"Prisoners of the Ghostland" Review - From the Facebook Vaults!

 "Prisoners of the Ghostland"

This is maybe the most normal Sion Sono movie, and only 8th weirdest thing to happen in this one

In Japan, a mysterious spillage of nuclear waste rendered a small region into a wasteland. Ruling over "Samurai Town" is The Governor (Bill Moseley), a white-clad cowboy with a personal harem of "granddaughters" and his loyal samurai bodyguard Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi). When The Governor's "granddaughter" Bernice (Sofia Boutella) goes missing in this wasteland after a late night joyride, he enlists a notorious prisoner (Nicolas Cage) to get her back. But there are caveats: he is equipped with a suit which will detonate his testicles if he attempts to violate her, and destroy his arms if he tries to strike a helpless woman, as well as ones which which simply kill him if she does not speak her name into a device after 3 days. Thus "Hero" embarks on an odyssey of the strange, a Gonzo-mashup of genres, venturing into the unknown...

In case you couldn't tell from that, this is a Sion Sono film. If you don't know who Sion Sono is: he's when Takashi Miike goes to film school and tries to enter Cannes. There is his visual flair on display here: lots of bright colours, some comedy sound effects (bells ring whenever Nicolas Cage is kicked in the testicles) and the entire film reads like a parody of the macho-hero genre, and of "Escape from New York" in particular, with some "Toxic Avenger" and old school samurai movies tossed in for good measure.

It's marketed as the craziest thing Nicolas Cage has ever done (and indeed has a quote on the box from the Lord himself stating as much) and it indeed is a wild ride, but honestly it's quite tame for Sion Sono. For a start it's one of his shortest movies, and the most comprehensible and straightforward (a pulpy movie about redemption and "reawakening" but with the class system and inequality sprinkled in) in the lunatic's ouevre, but for Cage I will confess this does give us some highlights and reminds us why he is great in action movies (screaming about his testicles in front of a clock tower, having a wrist-blade fight with a samurai, and screaming "Hi-FUCKING-yah!" not once but twice), there is some solid gold for fans of Cage both serious and memetic.

But the film is a lot better than it needs to be with the premise it has, and I actually give it a good rating!