If Wickerheads are apprehensive about LaBute's remake, starring Nicolas Cage, of the extraordinary 1973 British thriller The Wicker Man, which opens tomorrow, students of comparative religion (well, this one at least) are ready to reach for our machetes.

The movie stars Edward Woodward as Sgt. Howie, a policeman who travels to the remote island of Summerisle off the Scottish coast to find a missing 12-year-old girl after receiving a letter from her mother. He arrives as the villagers are preparing for the Beltane festival, the Celtic May Day celebration.

The place is ravishing: We're treated to Arcadian scenes of blossoming trees, rolling meadows, happy children at play, and scores of pretty men and women doing a lot of public cavorting and bucolic frolicking.

A devout Christian, and generally uptight, Howie becomes more and more unhinged the more he finds out about the villagers' lack of ("real") religion. Lord Summerisle says that under his grandfather, the villagers forsook Christianity and returned to their ancestral, Druidic belief system, which celebrates nature - especially as it erupts through human sexuality - as the central reality.

The clash between these two antithetical systems couldn't be more stark, and it highlights the central question that has haunted Western culture for two centuries: What now, that God has been decreed dead? Are all religions "false," or can we pick and choose which ones we feel like following? Is religion a doorway to Truth (and Beauty and Goodness), or is it a social tool we use to fulfill human needs?

Lord Summerisle reveals that his granddad, a Victorian scientist (natch), gave the islanders their neo-pagan religion "to rouse the people from their apathy," so they'd become better workers in the apple orchards. In a terrific bit of irony, Wicker sugests that far from offering personal salvation - New Agers take note - the islanders' neo-pagan religion actually served to unify the community and harness its energy for labor.

The Christian God "is dead," Lord Summerisle says, because he failed to remain relevant. "He can't complain. He had his chance, and in the modern parlance, he blew it."

But just as hippies had their obverse image in Charles Manson, Howie discovers the island pagans aren't all about lusty peaches and cream. They have their own dark side: Their religion involves human sacrifice.

If even the most granola-crunchy, all-you-need-is-love (and nude frolicking) religion must resort to violence, what does that say about other, more obviously blood-soaked religions?

In a 1996 interview, Shaffer, who died in 2001, said he conceived of the film as a way to explore the nature of sacrifice, one of the most debated concepts in the study of religion - and, according to recent theories, an inescapable part of all Western religions. Sacrifice allows a religious community to express violence without harming its own unity - by directing it against a scapegoat.

Few films other than The Wicker Man have succeeded so well in showing both sides of religion, while packing in a serious wallop of thriller thrills, horror chills, and... Britt Ekland.

This is cache, read story here