Season Of The Witch - DVD Review

'Cage and assorted grunts, priests and cohorts must get from place A to place B. There is a big scary forest in their way. One or more of the group might be untrustworthy. And that's not counting the witch.'

In this episode of Nicholas Cage Needs To Pay His Tax Bill And So Continues To Star In A Wide Variety Of Bizarre Films With Highly Dubious Production Values, young Nicholas finds himself taking on the role of a deserting member of the crusades who, despite intentions to the contrary, enters into the service of the church once again as he promises to take a supposed witch (Claire Foy) from one place to another.

As Cage tax-bill-paying exercises go Season Of The Witch starts off rather well. A schlocky horror opening has ideas of faith and mysticism and exorcism and presumably many other 'isms' which were hidden behind the medieval witch dunking and subsequent priest-bothering reawakening. After Cage and co-star Ron Perlman have dispatched of a few extras (three or so, judging by the extremely poor CGI of the supposedly 'large battle' scenes) a standard journey narrative is set up. Cage and assorted grunts, priests and cohorts must get from place A to place B. There is a big scary forest in their way. One or more of the group might be untrustworthy. And that's not counting the witch.

We've been here before but that doesn't mean there's nothing to see. Cage is decent. Perlman should have gone on to play the gruff charmer on a more regular basis after the Hellboy films (perhaps Hannibal in The A-Team?) and here he adds both the comic relief and the sage old friend versions of support. Director Dominic Sena does a fairly decent job of manipulating your opinion as to whether Foy's character is a witch or not although the fact that 'something' is up is never really in doubt although the final reveal of what exactly 'it' is, is a bit of a cop out.

The problem with the film is that it never really provides enough of anything interesting. The opening five minutes promises horror but there's precious little of that (the 15-rating is hardly deserved). The introduction to Behmen and Felson (Cage and Perlman) promises action but that's largely absent for the rest of the film too. The group dynamic suggests some intrigue but despite the best attempts of Sena to play around with Debelzaq (Stephen Campbell Moore), Hagamar (Stephen Graham) and Eckhart (Ulrich Thomsen) nothing really comes of it. The final twenty minutes quite obviously try to make up for all of these failings but despite the welcome sight of Perlman headbutting a demon it still fails to produce anything really genuinely exciting. The final scenes sum the film up. They're meant to be full of reverent emotion but they're as flat as a medieval map and about as dynamic as a cup full of stale holy water. Inadequate, although there are far worse Cage films available.

Season Of The Witch is released in the UK on Blu-ray and DVD on 27th June 2011.

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'On the Nicolas Cage crazy scale this is about a 2' - Slacker Cinema, 2/5