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Saw this today (as well as Black Swan as sort of a contrast) and had a pretty good time seeing it.

The story is about two knights of the crusades who desert their posts because they have had enough death and killing.  They come across a village dying from a plague.  They believe it to be caused by a local girl to be a witch and the cause of the disease.  They two knights, a couple a villagers, a priest, and a swindlers for a guide must go to a monestary to have her tried because they believe that will stop the people from dying.

The high point of this film was how well Nichols Cage ad Ron Pearlman (whose always awsome) worked together.  They really captured the feeling of two old soldiers, who know each other for a long time, just tired of the fight but really can't do anything about it.  They even have some cool one liners.  Pearlman especially.  There's a scene in the final part that really made me like his charachter.

There's some other stuff I would want to get into but can't without revealing some plot points and spoilers.

Season of the Witchis  a decent enough movie for a matinee or dvd rental, so your not going to hate yourself for missing it in theaters.

If I have one flaw I can talk aboout its that the film could have been a lot more fun.  At the beinging, it seems like it wanted to be simialr to a cheesy 80's action film-just set during the crusades.  Somewhere about mid point it loses that feeling and maybe wanted to be more of a traditional fantasy film.

I'd say it was neither good nor bad, and I agree it's worth taking a chance on a rental but I wouldn't rush to the theater.

The idea is original (yet a lot of the film still seems cliched).  Much of it seems like a wasted opportunity to make something truly different.  I disagree about the chemistry between Cage and Perlman.  It was OK, but neither character felt truly developed.  Cage just has 21st century attitudes in a medieval world, and your supposed to identify with him for that reason.  I thought Perlman (an actor I really like) was wasted a bit as a pure sidekick with no motivations of his own.  It's never really explained why he's so loyal to Cage, and had no motivations of his own. 

The battle/action sequences were a little bit of a letdown for me to.  I'm getting sick of this quick-cut, slightly sped up editing for battles.  Do we really need to see a single sword swipe from two or three different angles?  Mix in some long shots every once and a while.  The only battle I really enjoyed was the one with the wolves. 

A tiny thing, but I found it odd that it's set in a definite historical period but most of the characters have names that sound like their out of J.R.R. Tolkein instead of history. 

I came into this thread with the excited hope that they had released a Criterion Edition of Halloween 3 : Season of the Witch.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085636/

I am disappointed.....but looking forward to seeing this new movie nonetheless.

(http://insidepulse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/halloween3_buddyTV.jpg)

When I first heard the title of this movie I thought it was a remake of Halloween 3 with Nicolas Cage. Good thing its not.

I would pay to see that!  :teddyr:

Actually, when production started there was a rumor this was going to be a remake of George A. Romero's Season of the Witch (1972).

That said, I have no desire watching this. Just doesn't appeal to me. The finished movie was also put on hold for one year. Never a good sign.

A couple of good friends of mine saw this yesterday and stated that it was like a big budget SyFy channel movie, which I would call a compliment. I'll catch it at some point once it's been released on Bluray but there's no way that I'm spending 10 bucks to see it in a theater.

I, too, would pay cash money to hear Nic Cage singing the Silver Shamrock theme.

What I liked about it.

It's a quest film.
I like quest films.

The Characters
They were a disparate group, but you find that in quest films, which is one of the reasons I like quest films.
And I thought the characters were surprising well developed. Both through what they said, and what they did.

Ron Perlman
He is the only actor that I know that is seemingly ambidextrous with a sword. I'd like to see him fight with two swords. One in each hand.

Chris Lee
Boy, was he almost unrecognizable behind all that make-up.

The action
The non-battle scenes were exciting and surprisingly suspenseful.

The scenery
When they were on the road and just before the bridge. Carinthia. No one could imagine that. It has to exist in the real world. And the thing is, that area has changed little if any in the past 800 years.

The script
I liked the way it played with the audience's expectations. Who you thought was innocent was actually guilty, and who you thought was guilty was actually innocent.
And the way it laid out the clues. The way they were laid out, almost anythinbg you believed could have been the truth.

