We're Going to Need More Holy Water

[moon_custafer]

Space must've been holding some kind of mini-Nick Cage festival on the weekend, for we tuned in halfway through the remake of The Wicker Man, and then watched Season of the Witch.

For some reason a lot of films that get panned in the reviews turn out to be highly entertaining as far as I'm concerned, and I appreciated the construction of this one: the first few scenes carefully establish that in the world of this movie, both demonic entities and religious fanaticism are equally terrible sources of evil.

The middle of the movie is taken up with trying to determine which one the protagonists are dealing with, as two ex-crusaders (Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman) reluctantly lead several men who have respectively joined/been press-ganged into/snuck after a mission to transport a young girl to a remote monastery that has the necessary reference materials to determine if she really is a witch, and to deal with her if she is.

As they lead her through the wilderness in a wheeled cage, the girl pleads, taunts them, plays head games and occasionally tricks someone into coming close enough for her to reach through the bars of her cage and seize them in an unexpectedly strong grip; but even as people start to die around her, the possibility is left open that she's just a regular human who's using every psychological trick she can think of to get away from her captors.

Of course ambiguity can't be juggled forever, and neither "Yes, she's actually in league with Satan" nor "No, she's an innocent victim" was going to be a satisfying revelation after such a build-up.

Around this point I actually started to suspect she was a red herring and one of the party escorting her would turn out to be a warlock and the real source of the trouble; I won't give away the real twist, but I felt it was a viable third option, and the ending was appropriate.

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Aww, another fan of Season of the Witch! I loved everything about this movie, from the Templars fighting in the Second Crusade on foot having apparently eaten their horses, to Christopher Lee covered in boils, to the high death toll and ridiculous carnage, to Nicholas Cage's eyeballs, to the medieval pulp-fiction everywhere (time for a crevasse dangle, time for gratuitous swordplay porn, time for homoerotic male friendship, time for corpses and manuscripts and torture implements) to the crappy CGI. Also, I love Ron Perlman and I care not who knows it.

Is there some archetypal story of heroes making a journey with a caged villain, to reach a point where they'll be able to deal with the villain safely? I keep thinking that the basic outline of S.o.t.W. reminds me of something. It's not quite Heart of Darkness (that was Black Death, where the heroic knights are trudging up a river to settle the hash of a witch in the wilds of darkest Devon) and it's not quite Aguirre the Wrath of God. Does anything ring a bell? (well, er, I suppose Silence of the Lambs, where they're carting Lecter around covered in a bite mask and strapped to a trolley.)

The only problem I had with this movie was the fact that I can't accept witches as credible villains. Yeah, I know that's the entire premise, but still. I have a hard time gritting my teeth and saying, "OK, it's an alternate history where witches were really magic and in league with Satan," because I've read enough real-world witch-trial history that it feels like the moral equivalent of the villains being, say, eeevil Jewish well-poisoners or eeevil child-thieving Gypsies. Leaves me feeling dirty. Even simpler: the image of the old crone (soft target for witch hysteria) is so vulnerable that a witch never becomes a good enough villain to make good heroes. Mike Mignola tends to use evil old crones as villains in Hellboy, and there's the same problem. They're too crunchy to last more than a few rounds with the big bruiser heroes.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I've gotta admit, I like it both ways. I have a story I've been working on for a long time called "History's Crust" which simultaneously contains the idea that most witches were innocents treated appallingly and yet has at its centre three witches who are genuinely full-on aspiring terrorists with magical powers, at least one of whom is malign is a truly scorched-earth way. That said, what she's in league with is less Satan than a particular variety of bad angel, and her malignity does seem to have been an effect of the Scottish witch-fever, rather than one of its causes; she lives her life by the single commandment Satan supposedly gave covens like the North Berwick one, ie: "Revenge yourselves, or die."

Anyhoo, I too liked Season of the Witch a lot. Its historicity is ridiculously elastic, but no more so than in any given Hammer film, and I'm very fond of the idea of a robed and tonsured monk quoting Jaws.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I decided in retrospect that the opening scene was a case of the movie's Big Bad having created a witchcraft panic so someone would get out a copy of the book of Solomon. Hence the looking so very stereotypically witchy, while the others were clearly healers, or innocents tricked or tortured into false confessions.