Prisoners of the Ghostland

Nicholas Cage is a great actor. I think this film will be added to his long list of weirdly movies.

If you ever wanted to watch a Nicolas Cage neo-western meets Mad Max, this is the one. I am not sure what I watched, though. It has the problems of an amateur movie where the ideas are great in writing, awful in the sequence they were written, making barely any sense what is unfolding. If properly directed, rewritten a bit to follow a cohesive narrative, it'll be way better. The universe building relies too much on the viewer to smoke the pipe or something, to like it.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is not your usual movie but more like an intriguing fresco that is certainly not for everyone. At the very least, the film is bold enough to build its own self-justified and surrealist world, with its specific aesthetic

This is like the middle ground of direct to video Cage and Mandy-Color Out Of Space renaissance Cage. Glad I saw it but confident I'll never watch it again.

🍀 3.8/10 Nick is good but underutilized and the sets great. But it ultimately gets lost in the excruciatingly slow pace and lack of movement. There's ideas that work although aren't fully fleshed out to its full potential. Grade C

Do the Japanese like being portrayed as being weird and stereotyped in so many Western world film?

I've walked out of two movies without finishing them in my whole life (32) and they were Seth Macfarlane's Ted and Prisoners of Ghost Town. I would struggle to recommend a worse movie. I made it to 50 minutes but had I gone in theaters I would have left and asked for a refund after 10 minutes. First it is the most thematically confused garbage, even for a grindhouse style film. Set in a samurai, western, sci fi, nuclear apocalypse, and mad max universe, and believe me I get that it's supposed to be absurd, but rather than these concepts fusing into a unique setting it's more like 5 distinct ideas that couldn't be fleshed out into their own move and each theme clashes so much with the rest that it's constantly reminding you that you're watching a bad movie. Second, the action is boring. It's very infrequent, short, and not flashy. Third, it's pretentious art house garbage presented as a grindhouse film. I could keep going, it's slow, it's boring, it fails to immerse, and the pacing is terrible. I would recommend it only as a punishment, get someone you hate to watch it and when they talk about quitting keep saying "Don't worry it's about to get good" but it never does. The UN would make this illegal and on par with white phosphorus.

Not sure why all the hate. I thought the movie was good, Japanese samurai crazy mad max western type of movie. Its worth watching if you like the mad max style world with weird clans and tribes and hero saving the day.

Disjointed sums this one up. It was like Mad Max meets Japan, except, not good. I think I said, "what is even happening?" 40 times in the 1 hour and 42 minute run time. It was a weird Cage movie but without the redeeming qualities.

The Director went way overboard on the symbolism and metaphors at the expense of pretty much everything else that makes a great movie. The movie is visually stunning but will most likely leave you extremely confused.