New on Shudder: Sion Sono’s 'Prisoners of the Ghostland' Delivers a Disproportionate Mess

Hype is one of the most influential things a movie can have going for it. It can either damn its intended target or amplify what got people excited about it in the first place. This sets expectations for a lot of people, almost instructing them to be looking for something they deem worthy to cash in on however big the hype is. Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland has its hype going both ways, and for two wildly different personalities. People coming into this for a new Sono film will likely be disappointed. People in it for the Cage will have a few things to say about this movie, and depending on their mileage the dialogue surrounding his presence could range pretty broadly between boring and great.

Sono’s post-apocalyptic feature follows an unnamed protagonist as he robs a bank in a place named Samurai Town, and of course something goes wrong, leading to his imprisonment by the wealthy and equally flashy Governor (Bill Moseley). Our protagonist, whom most people call Hero in the film, is chosen by the Governor to rescue his granddaughter from the Ghostland, a lawless region well outside his jurisdiction. Sono seems eager to make this a patchwork film in the tradition of Escape From New York with the sexual elements and attempted sleaziness of Hell Comes to Frogtown, not to mention the obvious Mad Max riff. It’s nothing new.

GHOSTLAND and FROGTOWN are identical in that they both pose our protagonists testicular harm.

While Sono has the skill to turn something derivative on paper like this around into something fresh, exciting, and dangerous, he doesn’t manage to get there. One of the outliers in Ghostland is the direction of Cage and Moseley specifically. Both seem to be facing off in scenery-chewing contests, especially when they share the screen. But Cage just defaults to his wild-eyed faces and top-of-his-lungs yelling exactly when you think he would and Moseley strings out his dialogue to make it as cartoonish as possible, which serves as the extent of their emotional range in the film. It almost feels like they’re directing themselves.

The Governor’s territory of Samurai Town.

Even with something as simplistic as that could still be used by Sono to paint a picture of constants like Hero and the Governor against a changing background of society, not too much unlike what Carpenter did in New York. A place like Samurai Town, a rich haven lovingly done up like an old western town, and the Ghostland, a wasteland connected to a half-destroyed tenement, are positioned so near each other that they largely feel like two points on a map yet we never feel the impact of one over the other. The locations host very different structures in accommodation and quality but ultimately built in service to an ultimate form of hubris (with an expected focus on nuclear disaster that is cleverly woven into its own legend).

Tak Sakaguchi graces the film in two roles yet is not quite able to cut through with the mark Sono intended.

While Ghostland is Sono’s first English language feature he still seems to want to do more with his Japanese cast members. But the presence of Cage and Moseley actively contradict that instinct, restricting Sono’s nuanced weirdness to the background. Tak Sakaguchi’s involvement both as the stoic Yasujiro and as action director is a bright spot if still underutilized. Sakaguchi’s dual involvement and Sono’s visual flairs don’t fully push the film into the Samurai/Western hybrid that Sono is going for. His molding of the post-apocalyptic genre turns out to look just like all the others. It has some fun and interesting beats but just can’t stand apart from the other films it borrows from.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is available to watch streaming on Shudder.

[this article was originally published on november 29, 2021 on celluloidconsomme.medium.com.]