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Season of the Witch

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  • Season of the Witch

    Attended a late afternoon showing of the movie Season of the Witch at the Dole Theatre.

    It is about a couple of knights who fought during the crusade who have to escort a group of people traveling from their town to a monastry so that a woman who is accused of being a witch can be judged by the monks. The townspeople also accuses the woman of causing the plague to their town.

    The movie has some plot holes one of which was that the travel was going to take 6 days but they showed the travel across 2 nights.

  • #2
    Re: Season of the Witch

    Season of the Witch
    Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman.

    We were all set to see Country Strong, but there was a problem with the projector. Theater management gave us re-entry vouchers for our next visit and told us we were free to check out any other film in the theater. Somehow, Season of the Witch seemed like our best option even though I’d seen the trailer twice and KNEW it was going to be awful.

    And awful it is. Almost everything about this Medieval adventure story looks and feels cheap except for the two lead actors who seem from the beginning to be too good for the material and fully aware of it. I wouldn’t say they play the scenes in any kind of slumming or condescending way, but in a film that sort of calls for excessive acting, they seem to hold back just a little, as if this were the night game versus a bad team and they’ve got a day game versus a good team in just a few hours.

    Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman play sword-wielding Crusaders, knights in service to the church who grimly but competently kill scores of men in battle without breaking much of a sweat. When Perlman says to Cage, “I’ll take the three hundred on the left; you take the three hundred on the right,” it sounds cocky, but in a very well-edited sequence of battles fronting different landscapes in different kinds of weather, we can see that the arrogance is well earned.

    And that’s pretty much the highlight of the movie.

    After years of slaughter and pillaging, the main characters are stung by a bit of a guilty conscience, and they decide that while they will continue to serve God, they no longer serve the church. They wander homeward, one guesses, until they come across a town that has been hit by the plague. The resident Cardinal (Christopher Lee) is sure the plague has been brought by the Black Witch, and begs the two knights to take the witch to some monastery six hundred leagues away, where she might be exorcised or given a fair trial or something.

    The journey from town to monastery is a dismal onslaught of dimly-lit action sequences, melodramatic dialogue, and spooky noises from a Halloween haunted-house special-effects CD. It’s pretty dull.

    Leaving the theater, I was pretty sure this was one of the worst movies I’d seen in quite some time, but I gave it a night and a day to seep its way into my good graces, and I decided that taken seriously, this movie just sucks. However, taking seriously a movie that doesn’t want or expect to be taken seriously makes it impossible to appreciate, so I wondered if taken tongue-in-cheek, Season of the Witch could work, like a film made intentionally to be played on Joe Bob Briggs’s Drive-In Theater.

    There just isn’t enough there, ‘though some of the cheesy dialogue would certainly be entertaining fare at two in the morning if enough Bagel Bites were present. I might actually enjoy most of this movie’s badness, if it were not separated by so much dullness. And I do like the interplay between Cage and Perlman. For these reasons, I’m going to give it a little bit of a bump in score.

    3/10 (IMDb rating)
    31/100 (Criticker rating)
    Last edited by scrivener; January 12, 2011, 06:08 PM.
    But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
    GrouchyTeacher.com

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