Season of the Witch: As if you haven't had enough turkey lately

Ron Perlman, left, and Nicolas Cage in a scene from "Season of the Witch."The Associated Press

Not to be confused with the Donovan song or a history of the Thatcher years, Season of the Witch ventures all the way back to the 14th century, when the Ages were middling, the Plague was deadly black, and Crusaders were still slaughtering in the name of the risen Christ.

Among the latter are a pair of good old boys, a mangy-haired Nicolas Cage as Behmen (rhymes with demon) and a close-cropped Ron Perlman as his comrade-in-poleaxing. Together, they battle hordes of CGI infidels, taking an occasional break from the hand-to-hand combat for a hand-to-breast orgy. It's a pretty good life until it isn't. The same might be said of this movie.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades, punctuating the rift with a secular vow: "I serve the Church no more." Well, this is a useful reminder of a religion's terrorist past, and we're definitely curious to see where the plot will take the two heretics and their freshly minted scruples.

Initially, they head back home to a Europe so devastated by the plague that it looks like a George Romero set - pustulating corpses, mad dogs, everywhere the living dead.

On the bright side, the Church has a ready explanation for the scourge: "It's a curse called up from Hell brought against us by the Black Witch." Unaware of this keen medical insight, and unwisely wandering into an Abbey, our erstwhile warriors are captured by the Cardinal's henchmen, then offered a choice: instant death or the job of transporting said Witch (Claire Foy) to a distant city for a trial by those fairest of jurors, a conclave of tonsured monks. Hey, cue the road movie.

So off the group treks, across craggy mountain passes and through wolf-ridden forests, with the accused girl in a caged wagon and the boys riding shotgun. En route, director Dominic Sena actually generates some classic suspense by dusting off and rejuvenating a familiar trope - the ol' rickety swing bridge strung over a perilous gorge. His camera work is uncluttered, his cutting is clean, and, for a few delightful minutes, darned if we aren't kids again watching a Saturday serial with our hearts in our throats.

Suspenseful too, at least temporarily, is the ambiguity over the true nature of the comely prisoner behind those wooden bars. Is the gal a wronged innocent, a designing woman, or a supernatural force? When she accuses a young priest of sexual abuse, the answer points in the modern direction of victimhood. When she beckons Nic over to her cage and seductively purrs, "Allow me to ease your pain," the pendulum swings to the femme fatale part of the spectrum. The audience is tossed about on this shifting psychological ground and, had the script stayed there, the film might have fulfilled its potential.

Instead, the third act takes a commercial turn and goes all horror-flick on us. Nice try, but this formulaic decision comes with four consequences: (1) to reposition us from the edge of our seats to a slumbering posture; (2) to essentially undermine the logic of everything that came before; (3) to completely invalidate the humanist stance of the two protagonists; and (4) to inadvertently recast the Church from terrorizing villain into de facto hero.

No matter. To hell with logic, damn the theme - the action quota must be filled. And so it is, right up to the mark where, in the throes of devilish combat, someone is made to yell, "We are going to need more holy water!" By then, the writing is on the monastery wall, and Hollywood's miracle of transubstantiation gets repeated yet again: Another movie is turned into a turkey.

Season of the Witch