Season of the Witch

Directed by Dominic Sena. Starring Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell, Robert Sheehan, Claire Foy, Christopher Lee, Ulrich Thomsen 15A cert, gen release, 96 min

FIRST, SOME trivia. The latest lowbrow potboiler from Nicolas Cage shares its name with the working title for Martin Scorsese's Mean Streetsand much of its plot with that of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.It hardly needs to be said that it's not quite up to the standard of those masterpieces, but, as rump-season eye-sludge goes, it could be worse.

Featuring a great deal of trudging and much messing about on rope bridges, Season of the Witchcomes across like a blend of Three Men in the Middle Agesand I'm a Crusader . . . Get Me Out of Here!. Fans of warty plague horror should find it just about endurable.

Cage stars as a Crusader who, after spearing one innocent maiden too many, returns to some generic European locale (Hungary has offered the tax breaks this time, it seems) to cleanse his soul and make peace with the church. Before long, however, he finds himself inveigled into transporting a suspected witch to some distant monastery. The authorities believe that the unfortunate young girl has caused plague to spread throughout the land and that the monks have the power to decommission the supposed lady sorcerer.

Hooking up with a monkey- faced thief (Stephen Graham), Cage and his best pal (the always reliable Ron Perlman) set out on their mighty horses. They ride and they ride and they ride. They ride some more.

Unusually for a low-rent slab of pestilent exploitation, Season of the Witchis, for most of its duration, somewhat short on drama and incident: if pony-trekking past Beckettian trees is your thing, then you will have an absolute ball.

Indeed, little about the film seems properly thought through. It’s one thing to have the American actors speak in their own accents, but why have Robert Sheehan (brave young buck) and Christopher Lee (decaying prelate) been persuaded to ape trans-Atlantic drawls? Perhaps they too are under the spell of some malevolent witch. Griselda of the Post-Christmas Slump?