Should a film starring Ron Perlman not be taken seriously on the ground that it stars Ron Perlman?

The question fills one’s mind after seeing director Dominic Sena’s latest film Season of the Witch (2011). The film takes place in 14th century Europe and opens with the scene of a priest as he fumbles the burial rites of three women killed for the crime of witchcraft and is then killed by the demonically repossessed body of a dead witch. The film then jumps forwards several years following two forlorn veterans of the crusades: Behmen (played by Nicolas Cage, Kick-Ass, 2010) and Felson (Ron Perlman, The City of Lost Children, 1995, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008). After a series of medieval fight scenes that look a bit like scenes from the film 300 (2006), only on a Syfy channel budget, the pair abandon their careers of raping and pillaging in the Crusades to return to England. Once there, they are tasked with escorting a nubile young woman whom Saruman himself (legendary B-movie actor Christopher Lee) has accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death. What follows is a mildly entertaining mishmash of horror film and video game clichés as Behmen and Felson attempt to escort the nameless heroine to what they’ve been told will be a fair trial to see whether or not she is indeed possessed by the devil. Along the way Behmen and Felson encounter packs of giant computer generated wolves (cough, 300, cough), a rebellious knight in training portrayed by the actor Robert Sheehan (The Red Riding Trilogy, 2009), and the two find more then enough occasions to exchange throwaway one liners that were funnier when they were quite literally said the first time by Legolas and Gimli in The Lord Of The Rings films.

I, for one, really hope that films starring Ron Perlman are taken seriously because I sincerely feel that with one subtle, inexpensive change Season of the Witch could have risen above the unexplainable resurgence of the medieval genre films released over the past several months. I’m talking about Neil Marshall’s Centurion (2010), Christopher Smith’s Black Death (2010) also starring Sean Bean, Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle (2011), David Gordon Green’s much anticipated raunchy Dark Ages teen sex comedy Your Highness (2011) starring Danny McBride and James Franco, and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2010) also starring Sean Bean, to name a few. I put forth that within Season of the Witch is one monstrously toxic scene to which ninety-eight percent of the film’s quality can be attributed. Dominic Sena, director of such films as 1993’s Kalifornia, and, more recently, the unsuccessful 2009 filmic adaptation of Greg Rucka’s acclaimed graphic novel Whiteout, made a fascinatingly terrible creative choice. By showing the audience images of a computer generated witch-corpse attacking a village priest in the first scene of the film, Season of the Witch was killed in two significant ways.

First, this opening scene immediately designates that the universe in which this film is taking place in as one in which supernatural beings and demonic possession exist in the form of witches. By doing so, any suspicions Behman and Felson harbor toward their charge are rendered completely and utterly null. Had Sena not added this arbitrary scene to the opening of Season of the Witch, audiences might have spent the entire film wondering whether they were witnessing Cage and Perlman’s characters committing acts of historical prejudice in the name of the Catholic church, or if they where indeed being shown two medieval veterans fighting to the death to defeat Satanic evil. One wonders what appeal Sena saw in extremely quickly and effectively answering the question that the rest of the ninety five minute film spends asking.

Secondly, in immediately designating the universe in which this film is taking place in as one in which supernatural beings and demonic possession exist in the form of witches, the act of hanging three seemingly innocent women by Catholic troops then becomes a justified act. In other words, the scene validates witchcraft as existing, as being a threat, and supports the act of killing women suspected of witchcraft. In doing so, it also condones the killing and torture of thousands (typically females) by the Catholic Church throughout the Dark Ages, and also years later at the Salem Witch trials. Had Sena followed in the footsteps of Peter Weir’s 2003 naval epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, in which the mention of a cursed shipmate brings bad luck to a ship’s crew, he would have depicted dimensional characters, flawed and in possession of the false superstitions and cruel prejudices likely of people living in the Napoleonic era. At the price of losing the potential capital generated by movie tickets sold to the teenage video gamer audiences, Season of the Witch could have similarly commented on the trends of societal cruelty inherent in mankind’s history (or, at the very least, not vindicated the burning of Joan of Arc and the countless others killed throughout history simply by being labeled cultural “others”).

Had Sena not yielded to what I suspect was some form of misguided studio pressure and omitted the opening scene of Season of the Witch, audiences would have potentially been at the edge of their seats for the entire film, and (had the accused girl been found innocent yet still put to her death) Sena could potentially have woven a narrative with social commentary on par with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973). But don’t take my word for it as I’m both a huge Ron Perlman fan and would also see any film that obtained its psychedelic title from one of my favorite Donovan songs.