Tuesday 29 October 2013

Season of the Witch (2011)


I've been quite interested in seeing this for a while now, I think I was hoping for a Gothic horror/thriller that was dripping with atmosphere and lots of detail.  Shame.  What I got was a fairly silly movie, with little atmosphere, a puerile plot and a bad script.

Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman were OK, but in all honesty they were probably simply the pulling power for a film which otherwise would have slipped completely under the radar.  Both have been much better.  There is also a tiny and unnecessary cameo from Christopher Lee, probably just to keep his imdb entries ticking over!

I was never really sure who some of the peripheral characters were, even though they seemed to be more than red shirts.  Even worse was Stephen Graham’s character, who was specifically freed from his stocks to be the guide for the expedition.  Except he probably only said half a dozen sentences.  And after his inevitable death, no one seemed to care about the loss of the guide; they just carried on their merry way, thereby rendering the entire character pointless.  Rubbish!

OK, that's the specifics.  Overall; some of the locations were quite cool, (mostly eastern Europe according to IMDB) and the sets, in particular the towns, looked great - dirty and lived in.  I guess the (I use this word in its loosest possible way) twist at the end was nice, but overall the plot was sedentary, boring and predictable.  The finale put me in mind of Blade, but at least the SFX were better.  Director Dominic Sena seems to specialize in middle of the road thrillers: Kalifornia, Swordfish and now Season of the Witch.  But, well, you know, that’s just, like, er, my opinion, man.

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