BEFORE: I'm willing to pay a couple bucks today and rent this one on iTunes, because last year I was trying to qualify a short animated film to become Oscar-eligible, and I was successful. In order to qualify it, the film had to be played for a week in one of six cities (used to be just L.A.) and it had to screen a certain number of times each day in a real movie theater (or, because of the pandemic, we could have just submitted a letter from a movie theater that they WANTED to screen the film, but couldn't because of COVID...). We could have screened the film in a big L.A. theater for an enormous sum - which was the back-up plan - but instead we found a great little indie movie theater in San Francisco, the Roxie, at literally the last possible minute. They graciously screened the film before several different films that were playing live in their theater that week, and one of those films was "Prisoners of the Ghostland". It was a great help, and I'm all about paying it back, umm, sort of. So, my thanks to the Roxie and my thanks to "Prisoners of the Ghostland" for helping our film become Oscar-eligible. The Academy voters spoke, however, and the film didn't make it to the short list (the list of 10 films from which the five nominations are chosen) but hey, at least we were eligible and I hear you've got to be in it in order to win it.
So, really, how could I complete the Nicolas Cage chain without this one? And I've got just two more after this one before I close this chapter of the book. March is over after today, so here are my format stats for March, and then I can get ready for April Fool's Day tomorrow:
9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Elizabethtown, Some Kind of Beautiful, Good Luck Chuck, How to Build a Girl, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Margot at the Wedding, Cellular, The Humanity Bureau
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): The Rules of Attraction, Get Over It, Shall We Dance?, Take Me Home Tonight, The Last Kiss, Free Guy, Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
6 watched on Netflix: Carrie Pilby, The Power of the Dog, Not Another Teen Movie, Red Notice, The Adam Project, Between Worlds
3 watched on iTunes: A.C.O.D., The Love Letter, Prisoners of the Ghostland
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Being the Ricardos
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Being the Ricardos
4 watched on Hulu: The Tomorrow Man, The Croods 2: A New Age, Running with the Devil, A Score to Settle
1 watched on Pluto TV: Bangkok Dangerous
31 TOTAL
That's half of March's films still coming in from cable - I've cancelled the cable at my parents' house but my DVR is still incredibly useful. Netflix had a good month, and so did Hulu - Nic Cage is very well represented on Hulu, much like Bruce Willis was the king of Netflix in January. Hey, to each his own. Tomorrow I'll post my actor links for April, and the other great news is that I found a path to connect Mother's Day and Father's Day - so as weird as this sounds, I've got a clear path right now to (I think) the first week of August. What a relief, then I just need to find a path from there to October 1, I don't want to get cocky but after the horror chain, it's just a short trip to the end of another perfect Movie Year, maybe?
THE PLOT: A notorious criminal must break an evil curse in order to rescue an abducted girl who has mysteriously disappeared.
AFTER: On one of the posters for this film, a quote from Nicolas Cage refers to it as "The wildest movie I've ever made", and I suppose that's really saying something. Maybe THIS should have been my April Fool's Day film, because it's really out there. It seems maybe a bit like another one of those post-apocalyptic films, like "The Humanity Bureau", maybe? Then again, I'm not sure - there are references to an accident involving nuclear waste, but this could be a reaction to the Fukushima of 2011, which was an earthquake and tsunami combination that led to a nuclear meltdown - wait, is that what happened? And this was already over TEN years ago? My, how quickly time has flown.
Then again, there's no real-world timeline here, the disaster could have happened any time, and this film could be set in the far future, the near past, or in some parallel timeline that never happened at all. The city depicted is called Samurai Town, and there are a lot of feudal-era Japanese costumes, a lot of swordsmen wearing robes, but hey, maybe they come back into fashion at some time in the future. Beyond the borders of Samurai Town is the Ghostland, a barren, irradiated area filled with crazy outcasts. The town is run by the "Governor", and Cage plays a man who's being held in prison for a bank robbery that happened some time ago, in which several security guards and bystanders were killed, including a young boy. This happened during one of those Japanese festivals where everybody wears masks and pretends to all be cats playing with balls, or something.
Cage's character is named Hero, which should give you a clue about what's going to happen - I suppose it was an ironic name for a bank robber (his partner in crime was named "Psycho"), but then when Hero is called upon to save the girl and perhaps even the town, it's just a little bit too on the nose, isn't it? He might as well have been called "Guy" or "Joe" like all the other everyman characters that Nic Cage seems to enjoy playing. Anyway, the Governor needs the help of Hero, because his granddaughter Bernice has run off with two other girls from the harem, and despite having a sheriff and more than a dozen deputies in this Japanese/Wild West posse town, for some reason only Hero can save the day. This could just mean that since he's a criminal, he's quite expendable.
