[WGH]

Prisoners of the Ghostland is not a film for everyone. Japanese director Sion Sono is not well known in the West, in Japan he is a cult arthouse director that has directed 53 films over 37 years, each one exploring taboos.

“Movies need poison”, or so claims Sion Sono, the renegade arthouse director who has cemented a reputation over the past couple of decades as the enfant terrible of Japanese cinema.
Brought up on a diet of B-movies, horror and porn after running away from home to write poetry, the workaholic filmmaker has, with little surprise, made it his mission to challenge perceptions of taste through his transgressive brand of cinema.¹



"Few directors court and conduct on-screen chaos like Sion Sono. The wild (and wildly prolific) Japanese filmmaker-poet has to his name 50-odd directorial ventures across film and television, including a lurid four-hour “upskirt-photography epic” (“Love Exposure”) [ his #1 rated film ] , a sung-through yakuza gangsta-rap musical (“Tokyo Tribe”), and a J-horror satire about haunted hair (“Exte”). And those are his more accessible films: dig deeper into the Sono catalog at your own pleasure and peril.

"So giddily unrestrained and uniquely fused are Sono’s films that attempts to pull a unifying thread through them all seem doomed to failure, though the anarchic, wink-nudge tilt of his artistry regularly lands him in perverse and profane territory. As likely to explore taboo subjects of pedophilia, abuse, and incest as he is to pause his plot for an out-of-nowhere musical number or graphically dismember a main character, Sono often treats extremity as a goal in of itself, puncturing stereotypical perceptions of Japanese culture as unfailingly polite to establish a cinema of visceral audience reaction."²





So it seemed inevitable that Sono and Cage would make an East-meets-West dystopian Samurai Western atomic waste hybrid film together. An unrestrained Sono combined with the gonzo Cage make a film that is such an over the top, electric, genre mash-up that it exists in it's own unhinged universe. This a Grade B movie on steroids.

Nicholas Cage plays Hero, a violent bank robber who is tasked to rescue the Governer's daughter who is trapped in the Ghostland, a place where time has stopped. The movie trailer will give you a small hint of what you are in for. Sofia Boutella (Settlers, Atomic Blond, Star Trek Beyond) co-stars as Bernice, the lost daughter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6p1yxZ_LE



IndieWire has a review that was originally published at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
https://www.indiewire.com/2021/01/prisoners-of-the-ghostland-review-1234612091/

Amazingly, Prisoners of the Ghostland get a 75% rating on RT
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/prisoners_of_the_ghostland

 


¹ https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/12749/five-controversial-arthouse-features-japanese-filmmaker-sion-sono-bfi-japan-2020
² https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/magical-feelings-of-east-meets-west-sion-sono-on-prisoners-of-the-ghostland