I admit, going into the opening show of Nicholas Cage’s new movie Season of the Witch had me nervous. Between the fact that the movie had been delayed as many times as it had, and Nic Cage was in it (and let’s face it, Nicholas Cage can really only do a good movie maybe one time in every, oh, three or four), there was reason for concern. But Season of the Witch gave me a surprisingly good time.

Season of the Witch follows a pair of knights, recently enrolled in the service of the Catholic church to go off and kill people in the Crusades. But after a particularly disastrous romp involving the killing of women and children, knights Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) decide to turn deserter instead. They’re quickly found and pressed into service to escort an accused witch to a monastery where, hopefully, killing her will put an end to the Black Plague. The knights agree to do this, on the condition that the accused witch be given a fair trial (which, back then, usually ended in death regardless of the verdict) and that’s where the whole thing goes wildly off the rails.

I was actually pretty surprised by this; it’s not every day you get a 14th-century (give or take) period drama mixed with a buddy movie and then put on the road. And anything that even smacks of originality these days gets bonus points by my standards, and Season of the Witch at least smacks of originality.

It does a pretty fair job of keeping up the suspense–there’s a nice sort of “is she or isn’t she” interplay going on in here, and while it certainly could have done a better job than it actually did, it didn’t completely drop the ball. And for a Nic Cage movie, “didn’t completely drop the ball” is about the same as “incredible super-great achievement” for some movies. There are a couple other ways this could have gone, and frankly, I would’ve liked to see them instead of the relatively predictable romp we got here. But still, what’s done is done, and this is done halfway decently.

So I was left pleasantly surprised, and had a good time out of this low-rent, heavily flawed popcorn muncher that still did at least a passably good job of putting up a passably good story. Cage and Perlman do serviceable work here, and frankly, if you’re comparing this to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, as some did, you’re overthinking this by a factor of way too damn much.

It’s not every movie, after all, that will bring you zombie monks and flying demons–all I could think toward the end was how awesome it was that someone had actually filmed Berke Breathed’s “Nun Munchers From Hell”, as he once suggested in a Bloom County strip. I would have liked more originality, and it certainly could have happened, but this could have been much worse than it was.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Season of the Witch a thoroughly passable six out of ten for being strictly passable on most every level. Enjoy your gentleman’s C, Nic Cage, because for your filmography, they don’t seem to come around too often.