By It’s hard to watch a bad movie, but it’s even harder to watch a movie that seems to make every wrong decision in the book despite the fact that if it hadn’t there could have been a rather interesting film in it. If Season of the Witch was simply a bad film I would argue that it bordered on becoming good for its level of ridiculousness, but it isn’t just a bad film, it is a bad film that makes terrible choices in almost every way possible.
At points Season of the Witch has glimmers of some sort of tongue-in-cheek masterpiece, but by the end of the movie you realize that instead of moving their tongue into their cheek the filmmakers actually choked on their own tongues and died. In the absence of anyone above the age of 10, any children on the set took over and completed the film. This is the only way I can explain what I’m about to review.
It's hard to watch a bad movie, but it's even harder to watch a movie that seems to make every wrong decision in the book despite the fact that if it hadn't there could have been a rather interesting film in it. If Season of the Witch was simply a bad film I would argue that it bordered on becoming good for its level of ridiculousness, but it isn't just a bad film, it is a bad film that makes terrible choices in almost every way possible.
At points Season of the Witch has glimmers of some sort of tongue-in-cheek masterpiece, but by the end of the movie you realize that instead of moving their tongue into their cheek the filmmakers actually choked on their own tongues and died. In the absence of anyone above the age of 10, any children on the set took over and completed the film. This is the only way I can explain what I'm about to review.{{page_break}}
Season of the Witch starts off with what could be a rather interesting premise. Two deserters from the crusades, Behmen (Nicholas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) find themselves tasked with the job of transporting a suspected witch to a monastery where the last copy of a book that lets you kill witches is located. They're accompanied by a guide, a monk and an alter boy hoping to be a knight. There are plenty of plotholes just in these two sentences (why not bring the book to the town?), but the idea of it could have been sound.
If the movie had progressed as a sort of medieval psychological film, with the group of men slowly breaking down about the strange things occurring and the audience never knowing if the girl was actually a witch or not, the movie could have been thrilling as all hell. However, the filmmakers destroy the hope for this in the opening scene by establishing that witches are real and then proceeding throughout the film to entirely destroy any doubt whatsoever that the girl being transported is not a witch. Because of this fact, the movie must have a different twist ending (because what's a movie these days without a twist!?) and it has one of the worst. If, for some unknown reason, you cared at all about any of the characters by the time the twist rolls around, you sure as hell won't once it happens.
The only shining light in the movie — and by shining light I mean a dull flashlight at best — is Ron Perlman and Cage. The former delivers the only lines that seem to understand what a ridiculous movie this is and the latter is just ridiculous. It's like watching two people who understand that they're starring in a B-grade movie perform in a film everyone else is taking really seriously. No, it's not just like that, it is that. Sadly, their desperate struggles to make something interesting out of nothing do not pan out, and any campiness that they bring to the film is crushed under the movie's inability to do anything right and the directors inability to not use every cliche you've ever seen.
What is even more perplexing about Season of the Witch is who it is actually supposed to appeal to. It's obviously been dumped in the movie compost pile that is January, but even then one wonders why it was ever made. It's too Hollywood for a nerd audience, too fantasy for a general audience and too bad for anyone else. Clearly this is one of those movies that will make it's money off of pre-sales and foreign box office, but I just can't understand why it was made at all.
4.10 – Terrible. (4s are terrible in many ways. They’re bad enough that even diehard fans of its genre, director, or cast still probably won’t enjoy it at all, and everyone else will leave the theater incredibly angry. Not only are these not worth renting, you should even change the TV channel on them in the future.)
Xander Markham:
Overall Score: 4.00 — It's difficult to imagine how spending an hour and a half in Beelzebub's company could be significantly more painful than this, and certainly nowhere near so monotonous. You can read his full review here!
