There are many things that tend to be a sign of bad things to come. Good Examples would Be: Being in production for 10 years, a title that has nothing to do with the movie and the words “starring Nicholas Cage”. Season of the Witch has all three and that doesn’t exactly give you much to be hopeful for when you put it in your blu-ray player.
It’s easy to quickly mock this movie. It’s definitely not a good movie. But there are definitely positives. The landscapes look beautiful. The introduction of our Main Characters Felson (Ron Pearlman) and Behrman (Nicholas Cage) leading an army through the desert looks like something out of a modern epic. Sadly the film is not an epic. Infact it can’t decide if it’s a drama, an action film or a horror movie so instead it turns out to be none of these things. It’s genreless is in the worst of ways.
Unlike Nicholas Cage garbage of the past like Wicker Man and Next this film is bad and not in the so bad it’s good and laughable bad. This isn’t Nicholas Cage’s fault however. While he mugs and hams up shots and deliveries dialogue in that Nick Cage way we’ve grown to love the fault lies on the script. Everything from the plot, the title and the dialogue is wrong. The movie talks about the Plague but shows nothing but lepers, the name is Season of the Witch yet it’s about demons and every line of dialogue is terrible and cheesy. Half the characters speak like this is Lord of the Rings and others speak like it’s a Kevin Smith movie. However when a film has gone through a decade of re-writes it’s expected that the dialogue would seem disjointed.
Ron Pearlman does as well as he can with what he’s been served but really the best performance is in Stephen Campbell Moore’s performance of Debelzaq the priest. He manages to get through lines like “That’s Not a Witch” without it sounding as laughable as it could have.
The characters piece together things so quickly that there is really no excitement or suspense. The final 20 minutes are filled with quick reveals, flashbacks to scenes that literally just occurred and the shortest final battle ever filmed. It feels like whoever wrote this got so bored after page 70 that they just rushed a cleft notes version of the ending and that’s what got filmed.
There are occasional cool moments and some decent CGI but this is not a film I can recommend to everyone, or anyone really. If you wanted to see this, then you probably already have… if you’re on the fence, you’re probably better off not wasting 98 minutes.
Directed by Dominic Sena (Gone in Sixty Seconds, Swordfish), SEASON OF THE WITCH comes to Blu-ray and DVD June 28 from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and includes a shocking alternate ending, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes featurettes, commentaries (Blu-ray only) and more.
SEASON OF THE WITCH was released theatrically by Relativity Media and produced by Atlas Entertainment.
SEASON OF THE WITCH
Disc 1:
• Feature Film
Special Features:
• Deleted Scenes
• Alternative Ending
• Becoming the Demon Feature
• On A Crusade Feature
Disc 2:
• Digital Copy
SEASON OF THE WITCH Blu-ray (Catalog # 2275600) U.S.
Street Date: June 28, 2011 Pre-book Date: May 18, 2011 Screen Format: Widescreen 1.78:1 Aspect Ratio Audio Format: English 5.1 DTS-HD MA; Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital; French 5.1 Dolby Digital Languages: Dubbed English, French & Spanish; Subtitled English, French & Spanish MPAA U.S. Rating: PG-13 Total Run Time: 95 Minutes