The ending
I should have known both the boy and the girl would survive. Now I can predict the future. They'll get married. Have children. Teach the children their story. And their children will teach their children. For generations on down.

A number of niggling points, but there were really only two things I disliked about the film.

(1) I don't know what they could have done, but they needed a better explanation as to why the "Book of Solomon" was important to the plot.


(2) The film misleading audiences about the legal system of that day. Being thrown into the village pond was considered a fair trail. If you floated, you were guilty. Because water would reject a witch. If you sank, you were innocent. Hopefully, they pulled you out before you drowned.

I was glad I saw it in a theater. Like alot of films set in the past, it is seemingly misunderstood by critics. Thus, it is a much better film than what they make it out to be.

What's forthcoming
"The Eagle" With "Billy Elliot's" Jamie Bell. Who is seemingly one of the few people to make the transistion from child star to adult actor. I wonder if the film will do better business than "The Centurion?" February.

"Real Steel" with Hugh Jackman. Disney under its Touchstone label is expaning its horizons. I just hope no one thinks the idea expoused in the film is a new one.  That idea datges back at least to a 1963 episode of "Twilight Zone" called "Steel." October

If "True Grit" hands around for another week, I'll probably see that next. If not, my next film will probably be "The Eagle."

While it is still early in the film year, the way films are shaping up so far, 2011 looks like a better year for ilms than 2010.

I'd pay good money to see Nic Cage's head explode with snakes, roaches, and locusts.

The preponderance of bad reviews for this film makes it hard to find a good reason to see it, but the preponderance of bad reviews makes it easy to find factual errors in the reviews.

One of the easiest is Roger Ebert's review. For when he dislikes a film such as this, he gets flippant, and when he gets flippant, he gets error prone. One of his most interesting ideas in his review of the film is that the village in the prologue is the same village as seen later in the film. But . . . Ah . . . No. I disagree for the following reasons. (1) Where are the bridge and river that played such a prominent part in the film? They seem to have disappeared. (2) I vaguely remember a wall around the village in the prologue. That too seems to have disappeared. (3) Even in the dark, the village in the film looks smaller, the buildings look smaller and different than the village in the prologue.

But he is not the only film critic to make some sort of factual error about the film in their review of the film.

Hagemar (Stephen Graham)
Some critic said he was a merchant. No. Not in the way we understand the term. A better definition would be relic seller, or someone who picked up holy relics associated with the saints and/or the stories in the Bible and sold them to people, such as the monks.

Kay (Robert Sheehand)
A second critic said that he was "battle hungry." Again no. Just because he wanted to become a knight does not mean that he was hungry to go into battle and kill people. That is a misunderstanding of his character. What he comes across as is someone who sees himself as a failure in the eyess of his father and wants to do something to impress his father.

d'Ambroise (Christopher Lee)
A third critic said he was a king. There again no. He is a cardinal, but that does not mean he is not the ruler of the city. Some spiritual leaders of the community were also the secular leader of the community.

England, Germany. Hungary.
This shows that alot of film critics are geographically challenged. (And to make it easier for everone we use the terms in their modern day contest.) England. I have no idea where they got that idea. Germany. Better. But it is too far north.  Hungary. Better yet, but it does not look like the area in which the film takes place. As we are clearly told that the two deserting Crusaders are now along the Illyrian coast, which is the coast on the east side of the Adriatic between Greece and Italy. Thus where does it take place. Most likely in Croatia, where much of the film was shot.

The plague
Many of the critics associate the plague in the film with the bubonic plague. Does anybody remember whether any of the characters in the film called the plague the bubonic plague or the Black Death or any term we associate with such a plague. I can only remember the characters calling it the plague. Because if it is suppose to be associated with the bubonic plague, then the filmmmakers made a goof, for as it has been pointed out, the bubonic plague looks nothing like the plague in the film. I just saw it as a more generic plague.

Thus, for someone who likes to find the factual errors in a film review, this film has been a bonanza.