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Season of the Witch poster from IMP Awards

Way back in early 2011, I thought I wanted to see a movie that looked like it was a wild witch hunt starring Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman. I thought Season of the Witch would have all the excitement and action the actor’s presence heralds, but all hope was lost when the film started out with a history lesson about the Crusades.

Except it wasn’t a history lesson. It was a string of poorly read Wikipedia articles mixed with the common conceptions of what happened in the Salem Witch Trials. If the movie was meant to be a “historical paranormal” movie, someone went very far off the rails. Trying to tie the Crusades and the Inquisition is very hard, since they occurred for very different reasons.

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Open Doors originally uploaded by Federica Marchi.

I didn’t think I would ever come back to this world. After all the lies the government told me. After the nukes dropped in my backyard. I still came back. They would need me now that the world is half destroyed and the other half is sterile.

An open door is an invitation, or so they always tell me. The only locks on my shelter were on the inside to protect me from the terrors outside. Even now, I feel the weight of the rifle in my hands. It is a safe burden, but it does little to calm me.

To my left, I hear the bushes rattle. I fire a spray of bullets at my assailant and scream curses my mind discovered during my solitude.

“What the hell, man?” the bushes cry out. “What are you shooting at me for?”

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Thor poster from IMP Awards.

Anyone starting up a Thor film franchise has their work cut out for them. Spanning over 40 years and 800 issues of various comic books, the comic book hero alone is a daunting figure with an enormous history. Not to mention the fact that he is also a mythical being with yet another history to stay true to. With so many fans to quell, Thor manages to still be an amazing movie.

First of all, this isn’t the “official Thor.” It can’t be. As much as we would like the joy of seeing the much-lauded history of this figure on screen, is the overwhelming majority of the theater-going public willing to shell out cash for five movies worth of exposition? Probably not, so we are left with one very thick movie with a nice amount of action. Top it off with the promise of sequels and recurring villains and I’m sold.

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