Prisoners of the Ghostland

After watching this movie I joked with my wife about coming to RT and writing a convincing review falsely claiming this movie is good and that people who don't like it "just don't get it", but to be honest I didn't have the heart. This movie is seriously awful. We're talking the type of unmitigated disaster that even booze can't help. I'm saying this as someone who watches a lot of really bad stuff and usually still has fun - Watching this movie was torture, and I squirmed through the entire thing.

Not good, at all. Makes little sense but is worth a watch if you enjoy bizarre Nick Cage films.

I have a high tolerance for these deeply strange Japanese-made genre movies. But whereas a director like Takashi Miike can pull off an absurdly surreal story and somehow make you suspend your disbelief, this movie couldn't hack it. I can't emphasize enough that even if you like "weird for weird's sake," like I do, you may find this movie boring. Samurai, cowboys and other non sequiturs mill about menacing each other unconvincingly. You can get as weird as you want with your screenplay as long as the characters act like human beings with motivations. From the very first scenes, characters in "Ghostlands" act in random ways for mysterious reasons. I also think the screenwriters needed dialogue help from a native English speaker, because the English dialogue sometimes sounds like it was badly translated or written by AI. One example: Immediately preceding the opening title, a prisoner inexplicably shouts, "I am not a prisoner." Or how about "You will be my clock until Bernice returns." Of course, the Japanese dialogue is only legible by comparison. Some of the visual design and choreography is interesting, and Nicolas Cage always puts in a respectable performance. But there's really not much here to enjoy. The pacing is slow, so you have time to really take in the baffling dialogue and thin characterization. Even if you're a fan of bizarro cinema or Nick Cage, I suggest you look elsewhere for a good time.

With a bigger budget this film could of went a long way. I feel like with this concept you need to go all out with CGI, set designs etc and it just wasn't there at all, definitely felt like it was trying to be a Hollywood blockbuster on a straight to DVD level.

I love Nicholas Cage, but this has got to be the one film he regrets doing.

No idea what I just watched, someone should check the metal health of the people in charge of production.

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.