Season of the Witch (2011, USA)

Yep – I saw it. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Ron Perlman and Nic Cage’s ever-astounding wigs. (And this one’s a doozy – the best way to describe it, at least at first sight, is something akin to shoulder-length blonde dreadlocks.)

Season of the Witch is terrible, but it also commits that cardinal sin of many terrible movies – it’s boring. After a pretty hilarious Crusades montage, the action swiftly slows down when Behman (Cage) and Felson (Perlman) defect and return to . . . Europe? Sure. (Everything has a fake-ish name, and how they accomplish this journey on their own while on the run from the authorities is anyone’s guess. There weren’t a lot of direct flights between Jerusalem and Northern Europe back then.)

Anyway, they’re back in Europe, and after some fun meet-cutes with the Black Death (Christopher Lee probably had in his contract that his face would be so obscured with boils no one knew he was in this), they are charged with taking a witch to a monastery to stand trial for infecting the countryside with the plague. What follows is a lot of lame is-she-or-isn’t she blather, all conducted in the most contemporary language possible. There are rotting corpses, a bridge doing same, some wolves, etc., but the whole thing is pretty dull until the group makes it to the monastery. What happens there is nearly hilarious enough to warrant sitting through the middle of the film (the CG budget must have been about $15), but unless you’re a medieval historian – in which case Witch will most likely give you an aneurysm – this is definitely a hangover rental for the bad movie-loving crowd.