Fridae

Season of the Witch actually opens by ripping off two of my favorite movies, The Crucible, in a scene where possibly innocent young women are hung and accused of witchcraft, and The Seventh Seal, in which two knights return from the Crusades (here rendered in a series of battles all clearly shot on the same soundstage) only to find Europe devastated by the Black Death. Too bad you won’t get Winona Ryder as a hysterically lascivious wench or that guy from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey challenging the heroes to a game of chess.

I get instead the perennial fixtures of hokey genre cinema, Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman. Between the two, they have accumulated a world of high camp enough to last several Halloweens -- especially Perlman, who has spent about half his time on this Earth under prosthetic makeup ever since his days on Beauty and the Beast. A movie with them together is obviously going to be an explosion of high camp and high ham.

And in those aspects, this one frankly does not disappoint. Cage and Perlman play it gamely, maintaining a poker-faced attitude towards the horrendous and implausible goings-on around them. This is what passes for a story in this film: after being shellshocked from having to murder women and children during the Crusades, Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Perlman) return to plague-devastated Europe only to find they have a new assignment from a plague-infected Cardinal (played in a cameo by Christopher Lee chanelling Dune’s Baron Harkonen, complete with festering sores!). They have to escort a young girl accused of witchcraft (Claire Foy) to an abbey in which the monks can recite passages from a superpowered Holy Book to erase her powers, aided by a group of rather unmemorable supporting characters. On the way, the young girl does cast their original skepticism into doubt with her seemingly supernatural feats of strength and what can only be described as magic...

There is no way to take this film seriously, and while Cage and Perlman know that you shouldn’t, their intentions should not stop me from pointing out what I think is the film’s worst quality. More than its silly script, cut-rate special effects and awful dialogue, Season of the Witch reveals a sort of frankly reprehensible “The Devil Made Me Do It!” morality that I can’t riff on without showing any spoilers. You see, turns out the girl is not a witch at all, but a victim of demonic possession. And the same demon personally possessed the chaplain that urged Behmen and Felson to murder women and children during the Crusades. And the demon wants to bring about a world of darkness after destroying Europe with the plague. So you see, it’s not the fault of men or of the circumstances of nature and biology that massacres of innocent civilians in wartime or epidemics happen, but the work of the Devil. I don’t think I need to emphasize what a fundamentally bogus and disingenuous mentality this really is.

This is especially so given of course that The Crucible and The Seventh Seal were both dramas that offered up honest examinations of human realities, and Season of the Witch in place aims for the lowest common denominator in terms of crass, calculated disingenuousness. A movie for a world where The Seventh Seal and The Crucible never existed, Season of the Witch sets the clock back on enlightenment.