Films as bad as Season of the Witch just don’t happen by accident. It’s not like you can coincidentally assemble two actors known for appearing in subpar material, a script as stodgy and shallow as Hugh Hefner, and a director (Dominic Sena) who delivers mediocre films without fail. You have to be aiming for that. You need to be shooting for low B-movie status from the get go. There’s no other explanation for Season of the Witch other than a few people looking to make some money quickly and easily while putting forth as little effort as possible. Season of the Witch is unapologetically horrible and it passes from “so bad it’s good” in the first 7 minutes once you realize there’s 88 minutes left of Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman stumbling through a script attempting to balance Dark Ages speech patterns, levity, and a story about supernatural superstitions.
Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Perlman), two hotshot crusaders with a sudden awakening of conscience, rebel against their droning church supervisors and abandon their troops. The sense of freedom ends abruptly when they’re captured by ecclesiastic forces and are coerced into escorting a captured witch (Claire Foy) to her trial, under the two ex-crusader’s demand that it be a fair one. The cross-country journey has its share of dangers and battles during its otherwise boring duration, whose silence is broken by manly talk and the girl’s plying questions into each man’s mind, the rewards of which become evident in the film’s final moment of truth.
Between Sena, Cage and Perlman, the first two are to blame far more than the latter. Sena’s direction is sloppy in its staging of the brief action sequences and utterly unwatchable when the characters sit around talking. Of the talkers, Cage’s lines land with the emotionless thuds that have become all too common of the vast majority of recent films; the style works when the action sequences are well plotted and he’s playing it off tongue-in-cheek, but when he’s supposed to be gallantly sincere it never works. Perlman on the other hand has become well-practiced in finding the right approach to straddle the line between playing it straight and hamming it up.
The groan-inducing dialogue starts early on and never stops, whether it’s the makeshift banter of Behmen and Felson just before charging into the opening montage of Crusade battles or the late night chatter around the fire with points painfully highlighted leaving little doubt that it’ll prove important later on. Writer Bragi F. Schut seems ignorant to the concept of subtlety and just lays everything on thick so the audience never has to think. Consequently, character development is non-existent and the two machismo ex-knights experience no growth beyond the original shift in opinion about the church that stuffs the remainder of the film down our throats.
The film’s visuals are nothing special for the first three quarters, and once the effects do kick in, you realize why Sena held off for so long: they’re terrible. Season of the Witch is a testament to the idea that films with low special effects budgets are better using rubber suits than computers to get the desired look. It’s especially true here, because big bad monsters in rubber masks would at least have been charmingly low-key and told the audience that everyone involved knew they were making a lousy piece of dreck.
There’s very little compelling anyone to spending the money to buy a copy of this film. Had Sena realized the worthless product he was creating, he might have had the foresight to take the film into a parody of itself. Either he had too much faith in his film or he had no idea what he was doing (which seems clear more often than not), but whatever the reason, Season of the Witch shouldn’t be watched by anyone.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The combo pack includes a Blu-ray and digital copy, with extras on the disc comprised of an alternate ending, deleted scenes, and two featurettes about character effects and the creation of the crusade sequences.
"Season of the Witch" is on sale June 28, 2011 and is rated PG13. Drama, Fantasy. Directed by Dominic Sena. Written by Bragi F. Schut. Starring Claire Foy, Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman.