BUT, if Hero can put on the weird-ass explosive leather outfit and find Bernice, then her voice saying her name will disable the explosives, and this will give Hero two more days to bring her back to town. If not, parts of the suit will start exploding on various timers, starting with two spots in the nether regions. Ouch. Jeez, why not just let the guy do the job, why do you have to strap him in to an explosive suit and put an arbitrary time limit on the rescue job? I guess that's what you call motivation, right? If you want to keep your balls, you'll rescue the girl right quick.
Somehow this body-suit can also "sense" when Hero is mistreating a woman, because that will also trigger the explosion of a testicle. Forget the Fukushima accident, I think this suit was built following the "MeToo" movement. Can you imagine the desired effect of putting Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein in this suit? They wouldn't last more than a few minutes...
Hero does find Bernice, out in the Ghostland, where people from Samurai Town apparently go to forget their problems, and get slowly encased in plastic and turned into mannequins, or something. There were some very creepy giant dollhouse-like tableaus out in the desert, and I couldn't tell which were robot mannequins, and which were people. What the hell is wrong with Japanese people, is this some kind of weird fetish thing? What could be so bad that somebody would allow themselves to be turned into a brain-dead mannequin?
Oh, wait, I get it - Bernice isn't the "granddaughter" of the Governor at all - why would he allow his actual granddaughter to work in a harem? Geisha girls aside, I think he's got a bunch of women that he calls "granddaughters" and they're all just his sex slaves. Their origin stories are actually all tied together, how Bernice met the governor during that bank robbery where Hero got arrested and Psycho went all, well, psycho.
There's a lot more here that I can't even really get into, because none of it seems to make much sense - why are all those men using a rope to keep a giant clock from moving, for example? I suppose this is some kind of metaphor, keeping time from moving forward, they're all stuck in the present and can't advance or something, but come on, wouldn't it just be simpler to turn the damn clock off? Or let it get hit by lightning, like in "Back to the Future".
I don't know anything about this film's director, Sion Sono, but apparently he's very popular in Japan for his eccentric horror and sci-fi movies, like "Suicide Club" and "Why Don't You Play in Hell?" It seems he got a bit of a bump when Netflix streamed his 2019 film "The Forest of Love", and well, if "Squid Game" can be the hottest show on Netflix, then why can't this Japanese director start reaching more movie fans in America? This film may not be my "cup of tea", but it's sure weird enough to become some kind of underground cult film in the U.S.
But damn, it sure is screamy - and women don't really come off well, they're all either prostitutes or hysterical freaks or both, there don't seem to be many "normal" women here, but, to be fair, all of the men are caricatures, too, they're all just warriors or corrupt politicians or jabbering scavengers. Once again, if you want to hide a book, put it in the library - if you want Nic Cage to appear normal, you've got to surround him with a bunch of over-the-top freaks. It's a solid plan.
Just think of this as "The Seven Samurai" minus about six heroes, or "Mad Max" where the hero's not quite so mad, just maybe a little pissed-off. Maybe this is "Brazil" without all the wacky British people, or perhaps this is "Waterworld", only, you know, without all the water and with more testicular explosions. But if this is another case where Cage's character is something of an amalgam of the characters he's played before - he's a bank robber, like he was in "Raising Arizona" and "Trapped in Paradise", then he's in prison, like he was in "Con Air", then an ex-con like in "Wild at Heart", and then of course he's got to rescue the girl and defeat the evil power, which is like every movie ever made, just not in this weird a fashion. This is definitely one of the biggest box office bombs ever, and not just because it got released during a pandemic - according to IMDB, it only made $68,000 in theaters. So why isn't it on Netflix or Hulu yet? Why the hell did I have to pay to watch it on iTunes? There's $4.99 I'll never get back.
Perhaps I made a mistake when I ordered the HD version on iTunes - because I got an error message that the film would be streaming at a higher quality than my computer would allow. As a result, the film froze about every 10 minutes, I guess my computer's buffering power wasn't strong enough to handle this ultra-HD version I ordered. Or, more likely, the computer couldn't handle this movie because of how weirdly terrible it is, and had to take a break every few minutes. I'm going with that.
Also starring Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Nick Cassavetes (last seen in "The Astronaut's Wife"), Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Young Dais, Charles Glover, Cici Zhou, Louis Kurihara, Tetsu Watanabe, Takato Yonemoto, Shin Shimizu, Matthew Chozick, Constant Voisin, Yukuza Nakaya, Koto Lorena, Canon Nawata, Hiroshi Kaname, Ilsa Levine, Makoto Nishimura, Grace Santos, Jai West (last seen in "Equals"), Emiri Kisaragi.
RATING: 3 out of 10 floating kabuki heads
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