The Season Of The Witch (2011)

I'd been awaiting Season Of The Witch to drop onto DVD since I first saw trailers for it in 2011, as it looked to share the grim and gritty stylings of last year's Black Death (with Sean Bean), but with the added bonus of actual monsters for the knights to fight.

And it is like The Black Death - being set around the same time - and even has a whiff of The Name Of The Rose about it, yet despite this - and a reasonably stylish final conflict - there's no escaping the fact that Season Of The Witch is ultimately a very humdrum film.

It's not bad per se (if you like this sort of pseudo-Dungeons & Dragons, medieval adventure romp - which I do), it just could have been so much better.

At times it almost feels as though everyone is simply going through the motions to get the film wrapped up and finished so they can get on and do other things.

Nic Cage and Ron Perlman are a couple of disillusioned crusaders who desert the battle front after being ordered to slay women and children.

On their way home they stumble across a town in the grip of a virulent plague and are charged by the local Cardinal (Christopher Lee) with transporting a young girl (Claire Foy) to a remote monastery, where she can be tried for witchcraft and rituals performed to purge the disease from the land.

At first Nic doesn't believe she's a witch - despite demonstrations of her supernatural physical strength - but as the six-day cross-country journey progresses, and members of their party start being killed, he begins to change his mind.

However, it's not until the group of travellers reach the monastery that the truth of the situation is revealed.

There are some nice touches in Season Of The Witch, with the most important being the undermining of the typical cliché of this genre that the Church has been torturing an innocent girl (because it's not that straight forward and I rather wish more had been made of this during the progress of the story).

However the obstacles the group have to face along the way seem rather underwhelming, despite director Dominic Sena's attempts to up the stakes - the "rickety, old wooden bridge that looks like it won't support your weight" has been done to death (was anyone surprised that it fell apart AFTER they got across?) and what was with the pack of wolves that mysteriously transformed into slightly more aggressive wolves?

Ex-Misfit Robert Sheehan turns in a solid performance as the runaway choir boy who wants to be a knight, Ulrich Thomsen is superb as the grizzled, but reliable, man-at-arms and Stephen Campbell Moore is surprisingly good as the priest Debelzaq, who travels with them. Initially it is clear that we are supposed to see him as the enemy, but as the plot develops and he protects the witch from a summary execution, you realise that he truly believes in justice and not just simple vengeance.

However, it's Cage and Perlman - names I usually associate with memorable performances - that are phoning it in for most of the movie's 90 minutes. And the monsters (even the zombie monks) were rather a case of too little, too late.

Outlander (2008)

Some ideas are so obvious - and brilliant - that you're surprised that no one has thought of them before.

As far as I am aware, Outlander is the first film to pit Eighth Century Norse Vikings against an extraterrestrial monster!

Jim Caviezel is Kainan, the sole humanoid survivor of a crashed spaceship in Norway, but he soon discovers that an alien Moorwen has tagged along - the dragon-like beasts that his race have been fighting - and it's rampaging around the woody neighbourhood.

Kainen is captured by Viking warrior Wulfric (Jack Huston) and taken before king Rothgar (John Hurt).

The "outlander" tries to convince the locals of the Moorwen's existence, but they prefer to blame the attacks on a giant bear.

Matters are further complicated by the return of Gunnar (Ron Perlman) and his troops, who believe Rothgar's men raided their village while they were away trading - little realising it was the Moorwen.

Rothgar's warrior daughter Freya (Sophia Myles, of vampire detective series Moonlight and Doctor Who's Girl In The Fireplace) takes a shine to Kainan, despite Wulfric's desire to have her, but Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain's script manages to sidestep the cliched love triangle sub-plot by, instead, focusing on the grudging respect that grows between Wulfric and Kainan.

Opening with suggestions of Predator and even the original Planet Of The Apes, Outlander quickly develops into a superb Dungeons And Dragons-flavoured "man against monster" movie and a strong contender for the title of Top Film Of 2009!

The excitement is non-stop, the battle scenes are superb, with just the right dash of gruesome (there's one particularly shocking decapitation which caught me by surprise) that culminates in a tense engagement between the Vikings - led by Wulfric and Kainan - and the Moorwen in the beast's charnel lair.

What helps to elevate this story above the usual fare though is the backstory of Kainan and the Moorwen which reveals that Kainan's people aren't really the "good guys" when you view the larger picture and it was their treatment of the Moorwen that provoked the whole situation in the first place.

There are a few minor plot wobbles along the way - Freya seems almost indestructible whenever she is cornered by the man-eating beastie and there is some ridiculously fast sword-making by the Vikings when they are preparing for the final showdown - but these are trivial issues compared to the sheer thrill ride of the movie as a whole.

Jim Caviezel is a solid action hero while the ever-reliable Ron Perlman and John Hurt both bring their A-Game in roles that were made for them.

A simple, without being simplistic, script, delivered by great actors on top form, aided by slick special effects and a particularly imposing monster, make Outlander's 110 minute duration pure entertainment of the highest calibre.

In The Name Of The King - A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)

Forget whatever prejudices you may have against Uwe Boll for his previous crimes against cinema, forget whatever you've read about his eccentricities and conviction that he was the world's greatest film maker.

If you approach In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale with an open mind, you might actually realise that it's a cracking swords and sorcery romp.

Sure, it lifts a lot from Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, but films and books have been ripping off Tolkien for years, even before Jackson's sublime films.

However, despite running about a half-hour too long and having a dialogue quota of two cheesey lines for every decent one, In The Name Of The King certainly ranks as one of my favourite "Dungeons & Dragons" films of the Noughties.

