AFTER months of speculation and debate, the controversial remake of The Wicker Man opens in cinemas today - and it will confirm the worst fears of many fans of the original.

There have been no press shows - which usually means a film is so big the distributors regard reviews as unnecessary or so bad that they know the reviews would be terrible.

Such has been the web of secrecy and intrigue that there was not even a rating on the Internet Movie Database website yesterday, though audiences from test screenings are usually keen to share their views on-line. The reason is now clear, and critics are likely to have a field day at the expense of Nicolas Cage, who transforms the central character from upright Scottish police sergeant into a California highway patrolman, and with the film's obsession with bees.

The original 1973 film is right up there with Braveheart as one of the most talkedabout and most fondly regarded films ever shot in Scotland. Edward Woodward flies to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a local girl, finds a strange pagan community and is shocked by their loose moral and sexual standards.

It was a unique and unnerving combination of folk musical and horror film. The new film is just plain silly.

Alarm bells started ringing with the news that the story was being relocated in the US. The original version's director Robin Hardy and star Christopher Lee both expressed serious reservations.

Lee, who regards The Wicker Man as his best film, said: "I don't believe that you can remake The Wicker Man in alien surroundings. To remake The Wicker Man you would have to go back to Scotland."

His character has undergone an even more dramatic change than Woodward's. He has changed sex. Ellen Burstyn heads a matriarchal island community, set up by descendants of the Salem witches.

Woodward's virginity was an important plot element in the original, a neat spin on the idea of sacrificing virgins. But writer-director Neil LaBute thought a middle-aged virgin, who was also a regular guy, was implausible in America today.

Cage's character, Edward Malus, goes to the remote island at the request of an exlover to investigate the apparent disappearance of her daughter Rowan Woodward (get it? ). The island is ruled by women, with men reduced to the level of silent labourers, which is not so much sinister as unintentionally comic.

But the film's biggest problem is with the bees which the islanders keep for honey and which chase Cage through the countryside in a scene worthy of Monty Python. LaBute makes continual, heavy-handed analogies between humans and bees. Cage's character fantasises about a police colleague turning into a swarm of bees and in another scene he appears to see a woman with a beard made of bees.

Robin Hardy went to a public preview in London last night. He said: "I preferred my own version and I don't think this added very much to what we originally did."

He said he thought this was a more straightforward film, lacking many of the elements and the subtlety of the original.

Hardy and scriptwriter Anthony Shaffer mixed folklore and music from different parts of the British Isles, but chose Scotland as the setting because of its fundamentalist religious sects and remote communities.

The film combined locations in Galloway with footage from Culzean Castle in Ayrshire and Plockton in Wester Ross, along with striking aerial shots of Skye. The major cinema chains did not want it when it was completed in 1973 and a cutdown version finally went out the following year as the bottom half of a double bill with Don't Look Now.

Over the years, however, The Wicker Man acquired a cult following. There have been articles and books, a Wicker Man festival and even an academic conference.