Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Review Rating: 6 Templar Crosses
Knights returning from the Crusades to find the homeland devastated by the plague, are forced to transport a witch suspected of being the cause of the plague to an abbey to deal with.
Normally, I’m a fairly big fan of Nicholas Cage. And yes, even in this movie I think he did alright. Cage isn’t the problem, it’s the movie itself. His character Behmen is a very standard Knight Templar who, after fighting several campaigns off in the Holy Land, gets overwhelmed by it all when he accidentally kills a single girl in a raid on some temple, and decides to shun his Church because they condone these actions. If you’re any kind of fan of the whole Knights Templar deal, this is a very standard story and didn’t happen anywhere near as often as the movies imply. So Behmen and his faithful second Felson, who’s played the totally awesome Ron Perlman of Hellboy, leave the Crusades and go home, but at this point they’re classified as deserters. And there all the trouble starts, blah blah, the plague is ravaging this land and this fairly pretty if feral girl in the cage here is the cause of it all, right? Behmen and Felson have to transport the girl in the cage to the Abbey of somewhere, where they have the only remaining copy of the Book of Solomon, and only that will save the land from the plague.
That’s about as far as I go with spoilers and all, but I will add that the movie title is actually a complete misnomer, and I hate that. The girl witch, played by Claire Foy, seems to chameleon every time she tries to convince one of the men of the caravan to let her go, and that’s a fairly good testament to her acting skills. But the jump scares are few and lame enough to not actually qualify the movie as a horror flick, nor is it Sci-Fi at all, the closest one can really come is a bad dark fantasy attempt. I hope you didn’t actually pay the horrendous ticket prices to see it in the theater, it will piss you off. Season of the Witch gets a rating of six Templar crosses, and believe me, sadly this movie is lucky to get that.