Season of the Witch – so bad it’s (almost) good

‘Season of the Witch’ – put simply – Lord of the Rings, it is not.  It is a (modern) Nicholas Cage film.  And, as any die-hard fan (and I’m including myself in that bracket) will know, his modern films don’t really rate as highly as those he made in his heyday.

Nicholas Cage plays... well, Nicholas Cage in a suit of armour.  His natural charm and screen presence do their best to shine through as this time out he and Ron Perlman are knights returning from hacking a few dozen hordes of computer-generated barbarians to death in the Crusades.  However, life in yesteryear was never destined to run smoothly and the Black Death only goes and kicks off, leaving thousands dead in whichever ‘England-like’ land this film is supposed to be set in.

Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that a plague of epic proportions has nothing to do with a couple of battle-hardened knights.  That’s until the king tells them that they’re charged with the task of escorting a witch across the land to be burned.  Apparently, it’s all her fault or something and she totally needs to be roasted in order to save the universe.  Or something.

Anyway, so begins the quest – the not-at-all-like-Lord-of-the-Rings quest.  Nic, Ron and a few meaningless codpiece-wearing extras all trudge wearily across one grassy hill after the next, all the while defending against one computer-generated threat after the next.  Um, and that’s about it.  It’s hardly ‘epic’ – it’s pretty much by the numbers.  In the scale of things it’s not that bad, but then it’s not that good either.  You can dip in and out of this film at your leisure and you won’t really miss a thing.

‘Season of the Witch’ is one of those films which has only one fault: its total and utter ‘averageness.’ You’ll have seen it all before and, despite Nic and Ron doing their very best to raise it above being just another B-movie, they really can’t do it with this script, plot or (not so) special effects.

If you really love Nic or Ron that much, you may get something out of it.  Otherwise, don’t really bother.  And don’t get me started on Nic’s haircut.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back