Nick Cage Double Feature

I'm a bit sick at the moment, so to make myself feel better I decided to watch some movies that are crappier than I feel right now.  I ended up making it a Nicholas Cage double feature because no matter how awful I'm feeling I can at least take comfort in the fact that I'm not Nick Cage.  Besides, nothing cheers me up more than making snarky commentary on bad movies, so at my sister's request I've decided to write reviews of the movies so that you can laugh at them too without having to actually suffer through them as well.  First up: Season of the Witch

Season of the witch is about how men win glory by killing things and women need protecting...I mean it's a movie about redemption.  In order to have a movie about redemption, you need some characters who have done some things they need redemption for.  So we begin with Nick Cage and his sidekick fighting in the crusades.  We see them preparing for battle by swapping bon mots and boasting about who will kill the most infidels.  The one who wins the most will 'drink free' that night because apparently they've set up a bar in the middle of the battlefield.  I wonder when its happy hour starts.

Look our heroes are morally ambiguous!  Let's make that clear from the get-go.

The seasons change as they continue to battle, much like the famous Twilight scene of Bella sitting at the window doing nothing for months on end because she is so heart-broken over her sparkly boyfriend, but with more actual killing and less soul-killing displays of patheticness.  This continues until the Battle of Smyrna where he kills a woman and looks around to see other women and children slain by his fellow soldiers.  Apparently killing hundreds of men means nothing to him, but this is where he finally draws the line.

Whoops!  My b!

So Nick Cage and Sidekick decide to desert the army and abandon the crusade.  Well, at least Nick Cage decides to and sidekick plays along because he has no free will. On the road they find victims of the plague which are unnecessarily gruesome and have way too much screen time.  Seriously If I wasn't nauseated already from being sick this movie would have made me so.  I'll spare you the screen shot for this...trust me.

Eventually they decided to go to a town for provisions where they are discovered to be deserters and therefore thrown in prison.  They are told that they will be pardoned, however, if they agree to escort a witch supposedly responsible for the plague to a town where the monks have a special book and training to kill her properly.  Nick Cage refuses dramatically at first, making the scandalous declaration that he "serves the church no more"  but eventually agrees because otherwise the movie would have been too short and also in exchange for the promise that the witch will get a fair trial.  

A pretty girl needs saving? This is my chance for redemption!

So they gather a posse together, throw the girl in a wagon cage, and make their merry way.  But soon they realize that someone is following them.  Who could it be?  It's Nathan and he offers to help as part of his community service!  

The reason I decided to watch this movie.

I mean it's an altar boy who offers his services so that he may become a knight.  At first they try to send him on his way but after he proves that he can play the bon mot insult game (although not very well with 'old man' as his choice) they decide to test him with a fight.  He proves that he can hold his own in a fight against Sideckick with the cunning use of trees and somersaults, so they decide that he may come in handy after all and let him tag along.  

A true knight can hide behind trees in a fight with grace and nobility

When it's time to break camp the first man to watch the prisoner lets slip that she reminds him of his daughter who died of the plague.  She then escapes and leads them all to a mass grave for plague victims which they all decide to play hide and seek in.  The witch uses her knowledge of the first watchman to cause him to see his dead daughter and run himself in with Nathan's sword, although don't ask me how.  Nathan's holding it sensibly enough one minute and the next he's apparently holding it out straight in front of himself while looking elsewhere so that someone can run into it with enough force to push the sword through his entire body.  

Sensible enough posture

Shish Kebab

You'd think Nathan would be used to accidentally killing people after all the probation workers he and his friends have murdered, but he's still a bit shook up about this one.  They are soon distracted from their loss by the difficulty of passing over a rickety bridge.  Nick Cage won't let some silly rotting bridge stop him, so he leads the way across first to prove it's strong enough because it's been a while since we've had a reminder that he is a BAMF.

Rickety Schmickety nothing can stop me!

