We're going to need some more holy water.

Season of the Witch

(2011)

Enjoyably trashy Nicolas Cage 13th century tale of devilry, with Cage and Ron Perlman as disillusioned knights tasked with escorting a suspected witch (accused of blighting the land with plague) to a distant monastery to stand trial. A lively supporting cast includes Stephen Graham, Robert Sheehan and a revoltingly plague-ridden Christopher Lee.

Cage and Perlman make no attempt to disguise their accents and are given the most anachronistic dialogue possible, but the film has a cheerful disinterest in anything approaching historicity across the board.

Dominic Sena previously worked with Cage on Gone in Sixty Seconds. He puts together some effective sequences (a ramshackle bridge crossing in particular) and creates a suitably scabby atmosphere. But it looks like the money ran out at along the way as there's some fairly rank CGI throughout, the use of which unfortunately becomes more liberal as the film edges towards its climax. Best line; "We're going to need some more holy water."

***

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(SPOILERS) In which we find Sean Connery – or his agent, whom he got rid of subsequent to this and Cuba – showing how completely out of touch he was by the late 1970s. Hence hitching his cart to the moribund disaster movie genre just as movie entertainment was being rewritten and stolen from under him. He wasn’t alone, of course – pal Michael Caine would appear in both The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure during this period – but Meteor’s lack of commercial appeal was only accentuated by how functional and charmless its star is in it. Some have cited Meteor as the worst movie of his career (Christopher Bray in his book on the actor), but its sin is not one of being outright terrible, rather of being terminally dull.

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Flawless (2007)

The present day framing of this nifty little heist flick knocks a star off it, since it's truly lousy. Natalie Dormer is a horrendously annoying reporter interviewing a rather ropily aged Demi Moore, neither of them helped by atrocious dialogue. Back in the '60s Moore fares much better as a much passed-over aging manager in a diamond business who is tempted by Caine's cleaner into cleaning the place out.

Caine's on good form; nothing he hasn't done a hundred times, but full of energy, and the plotting makes it as much fun to work out how he done it as it is to watch the actors. Joss Ackland is surprisingly cast against type as an evil South African while Lambert Wilson has fun as the man investigating who stole what.
***

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