Demons have eaten the souls - and possibly the minds - of Dominic Sena and Bragi Schut. That's the best explanation I can come up with for Season of the Witch, the spectacularly bad medieval horror film starring Nicolas Cage. The question for audiences at this one will not be whether it's good -- answered very quickly with a resounding 'no' -- but whether it will be bad enough to be enjoyed for camp value.

Cage and his bad hair star as Behman, a 14th century crusader who, after years of battle and multiple sieges suddenly realizes that - egad! - innocent people die in war! How did I not notice them at the end of my sword before? And so he leaves, choosing life as a deserter over continued service in the crusades, taking his friend Felson (Ron Perlman) and his weirdly mushroom shaped helmet with him. 

On arriving home -- or home-ish, it's never really stated where they are or where they're trying to get -- the duo find all is not well. The country is in the grips of the Black Plague. And also they're recognized in about five minutes and thrown in jail pending future hanging. Their only hope of survival: Agree to transport a beautiful young woman to a distant monastery where the local monks -- keepers of the only remaining copy of a legendary book of rituals -- will determine if she is the witch responsible for bringing the plague down upon the country. Cue magic!

It's tempting here to simply say that after the one-two of Bad Lieutenant and Kick-Ass, plus his surprisingly entertaining turn in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, that the universe has righted itself, re-consigning fun Nic Cage back to the scrap heap and bringing bad Nic Cage back out in his place. But the problems in Season of the Witch run much deeper than that.

We'll start with writer Bragi Schut, who simply never decides if he wants to write a serious period piece or some sort of modern action film that happens to be set in ancient times, instead switching back and forth between the two with no particular reason or pattern to it. Dialect changes. Speech patterns change. We go from formal pseudo-old English to Cage cracking unsmiling jokes about saving Perlman's ass. Scenes are copied badly from better films -- Felson and Behman's battlefield wager over who will buy drinks that night is lifted straight from The Lord Of The Rings -- and attempts at humour fail horribly. Character development is virtually non-existent with Schut seemingly having no clue how to make these people likable, going directly from years of mass carnage with Behman and Felson joking crudely about who's going to kill the most on the battlefield before groping the local women and then going straight to Behman's supposed crisis of conscience. Memo to writer: your character must have a conscience for it to be in crisis. He also seems to have no clue whatsoever as far as what he wants to say about the church's role in all of this, simultaneously positioning it as the source of great evil and violence while also playing it as the only possible hope against the violence with Behman both rebelling and supporting its activities. The writing is a horribly muddled mess.

And then we get to Dominic Sena. When the high point of your director's career -- by a mile -- is Swordfish, that's a sign you may have some problems in that department. Sena, clearly, is not an actors' director. That Cage is prone to going off the grid is not even remotely news at this point but a good director should either be able to rein him in or recognize when to simply hitch the cart to his horse and have everybody else follow where he's going. Sena should know this. They've worked together before. Unfortunately they worked together before on Gone in 60 Seconds and neither appears to have learned anything from the experience. Cage is all over the map and completely uncontrolled. But even beyond Cage every member of the entire cast -- a cast, it should be noted which includes a handful of well established talent with Perlman, Ulrich Thomsen, Stephen Graham and Christopher Lee plus rising up and comer Robert Sheehan -- appear to be acting in completely different movies and the failure to get this much talent on the same page rests squarely on the director.

But nobody really goes to a Sena movie for the acting, they go for the action. Too bad that's horrible, too. The supposedly epic crusade sequences early in the film look as though they were shot on green screen with a handful of extras with the backgrounds laid on in soft focus using Adobe After Effects, some string, a bit of gum and a lot of prayer that nobody would notice. I noticed. Probably because I kept looking at the backgrounds to keep from giggling at Perlman's silly helmet. Poor production values aside the action is poorly staged and completely lacking any oomph. There's no adrenaline to be found, no tension, just a bunch of people hitting their next mark, delivering a flat line and moving on to the next spot. The scares don't fare much better than the action, either.

Here's the thing. There actually IS a really good new action-horror movie set against the backdrop of church run witch hunts and the black plague. It's just not this one. It's Christopher Smith's The Black Death. That one hits our shores soon. See it instead.