 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
Season of the Witch (2011)
Dominic Sena
Impression published on Saturday, 2011-11-05 | Film | 4 stars
Between the anachronistic buddy movie wise-cracking and the slap-stick, Saturday morning abandon of its setup1, there aren't five seconds of this movie that don't explode from the screen with the kind of rambunctious, shotgun-Vaudevillian impulsivity of Army of Darkness.
Which is to say that Dominic Sera's Season of the Witch, while not ostensibly a parody, manages to not only send up brooding Medieval prestige pics (think Kingdom of Heaven) and deadpan rehearsals of the social problems of witchcraft (think The Crucible) with the pithy irreverence that Mel Brooks showed for self-important space opera with Space Balls, but also to conjure some small part of the completely un-self-conscious spirit that camp icon Tommy Wiseau shared with the cinema-going world in his masterpiece, The Room.
Ultimately, however, Season never quite achieves The Room levels of iconic camp greatness. This is mostly on account of its cast. Nic Cage is good2, Ron Perlman does a solid turn as his smart-aleck/bull-necked companion and Claire Foy, whose CV looks mostly full of Lifetime-type dramas and period pieces, does this wonderful nerd-bait, black-metal-Lolita-vamp thing in the titular role.
It's all well and good, of course, but I never got the sense that Sera was quite able too convince Foy to loosen up, drop the flinty Victorian severity and get in on the act. I also felt like Sera was perpetually reigning Cage in, and missed a golden opportunity to let the father of Kal-El loose to do his thing.
More's the pity.
But if this film's cast are a bit more understated than I would have liked, Season of the Witch's script and staging are utterly unencumbered by any similar restraint and it is difficult (i.e. impossible) to say too much in favor of this movie's compositional and technical merits.
The script is well-paced, avoids unnecessary wordiness and provides ample space for Perlman's hilarious buddy-movie interjections. Also, to its credit, I should mention that I spent most of my first viewing of Season of the Witch reflecting appreciatively on the fact that this film does its viewers the service of telling them a story about medieval witches where the witches actually perform feats of Diabolical magic.
(And no mundane "psychological" or "folk" magic, either.3 Feats of witchcraft shown in the film include limited flight, exceptional strength and the ability to summon wolves.4 Witches also are able to survive traditional methods of execution, cast confusion spells and invade the dreams of men. Pretty good.)
The production is pitch-perfect. Season's final action set piece begins with wire fighting zombies in Sith robes (who Perlman quips are "like cock-a-roaches") and wraps up with a Jacob-versus-the-Angel meets the Ecstasy of St Sebastian tag-team wrestling match against a lime green Ray Harryhausen demon, replete with man-on-demon head-butts and the genre-requisite recitation of the Catholic Exorcism. The exorcism is shouted Latin, of course, and concludes just-in-time with a breathless "amen" that only narrowly prevents Apocalyptic consequences.
Great stuff. Well-written5, expertly staged and way over the top. Absolute must-see.
- After a happy decade of bringing Christ's love to the Middle East on the point of his sword, invincible crusader Nic Cage (who can deflect arrows in flight with his broad sword and strike a man so hard that he sails through the air like a medicine ball) suffers a sudden crisis of faith and conscience in the midst of applying the Lord's holy Ban to the "women and children" he and his strongman sidekick Ron Perlman are surprised to encounter on the soft side of the curtain wall of a European keep called awkwardly situated upon leagues of rolling desert and somewhat confusingly nominated, in the subtitles, as the Mediterranean metropolis of Smyrna.
The awkward situation of the keep upon the highly unlikely sand is at least as awkward as the situation of Cage's also very highly unlikely hair prosthesis, but not nearly so precarious as Cage and Perlman's legal standing as "deserters" of the Crusades (which, in the world of the film, are dramatized as some kind of regimented organization characterized by a culture of strict military rules and, even more bizarrely, uniforms).
After a run-in with the medieval law in a plague-stricken motte-and-bailey back in the World, the crusader and his man agree to escort the witch who wielded her power of Plague against the town to a distant monastery rumored to be in possession of the last transcription of a scrap of Solomonic verse that has the power to undo the witch's curse.
Guided by an opportunistic craven (handily named "Swindler", in order to avoid confusion), Cage and Perlman embark upon journey through a drearily Baltic Disney-scape (where precipitous ravines are bridged with decrepit rope bridges and the dry-ice machine runs 24/7) accompanied by an inscrutable priest, a gallant altar boy with aspirations to chivalry and, of course, the eponymous witch. - But not "great": if he's "great" in The Wicker Man, then he's only "good" in Season.
- I'm looking at you, Sean Bean's Black Death. If I see witches in the poster, I better see some unambiguously Diabolical and purely magical witchcraft between the credits.
- Which wolves are dramatized, not un-hilariously, by tiny, snuggle-puss Husky dogs whose muzzles and eyes are enhanced, using inexpertly applied post-production effects, to evoke ape and reptile features.
- To its great credit and to what ought to be the equally great shame of the majority of working/professional screenwriters, Season of the Witch is literally the only movie that I have seen in the past decade that features the correct usage of the word "thus."
