Season of the Witch (2011)
Directed by Dominic Sena
A 14th century Crusader returns with his comrade to a homeland devastated by the Black Plague. The Church commands the two knights to transport a witch to a remote abbey, where monks will perform a ritual in hopes of ending the pestilence.
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3 films that influenced Season of the Witch
What critics say influenced Season of the Witch
I am about out of astonishments for you, but buckle your seat belt for this one: The director, Dominic Sena , was inspired by Ingmar Berg man's “ The Seventh Seal ” (1957), that classic tale of a knight who returns from the Crusades and encounters Death on the road.
The Eastern European locations are sumptuous and the costumes authentic, but the dialogue is anachronistic and the climax mindless — though the lame film homages (The Seventh Seal!
Directed by Dominic Sera as a kind of giddy homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” — that is, if Bergman worked for Marvel Comics — “Witch opens with three terrified women accused of witchcraft.
A plague has ravaged everything and every place—at which point we realize that we’ve been watching the prequel for The Seventh Seal (1957).
It's The Seventh Seal meets Get Him to the Greek meets Lord of the Rings as if filtered through Uwe Boll's hack-tastic brain, only a guy named Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds) made it.
The doughty pair of knights played by Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman in "Season of the Witch" -- a movie that appears to have been shot entirely on leftover sets from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" -- regard the infidel hordes before them, and snicker.
Really, at its worst, the whole thing’s a little bit like “ Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — minus the jokes.
In order to make Season of the Witch director Dominic Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut must have used a time machine-- not to return to the Middle Ages when the movie is set, but to a time before parodies of Crusades movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, movies that make the likes of Season of the Witch seem utterly ridiculous.
At times, it looks like Monty Python and the Holy Grail , only the Knights Who Say "Ni!" are nowhere to be found.
While the movie is not a comedy—not intentionally, anyway—it does bear a striking resemblance to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In his latest film, the actor displays only the briefest flashes of the deep commitment to chaos he brings to his best work, as in his recent turns in the delightfully wacked-out "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" or even the watchable junk of "Ghost Rider."
Plus it has Nicolas "Ghost Rider" Cage.It's hard to describe how a movie like this could succeed, but somehow it does.
Nicolas Cage is a man of mercurial taste, an actor whose career choices careen from the astute ( Leaving Las Vegas , Raising Arizona ) to the astounding (Ghost Rider, The Sorcerer's Apprentice).