While trying to find something to watch some time ago the missus and I bookmarked a weird-looking (based on the trailer) trailer for a Shudder Original Nicolas Cage movie called Prisoners of the Ghostland. Tonight we actually got around to watching it. And afterwards we wished we hadn't.
Cage stars as Hero (movies aren't even trying anymore, are they?), a bank robber who while robbing a bank (hey, it's in the job title) with his co-robber, Psycho (Nick Cassavetes; what was I saying about names?), ended up with a lot of dead people is being held in a bizarre Japanese town which seems to be part brothel, part Western frontier town where the armed men either present as cowboys or samurais in service of the Governor (Bill Moseley, many Rob Zombie films), a white man who wears an all white suit and cowboy hat like Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard.
Governor wants Hero to find his "granddaughter" (read: escaped sex slave), Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and to keep him focused on his task he puts him in a swank leather suit with explosive charges on his arms and crotch (in case he gets any bad thoughts) and his neck (to kill him) and a five-day lifespan, the last two only if he finds the Bernice by the third day. Tick-tock, Hero!
As he sets off into the bizarre wasteland, he is captured and taken to an odd community built around trying to literally stop time by holding a rope attached to the minute hand of a clock tower. Again, while the people are mostly Japanese, the leader is a white guy. Hero learns of the nuclear accident that occurred there involving a prison bus and tanker of nuclear waste. By the time you factor in the choreographed background cultists dancing, it's all pretty wacky.
And it's also quite dull. Apparently director Sion Sono is a name in the Very Weird Movies genre (I only recognize a couple of his titles), but this, his first English-language movie, while being packed with weird, doesn't make much sense no matter how hard Cage tries to keep us focused. I was wondering if this was all some sort of journey to Hell parable, but it ultimately comes off as being just weird for weird's sake. By the time the final scenes with some action occur, they're welcome because they indicate the movie's almost over.
I can see why Cage signed on to this freak show (other than for the paycheck) and he doesn't phone in his performance, but there's not much of a character for him to play and he spends too much time unconscious and carted around from one weird spot to another. Boutella has even less to do other than be exotic looking and a flashback revealing how she got a scar and how it connects to Hero's crime confuses as to what sort of timeframe things take place in. Moseley's Governor is a cartoon, again due to the script.
While the setting and details clearly required thought and planning to execute, the underlying story is simply too thin, confusing, and ultimately irrelevant to merit the time to watch it. If you subscribe to Shudder, randomly flip through it and stop at random spots to see some weird.
Score: 2/10. Skip it (or just skip around the timeline to see some weirdness).
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