They decide to lead the horses across first then ease the wagon over with some sort of rope system.  Three are left behind to slowly let the wagon across with the rope while Nick Cage and Nathan lead it across.  But of course their plan doesn't quite work out as the priest is unable to keep hold of the rope.  This causes the wagon to fall faster and knock over Nick and Nathan.

If only he had a pair of fingerless gloves

Nathan looks like he's about to fall to his death, but he's too pretty to die so he's saved by the witch single-handedly--literally.  Instead of being grateful to the girl for saving the only thing making the movie worthwhile however, they just become convinced of the fact that she's a witch because how else could a silly woman have the strength to save a man?  Even the ones who wanted to give her a fair trial now just want her dead.

Never let go Jack!

The guide thinks they should just kill her immediately, so the witch does the only sensible thing to do and calls down a pack of demonic wolves to kill him. They let the rest of the group escape, though.

She's clearly team Jacob

Nick Cage finally decides that he's had enough too and tries to kill her, but Sidekick talks sense into him and tells him to wait for the monks because they're almost there.  They can see the town from the path even (convenient what with their guide being dead and all.)  So they make it to the town only to discover that they're too late and all the monks are already dead leaving behind nothing but more disgusting corpses.

Missed them by this much!

 But wait!  That's not all!  A dying monk points to a table where they find that they also get a fabulous jewel-encrusted book of magic!  All this for the low, low price of their lives.  They decide to use the book and the rope-burned priest to perform the ritual to finally kill the witch that has been spreading plague across the land.

This thing looks pretty long guys, I don't think we have time to read it..let's just skip to the end

So they go out to perform the ritual and kill the witch...but this movie won't die that easily!  They soon discover that it is not a witch but a girl possessed by the devil.  Of course!  Even witches are still women at heart and no woman could have outwitted them.  She clearly has to have a man lending her power!  She's a poor innocent possessed waif prime for saving.

This is what happens when you go to bed without cleaning off your makeup

The devil conveniently leaves them to re-group for a while so that Nathan can nobly decide to remain even when he is told to leave the demon slaying to the big boys.  For this gesture he gets the knighthood he has craved for so long.  Meanwhile they figure out that the devil wanted to come here all along to destroy the magic book, which he why he made the girl look like a witch.  They come upon monks who were trying to copy it out as they died and vow to protect it to save the world.  It's final showdown time.

Now repeat after me: Ni!

So the devil appears and reanimates the corpses of the monks which then need to be decapitated to be stopped.  Witches, werewolves, zombies, demons they're firing the big guns for this movie! So they fight to destroy the zombie demons and also, the library.  Those gorgeous manuscripts are just thrown about and shredded in ways that will give me nightmares tonight.  The posse members die off until eventually the priest reading the incantation to kill the devil is killed.  With him gone and Nick Cage in the clutches of the devil it seems as if the day is lost.

Nick Cage being strangled by the devil aka the best part of the movie

But unfortunately even the devil is prone to the supervillain weakness of having to explain your motives to your enemy to delay the hero's death.  That allows Sidekick enough time to apparently come back from the dead in a non-zombie fashion and make one last quip and save Nick Cage before dying for realsies.  Nathan meanwhile remembers that as an altar boy he knows latin too and takes up the book to kill off the devil.

Saving the day by reading...that's my boy!

Nick Cage holds off the devil so Nathan can read in peace and the devil stabs him repeatedly with his wing claws.  Nothing can stop Nick Cage though so he holds off until Nathan finishes his chapter like a true gentleman.  I wish I had someone protecting me from interruptions like that!  So the devil dies and shortly thereafter, so does Nick Cage.  Like a good anti-hero he dies promptly after finding his redemption and leaves living to the young and innocent (except for that accidental impaling incident.)

Whoever pulls the sword from the stone will...no wait wrong story

The girl turns out to be a helpless waif after all who is super thankful for being saved.  She is left to tell the story, and presumably to thank Nathan for saving the world.  I assume they end up together because women are clearly nothing but objects to be possessed in this movie.  And they all lived forever scarred by the images of the disgusting plague-riddled zombies.  Except for the people who already died.  The End.