Disclaimer: There’s a summary of all the key plot points below. I wouldn’t really call these “spoilers,” more like favors to you. Either way, you’ve been warned. And you’re welcome.
Nicolas Cage is in the fight of his life (again). Let’s spin the magical Cage-movie generator, annnnd this time he’ll be saving all of humanity from… [the plague]… that was brought on by [a witch]1!
Saving You the Ninety-Five Minutes
This movie starts out with a scene of a couple women right before they’re executed. You see, they’ve been deemed guilty of witchcraft, and the priest is very excited to send these ladies to Hell. It’s middle ages, this stuff was popular then.
The priest and some accompanying soldiers hang them and then drop the dead bodies into a river (obviously to double-kill them). The priest then wants to pull the bodies up and read them each a prayer or poem to ensure that they stay dead (or, triple-kill them), but the soldiers say that double-killing is enough for them. And why shouldn’t it be?
So the priest goes it alone and pulls them up one by one, reading each the poem, except he that darn third one that he can’t get done in time. She comes (re-double-?)alive, maybe eats him or something and is off to witch again. I believe this scene was included to show what the poem accomplished. And I say poem, but it was probably a prayer. It was just sooo looong.
Let’s find out why this scene doesn’t really matter.
Switch to Nicolas Cage fighting his way across the Crusades! They went city-to-city, murdering everyone in the name of God until one day they stumble upon a women-and-children-only castle and stab them too. Because Nicolas Cage is the ultimate humanitarian, he gets that angry/sad face thing, and the woman he stabbed haunts his dreams for most of the rest of the movie.
At this point, he and his buddy Ron Perlman (of Hellboy fame, equally as Cage-faced when they stab women) give up on the crusades and become traitors, refusing to fight. They’re imprisoned in a nearby town that was cursed by… a witch! The curse is making people die of skin bubbles, and that darn witch needs to be killed at least three times.
However, before they can kill her, they need to bring her to God-court which is unfortunately in another castle. Just when all hope seems lost (that the movie would end and we could leave), the head skin-bubbly priest makes a deal with Cage and Perlman: if they bring said witch from that village to the monk temple for judging (where they can officially proclaim, “yes, witch,”) and then they can burn her and read her a holy poem that will keep her dead forever and get rid of the curse and thus the plague, skin-bubbly priest will drop all charges.
There’s a no, some more thinking and Cage-face, and then a yes.
They pick up a couple more ragtag members that can die along the way and off they go with witch in tow, locked in a cage and guarded by a Cage. Blech.
Those other members eventually die, they cross a rickety bridge, and are attacked by wolves. At one point the witch escapes but they catch her again. Easy peasy.
So then a witch, a priest, Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman walk into a temple. You won’t believe this, but the monks are also skin-bubbly, mostly dead except for one dude that only has enough strength to point to the magic book that has the poem in it. Throwing the fair trial out the window (because the witch has been driving them crazy the whole trip), they read the “go to hell” poem at the witch.
But guess what!
Flip the Script
She’s not a witch, she’s a hilariously CGI’d demon! Think Gremlins meets an angel. To fix that, you read a different poem from the book.
The big “twist” is that this demon, which can escape the cage (and Cage) whenever it wants, apparently puts up with the rest of the posse because it didn’t know where the temple was and had to get their to destroy the magical book and all copies the monks may have been making. Of course, once the demon got there, it couldn’t touch the book (because it’s holy, and demons can’t usually touch holy things), so it was really a half-baked plan from the very beginning.
The Ending
Cage dies and they exorcise the demon (not a euphemism) to reveal an innocent yet slimy naked girl. She’s happy to be alive and innocent, a bit luke warm about the slime & nakedness. She says she will forever tell the story of how Nicolas Cage was a six-out-of-ten in niceness to her along a journey she only half-remembers and eventually saved her life just so that she could tell this one-out-of-five story.
Oh, Ron Perlman dies too. He gets incinerated in the demon’s wings. It’s not as cool as it sounds.
Good Grief
This movie is better if you think of it as Nicolas Cage representing the entire movie industry and the witch/demon representing Nicolas Cage. The struggle between “should I keep supporting you” and “should I destroy you” wavers for a bit, but in the end we firmly settle on complete destruction into flaming bits.
The first ten minutes after the pointless witch scene were a montage of poor Crusade action sequences, featuring Cage and Perlman swiping blades across bad dudes’ chests which is enough to kill them, even through chain-mail which I thought was specifically designed to save people from exactly such attacks.
Furthermore, the morality of the situation never really makes sense. Sure, the soldiers were fighting back, while the women and children literally only stood there screaming and crying while dudes barged in and plummeted any sharp object available into their chests, but does that make them less evil in the eyes of their objective? What would Nicolas Cage have them do, take a couple hundred prisoners instead?
You might get a handful of entry-level soldiers out of that in the long-run, but that can’t be worth supporting a village entirely full of women and female children (who, remember, you’ve considered to be worthless sinners). Besides, there’s a good chance all of those women will eventually be hung due to witchcraft anyway.
It was hard not to feel bad for Ron Perlman, it seemed like he was just trying to earn a paycheck, performing a role that was obviously written with him and only him in mind. Everyone spoke awkward fake-middle-ages English except for him. If you closed your eyes the entire movie, not only did you probably have a better time, but you also probably would assume Nicolas Cage was campaigning with Hellboy himself. Typecasting sucks.
Finally, Season of the Witch wasn’t even about a witch, it was about a demon. That witch that didn’t fully die in the very beginning? I think that’s the last we saw her in the movie. It’s hard to say, all old-witch-looking characters look very similar to me: big nose, scraggily hair, one funny eyeball, etc. Maybe she was there to establish “the movie has ‘witch’ in the title, and I’m a witch, so you should think the girl that we call a witch for most of the movie is a witch too!” It wasn’t necessary, no one saw the demon twist coming because everyone was checking their watches.
I’m not sure if it’s more unfortunate that Nicolas Cage has to do movies like this or that we went and saw it. How far into a movie can you leave and still demand a full refund? Is that why the demon switcheroo was all the way at the end? Can you believe this movie has made nearly $20,000,000?
Save yourself the ticket cost, the Redbox rental and save Netflix the shipping cost and skip this one all together. Your life will be better for it.
