Season of the Witch (2011)

Yeah.  So that Nicolas Cage guy...

...he's certainly giving me plenty to work with lately.

Anyway, Season of the Witch (no relation to that Halloween movie) begins by establishing its main characters with a little light banter. This way, we can see them as just a couple of average guys...who just happen to be fighting in the Crusades. And killing people.



No, not these two Crusaders.



These two.

After a few years of carousing drunkenly by night and kicking ass by day, these fellas (Nic Cage and Ron Perlman) figure they've had enough and rebel against "the Man" by roaming the earth like Caine from Kung Fu.

Nic Cage doesn't like to be called "grasshopper"

And of course, straight from a D&D player's cliche-ridden playbook, these two wandering warriors are quickly grouped-up with a Preist and another Knight to take on an important quest that they are reluctant to take up.



Now, where...




...have I seen this...



...before?

From the almost intentionally bad special effects to the terrible acting, the cards are stacked against this one. Maybe if they would have at least had a decent story to tell (they don't, and they seem to know it too) or if they could just decide what they wanted to do with the film. Sadly, this particular version of the cookie-cutter "adventurer" storyline ends up as a bit less Lord of the Rings and a bit more Uwe Boll.


Not so much this.



More like this.

So while our brave band of strapping lads are travelling with the witch to some important place (the quest they're given), there's a serious lull in the action. This is the point where the movie takes the opportunity to throw in some business about the politics of the church's view of the witches as scapegoats for any pertinent evil.


At least they don't do THAT anymore.

We may start to wonder if some lesson about fundamentalism might be buried in there, but the film will eventually reveal this depth to be like most of the scares that it tries to generate - the cinematic equivalent of a "head fake".

You know what I mean: those moments in a horror movie when the music either drops out completely (usually so that you can be blasted out of your seat when the "reveal" comes) and the big scare is only some fake switcheroo nonsense, like a cat that's scratching at the front door instead of the axe-weilding murderer you were expecting.

But all this build-up is halted when some witchcraft stuff goes down. Nothing interesting, mind you. Just enough to build a little mystery.

Maybe I'm a witch. Maybe not. You won't care either way.

The movie takes every opportunity to put our heroes into perilous situations ("oh no! a dangerous rope-bridge!", "uh oh! we've come upon some wolves that wish to eat upon our flesh!!"). The problem is, we don't really care what happens to the characters. The only thing that builds any suspense is waiting for the film to decide who the bad guy is. See, it tries to build its earlier teeter-tottering about fundamentalism into some audience anxiety about whether the girl is really a witch or if it's actually the priest who is the "evil one".

I won't ruin the surprise ending. What's far more important here is that one of the characters gets to deliver the Exorcism equivalent of Jaws' "we're gonna need a bigger boat" line. At least the final battle with the big, bad demon follows mercifully soon after that.


I'll swallow your....oh wait, wrong movie.

Thankfully, the audience is vindicated in the final moments of the movie when the filmmakers seemingly recognize the half-assed cheese they've created.  We finally know for sure that we weren't supposed to take this movie any more seriously than Mega Shark vs. Octopus.


Well, maybe just a little more seriously...

Just before the screen dims to black, we get the penultimately cheesy lines: "They don't know the darkness that almost was. The sacrifices made. The heroes lost. I will tell their story. I was there. I know."

How's that for some ambiguous nonsense? 

It's just too bad that the filmmakers couldn't have decided from the start that the tone of the film should be.  For once, maybe Uwe Boll would have made a better movie than what we ended up with. At least he puts all his eggs in one basket.