Season of the Witch (2011)

This film has the distinction of being the first I saw this year, and sadly the experience was hardly a memorable one. After enjoying both the lead actors (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) take on roles where, while badly written, were highly enjoyable due to their performance, the quiet and sober performances they give in this film are bland and forgettable. Not using Nic Cage to his full and lunatic potential should be considered a capital offence. Accents change with gay abandon, and the film never quite loses the air that it doesn't have a clue where all this action is supposed to be taking place. The movie is undermined, as that the film establishes in its opening scene that the titular witches are very real, and that the church is right to be killing women to defend the populace. Hence, all the succeeding moments where the priest is demonised for wanting to do away with the young woman accused of witchcraft are ridiculous, and make our main characters look like fools. But the biggest kicker of the entire film is that Season of the Witch has no witches in it! Pardon spoilers, but the main witch isn't a witch, but rather a girl possessed by a demon, granting her her supernatural abilities. The witches we see at the start seem to have the same powers and appearance, suggesting that they too were possessed. Hence, there are no witches in Season of the Witch, though there are both demons, man-eating wolves and monk zombies. Such stereotypical zombies that it is even explicitly stated in the film that the only way to kill them is to remove the head. Hardly a terrible film, but suffers from errors of pacing, casting and titling.


These are not interchangeable!