Season Of The Witch

Ahah! This is more like it! As you may have gleaned by now, bad action movies are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. Although actually, like Stephen Fry (and I am so very like Stephen Fry, Mn'yah!) I refuse to call it a guilty pleasure; as he once unashamedly declared his fond regard for Abba, I likewise pledge my allegiance to the bad hack fantasy action movie, the more ridiculous and cliched the better. And do we have a treat for you in store in that regard!

Nic Cage and Ron Perlman are a couple of crusading knights, apparently slaughtering their way singlehanded across the Holy Land, putting heathens to the sword, with the rest of their army pretty much reduced to clearing up afterwards in comparison. Nic's gone for the kind of noble bit, and Ron Perlman clearly can't be arsed being vaguely medieval, and resembles nothing so much as Ron Burgundy in armour. This goes on for a while until they come across a walled town, which they lay siege to, but when they get in there, they find that they're slaughtering what looks like the population of a small Lincolnshire village. Lots of apple cheeked children and pale and interesting young women. Which is not what you expect to find in Syria at all. Anyway, Nic and Ron round on the priest leading them, and demand to know why they've been told to slaughter these people (although my first question would have been what these people were doing there in the first place). Having got no satisfactory answer, the pair of them desert.

On their way back home, they're passing along the coast of Styria (which is in land-locked Austria, geography fans!) and encounter a walled city beset with the plague. Despite the massive cloud of ravens circling over the city, they decide to go in for provisions, and are immediately arrested, having been recognised as deserters. Presumably their crusading priest commander sent a fax ahead or something.

Anyway, all is not lost, because all will be forgiven if Nic and Ron escort a girl, who everyone says is a witch and responsible for the plague, to a monastery where there's a copy of a book of incantations which dispel witches, goblins, estate agents, etc. They reluctantly agree, insisting that they'll see it's a fair trial, and are equipped with the standard adventuring party of another knight, a priest, a dodgy guide, and the kid from Misfits, who's an altar boy who wants to be a knight.

So, it's an escort mission, and anyone who's ever played an MMO knows how well that's going to go. Spooky goings on go on in the mountains and woods, until we get to the monastery, where all hell breaks loose.

It's a fun film, and especially enjoyable because it's a little better and cleverer than it has to be. The plot's got a nice ambiguity to it, as we can't really be sure whether a) the witch is causing the plague, or b) the church is hysterically burning innocent women. Our perspective that we go in with is b), of course, and there's plenty of evidence for that, but then again, there's all the spooky goings on...

The acting is what it is; Nic Cage is giving it the full Earnest Intense Nic Cage, without being too sheep-eating crazy (shame); Ron Perlman is playing it for gags - the whole "I was in The Name Of The Rose, mate, this monks and plagues bit doesn't impress me" attitude is writ all over him. The accents are bizarre. Pretty much everyone has an American accent, including Stephen Graham as the dodgy geezer guide, and he's from Liverpool. So we are firmly in that marvellous fantasy realm of Hollywood, where everyone is either American, or Irish.

Ultimately, this is a film that knows what it is, and has fun with it. Knowing cliche abounds, from the rickety rope bridge with crumbling wooden boards and fraying ropes, to the character who unwisely waxes lyrical about how he's going to go home to his family and be happy when all this is over. I was practically shushing him as I watched.

All in all, this is a piece of pure, silly entertainment which by the end is like a cross between The Exorcist and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And if that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.