By Robert Mann.
Season of the Witch *
Neither a remake of the little known 1972 George A. Romero film Jack’s Wife – which was released on video in the states as Season of the Witch – or the much derided 1982 horror “sequel” Halloween III: Season of the Witch, 2011’s Season of the Witch has nonetheless become guaranteed to quickly disappear into obscurity like the former and has already developed a reputation that is, if anything, worse than that of the latter.
The latest in a long line of bad career choices by star Nicolas Cage – a very good actor who, for some bizarre reason, chooses to star in as many rubbish movies as good ones – Season of the Witch never looked like it was going to be any good from the outset but a series of bad omens have still managed to make it look even worse than it did back when the film was first announced. Postponed repeatedly and even undergone reshoots, this Dominic Sena directed action horror (which precisely it is supposed to be is unclear) is simply one of those films that was doomed from the very beginning and the bad omens have all proven to be right on the mark, the final product being a something that will be a blight on Nicolas Cage’s already heavily blighted (I’m looking at you Bangkok Dangerous and The Wicker Man) career and even the already less than illustrious career of director Dominic Sena (best known for 2000’s Gone in Sixty Seconds and 2001’s Swordfish although 2009’s Whiteout already suggested that what talent he may have once had has been lost).
Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) are two warriors fighting in the name of God in the Crusades. Fearless and brutal in their slaying of God’s “enemies” they swiftly develop a reputation for what they do but they find themselves conflicted when they are ordered to murder a town full of women and children. No longer believing that they are doing God’s work they desert their positions and go on the run, becoming wanted men in the process. With the plague showing up everywhere they go, however, they are unable to avoid passing through large towns for long and when they do they are caught and arrested. However, they are presented with an opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of God and the Church by Cardinal D’Ambroise (Christopher Lee). The Church believes the plague with which the land is being blighted to be a curse brought on by the “Black Witch”, a young girl (Claire Foy) who had been hanged for the crimes of witchcraft after confessing her crimes but who didn’t remain dead for long. Despite appearing to be just an innocent girl, she possesses tremendous powers and the Cardinal offers Behmen and Felson redemption if they perform the task to delivering the girl to the monks at a distant monastery where there is a book of rituals capable of destroying the witch’s powers. Setting out across dangerous terrain with a group of men – priest Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moore), swindler turned guide Hagamar (Stephen Graham), carriage driver Eckhart (Ulrich Thomsen) and altar boy in search of honour Kay (Robert Sheehan) – they find themselves tested to the limits as the witch uses their own personal weaknesses against each of them and the truth about who and what she really is proves to be far more horrifying than they ever imagined.
However bad you thought Season of the Witch might be is probably only scratching the surface. From the outset this is a film that has a very cheap look and feel and this is something that doesn’t let up, the CGI tending to be very shoddy, the effects passable at best and dire at worst, the green screen backdrops being mostly very poorly generated – although a few settings are decently realised and there is some attractive scenery in places – and the action sequences being far too brief, the violence quite brutal – the opening hanging scene in particular is quite brutal – but extremely dull. Some of the sword fights are just barely passable but a series of battles set during the Crusades are very poorly executed, lacking excitement and boasting cheap looking visuals, being little more than montage of clips from battles loosely threaded together for no purpose other than to establish the characters as warriors and show us why they choose to desert – something that it doesn’t do a very good job of. The direction here is quite dreadful and the writing is even worse. The poorly constructed plot relies too heavily on convenient developments rather than decent execution and just meanders from one poorly written scene to the next, throwing us right into the story at the start of the film with minimal development or establishment and offering little character development outside of the fact that the central characters seem guilty for killing innocents, something that is inadequately explored. The dialogue is atrocious and sounds completely inauthentic too and this gives the actors precisely nothing to work with. Nicolas Cage proves reasonably entertaining – even when he isn’t very good he always still manages to entertain – but this is easily his worst performance in a while and Ron Perlman doesn’t fare much better. Also, Christopher Lee is really slumming it here, sadly not bringing the level of class to the film that you might expect. With such awful dialogue it is little wonder that the actors come off so badly and the only cast member who really comes off in any way decently is Claire Foy who is pretty good as the Black Witch, portraying both a sense of innocence and a devilish look of evil across her face. It’s really saying something that the best thing in this film is an (unintentionally) funny scene where Ron Perlman head butts the devil – this is a film that fails to be scary as a horror and fails to be thrilling as an actioner. A mess of biblical proportions, there is little to redeem Season of the Witch. This is a very bad movie and it’s almost surprising that they even bothered giving it a cinema release at all.
