You know that song “Holy Diver” by Dio? It has more of a plot than Nicolas Cage’s latest “effort,” “Season of the Witch.”

It’s a toss-up whether the last movie this bad this reviewer saw in theaters was “Date Movie” or “Malibu’s Most Wanted.” So much went wrong with the film that it’s difficult to pick one place to start.

The screenplay was by Bragi F. Schut, who first started pitching it back in 2000. Unfortunately for the viewers the dialogue is just plain hideous. Schut couldn’t decide on an idiom so a quarter of the movie sounds contemporary, a quarter tries to imitate previous films set in the Middle Ages and the remaining half sounds like someone regurgitating “The Lord of the Rings.” On top of that, it switches constantly, so one moment a character is saying something very 20th century, like “Let’s get the Hell out of here” and his very next line is something like “Ere darkness and peril envelope the Earth and the cries of the despairing ones become as numerous as the songs of the birds.”

It doesn’t help that the lines are delivered in the most boring manner possible. Would it really hurt Cage that much to give a flying care? He was out-acted by the computer-generated zombie monks.

The plot of the film is very direct: two knights are assigned to transport a suspected witch to an abbey for trial – and we know from the prologue that the witch is real and responsible for all manner of mischief and evil.

Unfortunately, neither Schut nor director Dominic Sena knew anything about the Medieval period. Perhaps the most glaring example of this comes at the beginning of the film where the Crusader army is about to attack the Muslim army and the knights are on foot. In fact, both armies are entirely on foot, as if cavalry was invented for stereotypical westerns and not thousands of years before the film takes place.

Probably the worst scene of the entire film takes place during the overlong Crusade montage: for five-ish minutes Behman, played by Nicolas Cage and his friend Felson (Ron Perlman), enjoy killing the Muslims, with the agreement that whoever kills the fewest during the battle buys the drinks afterwards. Then they attack a castle full of women and children and Behman runs his sword through a woman’s chest, leading him to question the Crusade and not want any more part in it. However, the Muslims are supposed to be Arabs (it really wouldn’t be surprising if it came as a shock to the filmmakers that the major Islamic powers in the Middle East during the 13th century were Turkish peoples – and therefore Caucasian) and the innocent women and children in the castle are white.

Once they return to Europe, specifically to a region identified as the “coast of Styria,” a region of Austria that has never, ever, ever had a coast, Behman and Felson discover that there’s been a huge plague and the Church believes a witch (Claire Foy) is responsible, so they have to take her to an abbey where the monks have a book called “The Key of Solomon” that they’ll use to defeat the witch and end the plague. In the movie the book contains rituals for exorcism and that kind of thing.

Now, “The Key of Solomon” is a real book. It dates back to the 14th or 15th centuries – some 200 years after the film takes place – and it does contain rituals, only they’re for summoning demons and forcing them to do your bidding and generally doing the things people accused of witchcraft were supposed to have done.

The Catholic Church does have a book for exorcisms. It’s called “The Roman Ritual” and by far the vast majority of it consists of prayers and blessings for the blessed sacraments and just about everything under the sun, including cheese, butter, bread and beer.

And it’s going to take a lot of beer to wash the foul taste of “Season of the Witch” out of your mouth, so you’d best get started.

Matthew M. Robare can be reached at [email protected].