Based on a video game I was totally unaware of, the film has Jason Statham as a lowly farmer (with the required "secret destiny") - called Farmer, for reasons too dull to go into - whose village is attacked by the Krugs, a race of cut-price orc wannabes controlled by the wonderfully evil sorcerer Gallian (Ray Liotta).

Gallian has also seduced Muriella (Leelee Sobieski), the young fighter/magic-user daughter of the King's advisor, the magus Merick (John Rhys-Davies), and has convinced the king's foppish nephew Duke Fallow (Matthew Lillard) that his Krugs will aid him in a coup.

The King, by the way, is Burt Reynolds.

The Krugs carry off Farmer's wife, Solana (Claire Forlani) and so aided by his old friend Norick (Ron Perlman) and Solana's brother he sets off in pursuit.

Meanwhile King Burt gets poisoned and a civil war breaks out.

On his travels Farmer meets some rather naff, bungee-vine-swinging "wood elves" (led by the gorgeous Kristanna Loken), who seem one of the more unnecessary elements in the film, gets captured by the Krug and meets up with Merick - who reveals that Farmer is, in fact, King Burt's son.

With Reynolds, Liotta, Lillard and Rhys-Davies all vying for a piece of scenery to chew, the film reeks of ham, but this adds to its harmless charm.

However, whenever Doug Taylor's script tries to tug at the heartstrings (such as the King's death scene) it is at its weakest, but luckily there's plenty of action and fighting to paper over these cracks. For instance, the climatic wizardly duel between Merick and Gallian, I would say, is less risible than the break-dancing challenge between Saruman and Gandalf in Fellowship Of The Ring.

The big battle scenes between Burt's boys and the Krug probably could have been trimmed and odd gimmicks, such as the burrowing Krug and the King's unit of Chinese wuxia skirmishers, are never really developed or even explained, but, for the most part, at least this film is never dull.

Great CGI scenery and pretty classy special effects help to elevate this above the normal straight-to-video swords and sorcery fare of yesteryear. 

It may not be 100 per cent original, and despite the title there are no "dungeons" and no "sieges", but I really enjoyed it and could happily see myself watching it again.

Although there were no large monsters in it, it certainly felt more Dungeons & Dragons-y than either of the first two 'official' Dungeons & Dragons films, from around the time this was made.

As a gamer I always look at this genre of film to see what I can take away from it. As Taylor and Boll have lifted from Tolkien and Jackson (and probably countless other sources), I reckon I can lift ideas from In The Name Of The King. I don't think I could ask for much more from such pulp fare.

Hellboy - The Crooked Man (2024)

It's the late 1950s and, following a train accident, Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and rookie Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense researcher Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph aka Agatha from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) find themselves stranded in the Appalachian Mountains.

They soon become entangled in the life of Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), an ex-soldier and former resident of the area who has returned to try and undo a pact he made with a demon when he was a child.

Initially, they accompany Tom to visit his former childhood sweetheart, Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), who has since become a witch.

Tom explains to the BRPD agents that he had been seduced by a witch called Effie Colb (Leah McNamara) who had taight how to create a lucky totem and urged him to summon a local demonic ghost-entity called The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale).

Cora returns to her home, telling Tom and the agents that she is being persued by other witches... and it tunrs out that they are being led by Effie, who looks exactly as she did when Tom met her all those years earlier.

She is riding a white horse that turns out to be Tom's transformed father (Anton Trendafilov), who promptly dies when Effie is scared away by Hellboy.

Tom wants to take his father to the nearby church, to be buried in consecreated ground.

However, on the way they are attacked by a demonic snake that kills Cora and injects Hellboy with its toxin, causing him to have hallucinatory visions of his mother, Sara (Carola Colombo), herself a witch.

At the church, the group - meeting the blind Reverend Watts (Joseph Marcell aka the legendary Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) are besieged by The Crooked Man and his coterie of witches.

Through some clever magic, our heroes manage to repel the supernatural attackers.

Hellboy and Tom then chase after The Crooked Man to the abandoned mansion that was once his home, while Jo and The Reverend head into the old mines that crisscross the mountain, believing that that is the source of The Crooked Man's power.

Working from a screenplay co-written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) and Christopher Golden, his frequent collaborator, director and co-writer Brian Taylor serves up a Hellboy movie unlike any that have come before.

I have to confess that, for all my decades as a comic book reader, I might have only read a handful of single Hellboy issues and they've never really hooked me as Guillermo del Toro's early 2000's pulpy Hellboy duology did.

But, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, an adaptation of a 2008 Hellboy mini-series of the same name by Mike Mignola, steps away from the superheroic blockbuster nature of the del Toro era and leans, instead, heavily into Hellboy's horror roots. 

It's of a smaller scale, and more focused on its single driving narrative, than we might be used to - cinematically-speaking - from movies involving Hellboy and his compadres in the BPRD.

But have no doubt, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a phenomenal down-and-dirty work of  mesmerising, disorientating weird Appalachian folk magic that has more in common with the works of HP Lovecraft (who gets namechecked) and atmospheric films like The Blair Witch Project, Night of The Demon, The VVitch, and Evil Dead.

If you know my taste in horror then you can see why I loved The Crooked Man.

The verisimilitude of the world created is second to none, relying mainly on practical effects, and proving you don't need a honking big Hollywood budget to produce memorable horror movies.

While this is very much its own thing - officially unconnected to del Toro's wonderful flicks and whatever the dickens that 2019 mess was - I could see an argument for Jack Kesy's charismatic Hellboy being a younger version of Ron Perlman's take on the character.

I can also see why The Crooked Man might not be for everyone, but given that this was co-written by the character's creator, I have to believe that this is the closest iteration of Hellboy to the source material.