After all the glowing reviews, I was not as impressed as I expected to be. It was very attractively filmed and most of the acting was OK, but it felt rather less than the sum of its parts. Some of the physical special effects e.g. after the cliff drops, were very average to the point of being intrusive, as in 'ooh, look at all that cast latex'. When the old man was lying on the ground, my thoughts turned to various scenes from Life of Brian. When they wheeled out the bingo machine, I almost burst out laughing. Also, the portrayal of a culture and its belief system felt a bit like a game of 'lets's see how many quirky and inexplicable bits we can cram in'.
Other parts were well done, but...
The biggest single problem was that I never felt the slightest identification/worry/concern for any of the characters. That's one reason I think the 1973 Wicker Man is far superior.
I suppose it is meant to be a (dark) comedy. In that case, its comic elements are just not quite funny enough and/or a bit heavy handed. It still comes down to the lack of sympathy for the foreign party co-opted in as guests/victims. They're simply too boorishly wooden - OR - their boorish, wooden, qualities aren't well enough observed.
Otherwise it comes down to balance and context. Take the insemination scene. Thinking back nearly 50 years, I managed more back then with some weird chemicals inside me than I could dream of these days. But not with an audience groaning along. And not with my granny pushing on my arse to help. If you're going to put shit like that in a film then the audience needs to be clear that they can laugh along, if not, it's just a peculiar isolated incident.
