Sunday, September 04, 2011

Season of the Witch

1.5 out of 5

Despite a lot of bad reviews, I approached this Nicolas Cage vehicle with an open mind, because it's a horror movie and I have previously come to the defense of his similarly maligned The Wicker Man. The plot finds Cage and Ron Perlman, a pair of medieval swashbucklers, charged with transporting an alleged witchy woman on a long journey to meet her judgement. This is preceded by a series of battle sequences that show Cage and Perlman tiring of their bloody adventures while engaging in supremely hammy dialogue about things like who's buying the drinks tonight. The movie fails to do much with its villain; a sequence in which Cage's entourage tries to get her carriage across a decaying bridge is more entertaining than anything she conjures up. There's also a twist in play here, and it's not uninteresting, but it is the most blatantly obvious twist I've ever seen. I'm not one of those types who's always bragging that I had it figured out in the first 30 minutes, but I pretty much saw it coming right away. The movie climaxes with an action-filled throwdown, but the best I can say for all of this is that some of the scenes look terrific in 1080p. Note that the movie has no connection to George Romero's 1976 movie of the same name or Halloween III: Season of the Witch from 1982.

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