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11Things do not end well, least of all for the audience.
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25After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.
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Jan 7, 201150Though it slows down in the back half, the opening acts of Season are reasonably entertaining.
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30As usual, Cage alternates between leaden line readings and thunderous outbursts, making his accomplished costars Ulrich Thomsen and Stephen Campbell Moore look even better.
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50You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.
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42It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.
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40Does to the medieval era what Cage's Wicker Man did to Anthony Shaffer. Hokum and not in a good way.
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50The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.
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40The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.
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Jan 6, 201130Season of the Witch is at its worst when it tries to be a straight-ahead action-adventure film. The early sequence set against the epic battles of the Crusades is almost brazenly bad with its unconvincing "300"-style special effects.
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55Season of the Witch is barely even a Nicolas Cage movie. He wanders through the picture, zombified.
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20At least "Witch" offers Perlman's easy, early-hominid charm, and a semi-suspenseful rickety-bridge scene.
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38A movie that appears to have been shot entirely on leftover sets from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
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25The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.
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38Cage appears as a knight of the Crusades, slogging across the continents, slaying infidels and unbelievers and anyone else who gets in his way. There isn't a minute when it looks like he's having fun.
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38Season of the Witch teeters on the edge of slipping into the "so bad it's good" camp, but ultimately ends up being merely bad.
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25The real plague is the movie, a sci-fi hodgepodge of bad history and worse special effects.
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30Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.
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25The film looks dispiritingly cheap and, as if in response, most of his cast seems half-committed at best, as if they're counting the moments until they can move on to a bigger picture.
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50The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.
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40Cage supplies energy but no depth in his portrayal of a disillusioned knight. Ditto that for Perlman, who never feels comfortable in the sidekick role so he pretty much goes through the (exaggerated) motions.
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30The entire film seems to be happening on the other side of a dirty window - good news for the dreadful computer-generated effects, if not for our eyes.
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40It's "Centurion Deux" without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.
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50A mishmash of horror and history genres that's not as bad as its trailers but ultimately is dragged down by, of all things, its star.
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Jan 6, 201130Both overblown and undercooked, Season of the Witch is a fine example of a film that would've been great fun if only its creators had a sense of humor about the wild brew of absurdity they had percolating.
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10Mr. Cage's knight ends up playing second banana to a digital devil. Welcome to the January dead zone.
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Jan 10, 201125The movie proceeds in near darkness, perhaps to obscure its shoddy special effects, but the pervasive gloom is less discouraging than star Nicolas Cage's indifferent performance.