Mumbles & Grumbles - Seventh Son

On our local movie theatre's schedule this week is Seventh Son, said to be based (almost imperceptibly as far as I can tell) on English author Joseph Delaney's 2004 Young Adult novel The Spook’s Apprentice ( U.K. style), titled in the USA The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch. The novel was first in The Wardstone Chronicles series; whether the film adaptation will also be first of a series remains to be seen. The movie Seventh Son itself will, as far as I'm concerned, remain to be seen!

"In a time long past, an evil is about to be unleashed that will reignite the war between supernatural forces and humankind. Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges), the last of the Falcon Knights, had imprisoned the malevolently powerful witch, Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), many years ago, but now she has escaped and is seeking vengeance. Summoning her followers of every incarnation, Mother Malkin is preparing to unleash her terrible wrath on an unsuspecting world. Only one thing stands in her way: Master Gregory. In a deadly reunion, Gregory comes face to face with the evil he always feared would someday return. He has only until the next full moon to do what usually takes years: train his new apprentice, Tom Ward (Ben Barnes) to fight a dark magic unlike any other. Man's only hope lies in the seventh son of a seventh son".
(See here)

Having read a little about the source material, the author and his English Lancashire background, I don't relish sitting through a film with mangled indiscriminate accents and nothing at all to anchor the tale to its origins.

The original story is grounded in historical fact. The area of mid-Lancasire in which the tale was set by Mr Delaney is famous for its medieval witches. Fully documented witch trials in Lancaster in 1612 lend authenticity. Joseph Delaney used real, though slightly adapted, local place names in his books, and culled the bare bones of his themes from local legends and ghost stories.

Half a century before Joseph Delaney's book was written, Robert Neill wrote his locally famous novel, Mist Over Pendle, first published in 1951, reprinted several times since. Now, there's a novel which ought to be made into a movie! It'd have to be done by the BBC for TV though, not by Hollywood! This a serious novel, dark and brooding in atmosphere - yet entertaining too. I read it long ago, when I lived, for almost a year, in the very area of Lancashire where witches once did what witches do. My parents, at the time, had a small cafe/snack bar in a town where Pendle Hill was nearby, clearly visible. Around 1959/60, between my stints working in hotel offices, I went to live there with my parents for a while, found a job as secretary/telephonist in a Rolls Royce Gas Turbine engineering factory in town, and was made familiar with the area's colourful local history. That part of Lancashire, around a town called Clitheroe, has the warmest, nicest set of inhabitants I've ever found, some gorgeous, rich Lancashire accents too. If locals do retain bits of witchy DNA, it has worked out well!

Back to Seventh Son. Knowing the land in which the film's source material was originally set, and the accent that goes with it, I could not stomach hearing Americans Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore using mangled hybrid accents, nor any of the younger, London born actors doing the same.

Films hardly ever portray their source novels closely, some even change the entire setting of a tale - but there are certain lines that ought not to be crossed, for me anyway. Among Rotten Tomatoes' reviews Variety's film critic Peter Debruge describes Seventh Son as: "An over-designed, under-conceived fantasy epic in which even topnotch contributors can't get the chemistry right, leaving Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore looking silly". I suspect even that critcism is way too mild.