Season of the Witch

Another day, another Nicolas Cage movie.

It’s the sea­son of the witch, appar­ently. But these days if a new sea­son guar­an­tees any­thing, it’s that when one Nico­las Cage movie leaves the cin­ema, another will be along shortly to take its place.

He does seem to be rack­ing up huge piles of cel­lu­loid, some if it good, a lot of it bad. Prob­a­bly due in no small part to his out­ra­geous spend­ing sprees, and a huge unpaid tax bill.

I feel like I’ve pushed the boat out if I buy a cou­ple of blu-rays. But Cage? A cou­ple of medieval cas­tles, an island, or a dinosaur skull (yes, really) on the debit card are pretty run of the mill. I’m not sure, but there’s also prob­a­bly bulk orders of swan’s eggs and otter’s noses, winched in by gold plated helicopters.

That’s a lot of money. Which means mak­ing a lot of movies to pay for it all. The lat­est is this load of old non­sense about witches.

Cage plays a 14th cen­tury knight of the realm hap­pily chop­ping his way through the Cru­sades, along with his bezzy friend, Ron Perl­man. We can tell he’s happy because of a mon­tage of bat­tles across numer­ous years which show him and Ron killing non-believers on the bat­tle­field, with big grins on their faces. They make bets about how many they’re going to slaugh­ter, and then usu­ally fin­ish up in the pub with a whore on one hand, and a tankard of ale in the other.

Christo­pher Lee calls a priest a wanker.

Life is pretty sweet. Until one day, Cage has a cri­sis of con­science when he sees women and chil­dren being killed in a cas­tle. I found this bit rather odd. Y’see, the film tells us that for years, Cage and Perl­man have been fight­ing these wars. And yet dur­ing all this time they’ve never seen one inno­cent child or woman being killed in the name of their cause?

What did they do when they got to storm the final cas­tle strong­hold at all those other bat­tles they fought in? Did they stop short of the room with women and chil­dren in, and say, “Right, that’s us done! Me and Ron are off to the pub! The rest of you guys carry on!”

All their knightly bud­dies say, “Hey, hang on a minute! We’ve got to kill all the women and chil­dren whilst you go and get wasted in the pub? How’s that fuck­ing fair?”

Later on in the pub, when Nic and Ron have downed a few bevvies, the rest of the lads arrive, cov­ered in the blood of women and chil­dren. And then they start talk­ing about all the women and chil­dren they’ve just killed.

You’d think Cage and Perl­man might realise that these Cru­sades aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and that maybe, just maybe, some­body, some­where, is killing a lot of women and children.

But no, not until they’ve been scrap­ping on the bat­tle­field, and storm­ing cas­tles for a good five years, does the penny drop.

HOW INCREDIBLY STUPID ARE THESE GUYS?

Any­way, it’s a small point. I don’t want to go on about it. This is a film about witches. Or at least, one witch. Or, poten­tial witch.

Because when Cage and Perl­man return to Eng­land, they get tasked (along with a bunch of other guys) by an almost unrecog­nis­able Christo­pher Lee to ferry a witch across the hills to a monastery to cure her witch­i­ness, and thus sort out a plague that’s, y’know, plagu­ing the land.

I can’t think of an ironic cap­tion for this photo.

Most mod­ern block­busters hit with you an absolute onslaught of set pieces, with lit­tle breath­ing space inbe­tween. By con­trast, Sea­son of the Witch has a some­what mea­sured (some might say slow) pace, which sort of sur­prised me. How­ever, by the time they get to the monastery, I realised that there’d actu­ally been very lit­tle in the way of inter­est­ing action.

The one area where the film could have been really inter­est­ing — the men won­der­ing whether the witch really is a witch, and going mad with para­noia — is made pretty much ten­sion free by a poor script.

For a while, the film’s one sav­ing grace is a pleas­ing lack of CGI. The FX have a real world feel to them, made most appar­ent in the open­ing witch hang­ing scene, which is shot with a kind of Raimi–esqe Evil Dead 2 phys­i­cal­ity. It’s pretty good.

It’s all sent to hell though in an end­ing cram packed with awful CGI, full of fake look­ing fire, and car­toon­ish demons. It’s like the bad old days of The Scor­pion King.

Y’know, when I’m sit­ting on a hill­top, care­lessly toss­ing dan­de­lions into the late evening breeze, and watch­ing the sun set on another day, I find myself rumi­nat­ing on stuff that would be really cool if they put it in a movie. Like, oh I don’t know, zom­bie monks?

You might say to your­self, “How can a film with zom­bie monks pos­si­bly fail?” Sea­son of the Witch is ample proof that they can.