Season of the Witch Review

I hate the IRS

THE MOVIE: CRITIC'S TAKE

This is one of a million Nicholas Cage movies that he did for a paycheck. I was hoping that this movie would be good or at least decent for the most part. When the film first started and I heard the score I thought "Well this can't be all rubbish." Then the first five minutes was over and I thought "Yep not rubbish... this is a pile of crap!" Not any pile of crap though but the smelly, stupid, and wish you had spent the 90 minutes watching Showgirls again type bad. This movie sucks!

STORY

We start out with a priest in the 13th century killing three women. He believed that these women were witches and were doing terrible acts against god. He hung them over the bridge breaking their necks. The other servants of god refused to do the proper rituals that would keep them from returning. The reason being is due to complete laziness on their part. You can guess what happens next.

Get the fuck out my face!

That's right! The witch comes back to life and kills the priest. Fast forward to 100 years later and the crusades are taking effect. Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman are knights fighting for the church. After a few battles they witness something far more disturbing. The church is killing women and children during the crusades and these two men want no part of that. They choose to leave the war and make a living on their own. Thats when they come across a village plagued with a deadly disease.

The villagers find out who they are and captures them. During their capture they encounter a young woman being accused of being a witch and causing this plague of illness. For some reason Nicholas Cage's character decides to feel for this woman. He and Ron Perlman take up the Cardinal's offer to take the witch to the monastery so the super monks can perform the proper rituals to save the girl and most of Europe.

Come closer and I will bite!

Cage recruits a few more people to help him on his journey. Along the way he encounters some obstacles. Those obstacles are mostly do fault to the accused witch named Anna, played by Claire foy. She seems to be playing head games with the men that gets one of them killed. She escapes from their grasps and plays a short game of hide and seek. Naturally the men go crazy and some try to kill her despite knowing that her strength is above them. Luckily they reach the monastery in time to find out the dreaded truth that Anna isn't a witch but a woman possessed... literally.

It's not my fault my parents were ugly

The demon was tricking them so he can get his hands on the book of Solomon. It wants to free the evil contained within the book so the world can be consumed with darkness. After an uninventive fight they succeed in their journey and free the woman from the demon and save the world. Too bad they couldn't save most of their friends and the movie as a whole.

ACTING

What can I say here? The acting was well...not very good. Nicholas Cage was miscast for this role by a long shot. The only chemistry he had was with Ron Perlman. The others he seemed not to really care about. The best person in this film to watch is of course Ron Perlman. He made his role believable and had chemistry with everyone he had a scene with. You would think he should have been the lead but cage has the bigger name. If only cage cared it may have been decent... but I doubt it.

I should have been the star

SPECIAL EFFECTS

The effects here are nothing special. The wardrobe looked cheap and the surroundings looked more like studio backdrops than real nature. The demon looked horrible and it's not a complement. Some of the makeup was decent for the dead and dying and the score was good but that's about it. Try not to laugh when you hear the demon speak. It was cheesiness at it's best.

Herpes?

WRITING AND DIRECTING


The movie was written by Bragi F Schut. The dialog here is ok at best. The actors made the dialog better than what it was and that's saying something. This movie went by too quick for anyone to really care about the characters and that hurt the film. It was directed by Dominic Sena. This has to be the worst picture he ever directed. It's not the camera work that was bad but the budget he had to work with. He tried to film an epic on a low budget film. Big mistake on his part. His tactics made the film look worse and more of a high paid B movie.

THE END

Skip it. Run away from it. Try to forget about it. Do anything you can to avoid this garbage. It's a true waste of time. This has to be one of the worst films by Cage in his entire career. I hope he starts doing better movies soon because his career is floating in the toilet ready to be flushed.



STORY 3 out of 10
ACTING 2 out of 10
SPECIAL EFFECTS 4 out of 10
WRITING 2 out of 10
DIRECTING 3 out of 10

OVERALL 3 (DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME)