**
DVD release
We first meet our leading man,
Behmen (Nicholas Cage) and his best friend, Felson (Ron Perlman), running down
a sandy dune during the Crusades. Driven by the word of God, they roam the land
with their army, killing and plundering until one day they invade a castle
filled entirely with women and children. Leaving the army in disgust, Behmen
and Felson try to lie low, only to discover that the land has been ravaged by
plague (cue some gory close-ups of boils, pustules and rotting corpses). After
being captured, they are commissioned to take the Black Witch (Claire Foy),
accused of bringing the plague to the land, to a distant abbey where the monks
will cleanse her using an ancient book. Behmen and Felson set off, accompanied
by a priest, an altar boy, another soldier and a general miscreant, with the
witch locked up in a cage. Between point A and point B, however, lay many
perils…
‘Season of the Witch’ is really
stupid and generally unfulfilling. It’s mildly entertaining whilst you’re
watching it, but is instantly forgettable. It irritated me because it could
have been a much deeper film then it ended up being, as the Christian debate is
there at the beginning, and then dwindles off into non-existence as the film
descends into a CGI-gore-fest. We know that Behmen and Felson went AWOL from
the crusades after becoming disillusioned with the word of God, only then to be
commissioned by another leader of the Christian faith to take the suspected
witch to the abbey where she will be tried. There could have been some
interesting debates between the priest and the two soldiers, and this is hinted
at, but this comes to nothing – it feels as if the director didn’t want too
much of a philosophical angle, so the film ends up being wholly unoriginal. Cage
and Perlman have some chemistry as the two war-wearied best friends, and the
film could have been more interesting had it focused on their friendship and
the wars they had fought. Claire Foy is good as the creepy suspected witch
figure, but she has very little to do except sit in a cage and look innocent and
then evil. Stephen Graham is wasted in a shockingly underwritten role, and the
foe the group finally come up against appears to speak in a Jamaican accent.
Some of the graphics are alright but that is not enough to base a film on.
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