Director Sion Sono
Starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes & Bill Moseley
Rated MA
Score 6/6

Streaming on major platforms from November 3
DVD and Blu-Ray available from November 17

A notorious criminal must break an evil curse in order to rescue an abducted girl who has mysteriously disappeared.

It has been a while since I’ve last watched a Nicolas Cage movie, I will admit that the last movie I saw featuring Cage was Jiu Jitsu and I didn’t like it, so its good to see a Nicolas Cage movie that I liked. Like me I’m sure there is more then a few of you out there who are aware that Nic Cage is one of those actors who is more then willing to challenge his audience. One of the odd quirks of Cage’s performance was that in one of the fight sequences Cage’s character’s fighting reminded me of The Power Rangers.
I went into Prisoners of the Ghostlands completely unfamiliar with director Sion Sono’s work, come to think of it I wasn’t that familiar with most of the other actors cast in this either. What struck me about the movie was the craziness of it all, for most of the movie I found myself wondering just how crazy the characters in this movie where. Reading about this movie I found out that Cage has said that Prisoners of the Ghostland might be the wildest movie that he has ever made. The movie seemed to me as some sort of mashup of the Mad Max movies and John Carpenter’s Snake Plissken movies. This is a very stylised movie and even though there is a transition away from cinemas Prisoners of the Ghostland is one of those movies where you really should watch this on a large screen. I also loved how watching this was a chance for me to indulge in my fondness for ‘Cowboy Westerns’. I loved Yuzuka Nakaya as Susie she had a brilliant onscreen presence and was possibly one of the sanest characters even though she seemed the craziest. While Bill Moseley’s performance as The Governor reminded me of the character Merritt Farley from the 2020 movie News of the World.