As I mentioned in the Incredible Shrinking Man review, bad weather kept me away from the local multiplex this weekend. As such, I opted to go for some movies at home, and the second of the two I went for was something I found by chance: Prisoners of the Ghostland. I remember seeing it when I had a Shudder subscription (since dropped since I switched to AMC+ which includes Shudder) when I scrolled through their library, and this time I looked a little closer and found something involving Nicholas Cage going off to find someone in the Ghostland while held at swordpoint by various samurais and gunpoint by various Western types. Essentially, it looked like a very weird Nic Cage movie.
I’m generally down for the occasional weird Nic Cage movie when I’m in the right mood, and finding stuff by accident got me to Tale of Tales pretty much the same way, so why not?
Cage plays a character referred to as “Hero,” but many of the characters here don’t seem to have real names, so take that with a grain of salt. Regardless, Hero and his partner Psycho (Nick Cassavetes, director of The Notebook) were robbing a bank when a small child offered Psycho some gumballs, causing Psycho to kinda freak out and start shooting, killing several people including the child. Hero is later caught and tasked by the Governor of Samurai Town (Bill Moseley) to go into the mysterious Ghostlands and bring back the Governor’s “granddaughter” Bernice (Sofia Boutella). To give Hero the right amount of incentive, he is told to don a black leather suit with explosives on each arm, over his groin, and around his neck. If he tries to harm Bernice (or any woman really) in any way, the appropriate bomb will go off, and if he isn’t back within a certain number of days, the neck bombs will go off. If he returns Bernice safe and sound, the Governor will unlock the suit and deactivate the bombs.
From there, Hero is given a car and sent out into the Ghostlands, a mysterious zone said to be haunted. It’s mostly a bizarre hellhole that supposedly no one has ever come back from. The thing is, the Governor is obvious corrupt, and Bernice is not his granddaughter any more than any of the other captive women of Samurai Town that the Governor refers to as such are. And even if Hero can find Bernice, would she even want to come back? Hero can’t exactly force her to go because of the bombs. What even is the Ghostlands? And how much of what happened here is Hero’s fault?
OK, I went into this looking for a weird Nic Cage movie, and it certainly is that. This movie is the work of Japanese director Sion Sono. I’m not familiar with his work, but if Prisoner of the Ghostland is indicative of it, I may want to keep it that way. As much as the movie is weird, it also doesn’t have a narrative or characters that really grab me. For example, the Governor has a samurai-looking bodyguard named Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi), and I cannot say with any degree of certainty what side he is on. He breaks with the Governor late in the movie, but he still battles Hero when Hero returns to set things right. Psycho, a character that lives up to his name, is somehow someone Hero needs to apologize to. As weird as the movie is, it also doesn’t have enough of a narrative to really grab me.
Now, this all could just be the way Sion Sono works. I have no idea. And Cage has plenty of weird movies out there, especially as he decided at a certain point to embrace the weird. Face it: if you slap Cage’s face on a weird movie, people will see it just because it’s a Nic Cage weird movie. Sometimes that pays off with something like Mandy or Color Out of Space. But for me, it doesn’t work so well with Prisoners of Ghostland.
Grade: C
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