#61: Season of the Witch (2011)

My name is Ed and my self-inflicted curse is to watch every Nicolas Cage film until I have won the National Lottery (using numbers based on each film), or have run out of Nicolas Cage films, or have bludgeoned myself to death in a fit of despair.

“Do you have any regrets, grampa Ed?” asks my space grandchild as I lie dying from a space disease, incurable even with all the medical resources my huge Nicolas Cage film-watching derived fortune can buy. I look into all 3 of her space eyes, and whisper: “Season of the Witch”.

There have always been bad Nicolas Cage movies: the list of what I’ve got left to watch includes several that only avoided the ‘straight-to-DVD’ label on a technicality by being shown once in a cinema in Idaho or something. But it’s not the bad ones that get you, it’s the boring ones.

There really is barely anything to say about Season of the Witch, because barely anything happens in it. Interminably. Nic Cage and Ron Perlman fight in the Crusades until they suddenly realise that they’ve just spent the last ten years butchering women and children for no particularly good reason and fuck off. Then Christopher Lee (near unrecognisable under prosthetic plague buboes and a questionable accent) tells them he’ll dob them in if they don’t take a witch to a monastery. So they do that and some other people including that young Irish lad from off of Misfits come with them because that’s what it says in the script.

Something was clearly very wrong with the production of this movie — reshoots were done without the involvement of the original director (Dominic Sena, of Gone in 60 Seconds ‘fame’). Instead King Mediocrity Brett Ratner stepped in to wave people around in front of green screens in a desperate, failed, attempt to make this watchable. Fun fact: Brett Ratner once published his own magazine called RATMAG. “What makes Brett Ratner tick? Pick up RATMAG and find out.”

But the real giveaway that something was very severely up is the accents. The film is set in Eastern Europe: the standard approach would be to get everyone to do that sort-of British accent that indicates that something generically historical is happening. Instead the actors appear to have been allowed to do whatever the hell they felt like that day. Cage could, somewhat generously, be said to be mid-Atlantic, Perlman is perhaps floating a few miles off the coast. Meanwhile, actually British actors Claire Foy, Stephen Graham and Christopher Lee have each decided to affect a different American accent. One can only assume that they were under orders to try and follow the lead of whatever the hell Cage was attempting to do.

Anyway, off they go across the country with a witch in a box, getting into largely dismal scrapes including an obligatory sequence where they have to push the lady in the box over a rickety bridge. Why is there alway a rickety bridge in this kind of film? Who made them, and why don’t they look after them properly? You lads need to sort out your infrastructure. But at least something happens in the bridge scene: the film’s big mistake is to keep flashy, expensive action sequences sparse and hope that it can wing it on a spooky atmosphere. And while the Eastern European location footage looks alright, the performances are more Monty Python and the Holy Grail than The Seventh Seal.

Actually, that’s a really unfair thing to say. I shouldn’t airily dismiss Monty Python and the Holy Grail like that, comedy’s difficult. And the closest this gets to being watchable is a few almost passable bits of business between Cage and Perlman, e.g. “I’ve seen girls destroy men without lifting a finger.” “How many times do we have to go over this? It was in FRANCE!” But the actors seem so disinterested in it that in that it isn’t a hope — both comedy and horror are rendered into dreary grey soup.

The Hound from Game Of Thrones is in it very briefly if you’re trying to watch all the stuff with The Hound from Game Of Thrones in it. It’s one of 301 films listed on IMDB as containing substantial amounts of Latin dialogue. I like toasted cheese sandwiches. Did they really have dudes wandering around battlefields shouting about the glory of God during the middle of the brutal fighting? Seems a bit impractical. Put a spoonful of baked beans inside a toasted cheese sandwich for a fun bean surprise.

There isn’t even a witch in this film, as it turns out. It was a computer-animated demon all along! If you’ve been affected by a computer animated demon, the Kilroy team would like to hear from y

THE NUMBERS

3 — The plague brought by the witch has been on the land for ‘three years and a season’.

6 — The monastery that they need to get to for whatever reason is 6 days travel from wherever they start from is. Sure.

10 — Ron Perlman signed up to fight for the Crusades for 10 years because he wanted God to forgive him for banging too many ladies. That is a real background detail in this film.

32 — We first see Nic Cage and Ron Perlman fighting a Crusade at the Gulf of Edremit in 1332. Apparently this is historically inaccurate — the closest real battle was in 1334, was naval and wasn’t really a crusade. Somewhere on this long internet web page is someone getting very mad about how just dubious the history behind this film is.

40 — The monastery that they need to get to for whatever reason is 400 leagues from wherever they start from is. Fine. Actually, it’s not fine. 400 leagues is about 1,400 miles. That’s about 230 miles a day. By horse. Pulling a lady in a box. Nah, mate.

44 — The bulk of the ‘action’ takes place in 1344. You can tell I’m not really overthinking these, can’t you? 1344 was a leap year.

THE RESULT

Sorry space grandchild, I guess my unborn space family will have to live in the space bin because I have still not won the stupid lottery.

Oh well. At least I still have my pride.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Drive

Angry

3D

(Except not in 3D because I’m not a 3D TV owning millionaire. Yet.)