Before you go getting all excited for Silver Shamrocks Halloween masks, that’s not the season of the witch that I’m talking about. This is from 2011 and it’s an action horror movie with the one and only Nicolas Cage. Last year I watched Cage in Arcadian and here he is again. Heck, I’m pretty sure we did Willy’s Wonderland in the last couple of years on the podcast. So Nicolas Cage being an annual part of the Spooktacular in one way or another seems like it may be destined to be. After 3 weeks of mostly straight horror, with a dash or two of horror comedy, I was ready for a little something different. Disney+/Hulu came through with this categorization. I suppose I’ve seen a few before like Van Helsing and maybe like the Blade series. I suppose Underworld as a franchise might fit under this umbrella as well. In the end, it was nice to get a slightly different flavor of horror on the palate as sometimes 31 days of just straight horror movies can get a bit much. The really good ones tend to be few and far between so a lot of the month is just sitting through a lot of the same stuff, keeping your fingers crossed for a good one to pop up unexpectedly here and there. So lets get into this witch business.
This movie is one part Lord of the Rings and one part Constantine. Maybe there’s a sprinkling of a Tim Burton kind of influence on top. While I’m no fan of the LotR series, this movie worked ok for me. Nicolas Cage and Ron Pearlman teaming up works a lot better in so many ways. Plus we got Tommy from “Snatch” as well. There were some other people and they acted in the movie as well. I will say that Cage and Pearlman are an interesting team. Most of the time I’m fairly certain that Ron Pearlman just shows up on the set of movies, people put a costume on him and go tell him to be Ron Pearlman while someone films him. They don’t give him lines. They don’t tell him what the movie is about. They just film Ron being Pearlman. I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where he’s not just Ron Pearlman in every scene. Like picture him in a RomCom or like a family comedy where he’s a Birthday Clown trying to save a bunch of puppies. Literally put him into any movie you like. Sub him out for your favorite character in your favorite movie and just play that out in your head for a moment. He’s not going to adjust to the role. He could be on the wooden door watching Jack drift into the icy water as the Titanic sinks behind him and he’d light up a cigar and say something like “That stiff was getting a little clingy” and you’d laugh because that’s the perfect Pearlman quip. He’s just always Ron Freaking Pearlman. So he works perfectly here because he’s just Pearlmaning up the set and it totally works.
Nicolas Cage is also mostly himself here. He’s a little subdued which felt like it was a waste of Cage at times. He didn’t need to just be unhinged the whole movie, but he’s hardly ever that way and so it seemed like we weren’t getting the full Cage. He was really serious throughout the movie and it just never really bled over into that over the top version of him that we have come to know and love. He was a good enough protagonist. But you always want a little bit of that real Cage to solidify his performance. The other people were ok too. But really as far as the cast rounded out, it was pretty bleak. So I didn’t expect a lot from the movie if Pearlman is backing up Cage and once I realized we weren’t getting full Cage I readjusted my expectations and things seemed to flow just fine from there.
I will say that initially this movie was pretty ok but the more I realize that it’s in the same vein as Van Helsing, I really feel a little more disappointed in the end. Not that Van Helsing was some masterpiece by any means, but it really did a lot more with the genre than this film did. There were beats of action and some of the tension was achieved through other means. The action outshined the horror through a lot of the movie, I will say. Again, didn’t mind that terribly as I’ve had a steady diet of primarily horror throughout the month so something a little bit fresh definitely helped make this movie more fun to consume. But when I think about the way that Van Helsing moved through the space in a richer fashion, I feel like this movie doesn’t measure up quite as well.
The basic gist of the story is that Cage and Pearlman are crusaders in the 1300’s who grow a conscience once they are forced to kill women and children. They defect from the righteous army of the church and make their way through the world. Eventually in their travels they are caught and found to be deserters so they are sentenced to something bad, I’m pretty sure. Instead of doing that, they are offered the chance at a quest. And as we all know, a dangerous quest is a lot better deal than certain death in an execution of some sort. So they have to escort a witch to a place where there are a bunch of priests or monks or something like that. Supposedly they can stop the lord of this territory from dying from the plague as it was a curse put upon them by a witch. So Cagney and Lacey suit up with a priest, another knight kind of dude, a younger dude who might have been a priest but wanted to be a knight and then the lady who they thought was a witch. Oh and Tommy from “Snatch”. He’s a “merchant” who will show them the best route to the place they need to go. Spoiler alert, he gets eaten by wolves. That part was pretty intense. So it’s a dangerous quest journey movie and in the end Cage and Pearlman fight a bunch of demons and they both die. Oh yeah, spoiler alert. They both die. In the end, the girl isn’t a witch but is possessed by a demon. The original knight dies. The priest gets his head twisted around backwards. Pearlman gets heated up to a billion degrees and turns to ashes and dies. Then Cage dies a heroic death by being stabbed by the demon wing a bunch of time while the priest/knight kid reads latin out of a shiny book and kills the demon. This movie has been out for 14 years and if you’re angry that I just spoiled the ending then you must be new because what the heck man.
So overall this movie is probably in the 5 range somewhere. I’m feeling pretty content with a 5.2. It’s a low 5 for sure. It’s a little better than just straight middle of the road but not by much. There’s not enough really interesting things that happen to make this movie very memorable. There’s a lot of scenes that make it very not. Ron Pearlman is pretty fantastic but you know he’s just going to beat that Pearlman drum the whole time he’s here. He and Cage make a pretty decent team. I figured one of them would die. I was pretty bummed when they both did. Pearlman kind of died twice. Like you thought he was dead and then he came back for one more Pearlman quip. It was pretty great. But in a movie where everyone you liked dies, it’s just kind of ok. They weren’t satisfying enough characters that I was super bummed that they died but I also didn’t like that they both died. So it is what it is. I think if you’re a fan of Tolkien and you wanted like the Kirklands Costco brand equivalent of a horror movie from that world, this one is it. It’s not going to wow you. It’s going to take up an hour and a half and it does that really well. The run time is perfect. Many times these “epic” style movies are at least 2 hours and I would not have been able to handle this movie for another half an hour. I could have probably cut it down to low to mid 80’s and we’d still have been ok. But whatever. It was good enough to get the job done. I’ll take it for tonight. So if you feel like defecting from the king’s army based on some moral dispute and need a way to work off your desertion tab, find yourself a Pearlman and escort a witch/demon to Pittsburgh and leave her with the church for them to solve the problem. Then go get some buffalo wings with Pearlman and have yourself a good time. As for me, I’ll figure out what I’m going to watch tomorrow and get on with this business. We’re almost in the home stretch now. I can feel it. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
