Season of the Witch

Watched July 24, 2012

2011
Starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell Moore and Stephen Graham.

This one does have witches in it at least.  It's the crusades and plague times all wrapped into one. It begins with a couple of supposed witches being hung and drowned. The main monk knows that once you drown those horrible witches you have to recite some words from a holy book to really destroy the witch demons. The demon witch comes back to life and before the monk can say the right words,  the demon kills him. So begin the plague times.

Now we meet our heroes, Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. They're Knights of the Crusades and they're destroying heathens left and right. Nic kills one lady too many and finally wakes up to the fact that he's murdered a ton of people. Nic and Ron quit the holy army, wander around and stumble upon a plague town. They are trying to hide that they're knights but are quickly found out. They are then asked to undertake a special task. The town has a witch captured and they're convinced she is the bringer of the plague. Since she is a witch demon, she has to be taken to a special castle/abbey where a holy book can properly destroy the demon and give the girl a fair trial. A group is assembled to make sure the witch girl makes it to the castle.  They make sure a teen with a gross mustache joins the team.

As they travel it seems like the girl isn't really a witch, she just has the demon inside her. Sometimes she seems nice, other times she gets possessed with the demon and tries to kill everyone. She makes the trip really difficult,  one night she summons wolves and turns them into CGI wolves to attack everyone.  I wonder why they didn't kill her right then and there or at least knock her out.  Nic Cage seems to be bent on making sure she gets a fair trial.  Fair trials didn't exist back then,  so they should have just killed her.
They make it to the abbey and all the monks are dead from the plague.  The monk that is traveling with them finds the holy book just in time for the demon to show its true form. The demon flies around and tries to kill everyone.  The monk is killed reciting the words, who is going to read the holy book now? Luckily teen knight pulls it together, starts reading and finishes vanquishing the demon. Too bad Nic and Ron die doing their best to destroy the demon. The witch girl survives the demon leaving her body and the plague is gone. The girl and teen boy ride off together, obviously in love, because everyone else is dead from the plague.

I thought it was going to be worse than it was, but maybe I've been watching too many super slow movies that don't go anywhere. This movie isn't good by any means, but at least it's got lots of action and terrible accents. The scenes of Nic and Ron during the crusades killing people seem to be repeated a thousand times.  Nic Cage has a really impressive beach waves wig that looks likes he's been back on the set of Valley Girl chilling by the shore. Everyone wears a thousand blanket robes for costumes which is pretty entertaining. Nothing really blew me away to make it truly memorable.

An alright movie to watch with a group of people, I think it would terrible to view it alone.