's finest moment - dresses up as Bungle from Rainbow to infiltrate a heathen procession.
The central premise of the original - Edward Woodward's virginal cop grappling with diabolic village elder Christopher Lee while Britt Ekland frolics naked - has been entirely dispensed with.
What we have here is the sort of horror movie you might take seriously... if your head was full of straw.
Tim Evans
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