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'Season of the Witch' Reviews: Going to Need More Holy Water

by Jordan Yerman | January 7, 2011 at 09:05 am

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Season of the Witch Review Roundup: It's Not Pretty

Sorry, Nicolas Cage fans. The reviews are in for Season of the Witch, and that's not good news. Season of the Witch, which was not screened in advance for critics (uh-oh), stars Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman as 14th-Century knights who have to escort a suspected witch to a group of monks. Note that Season of the Witch is not a remake of the 1972 George Romero film, or the 1982 Halloween sequel.

The most positive review we could find was that of The Hollywood Reporter, which was not exactly a positive review. The only pluses that Kirk Honeycutt finds are the scenery and production design. Note that he did not mention script, story, or characters.

As a motley crew of thinly written characters journeys across Plague-ridden Europe, the tilt is increasingly campy, but the line that finally decides things is this: "We're going to need more holy water."

Tasha Robinson at the AV Club describes Season of the Witch as confused, self-important and undercooked, saying that even Nicholas Cage's normal scenery-chewing wasn't in full effect:

Apparently the scenery in Season Of The Witch looked as flavorless to him as it looks to the camera; Cage plods through the story with a stiffly restrained, exaggeratedly earnest performance that makes him look like the most awkward amateur in the local Society For Creative Anachronism troupe.

The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern denounces Season of the Witch as "nonsense":