Key Sentence:
- “Ghostland Prisoners” is a fantasy science-fiction comedy starring Cage as a bank robber punished with a grenade in his testicles.
“I don’t have money to buy food. Before I joined, a sect Zion Sono member informed me that food would be provided. I love eating there – but I don’t enjoy all the things that come with it. “To escape, he must join another sect.” Love Exposure and Suicide Club were greatly influenced by my experience there.
Cults and gangs, especially their interest in unaccompanied youth, can be found in Sonos’ filmography. In Love Exposure, Zero Church hunts down young loners who have lost love. At Noriko’s dining table, a 17-year-old girl runs into a stranger she meets online.
In the Suicide Club and the Forest of Love, students in Zion Sono uniforms hold hands and jump to their deaths. Finally, in Sono’s latest film, Prisoners of the Ghostland, a woman leaves her hometown. And home to live with the undead in a parallel world called Ghostland – destined to become a cult film in more ways than one.
Starring Nicholas Cage and Sofia Butela, “Prisoners of the Ghostland” is Sono’s first American film – with caveats.
The sci-fi crime comedy “Bonkers” was filmed in Japan, all the additions are Japanese, and the climax is the samurai sword. Chameleonic in its genre, supernatural western conjures raw humor women criticize the ergonomics of Cage’s penis with poignant reflections on Fukushima (time is frozen to prevent another nuclear explosion).
This is a Sion Sono film involving Nicholas Cage, not the other way around. “When I first met Nicholas Cage, he told me he was a huge fan of my films,” Sono said. I thought he would say something (better known) like Love Exposure.”
Sono, now 59 years old, started his career as a part-time poet and part-time porn maker. For two decades, however, Japanese provocateurs have specialized in portraying the breakdown of family dynamics. And traditional values in their homeland – be it incest, murder, or, in Exte, sexual fetishes for hair on corpses.
Sono calls himself “Anti-Ozu” and claims that a natural Japanese household resembles an Ozu drama. But when I spoke to him on Zoom in early September, he said, “Maybe I said something like that during the interview. I’m not entirely against Ozu, but I do have some reservations. “
However, “Prisoners of the Ghostland” is the story of Sono from Tokyo, not Ozu. In a sign of the absurdity of the plot, Cage plays Hero. A convicted bank robber imprisoned in the mixed East-Meeting-West, Samurai city. However, the governor (Bill Mosley) gives Hero a shorter sentence to save Beatrice’s missing granddaughter (Boutella).
The trick? The Hero is strapped to various bombs that detonate if they last longer than five days or, in the case of a grenade on his testicles. When little Nick gets too excited in his Cage – after the initial encounter with Beatrice, the Hero has a literal Explosion in his pants.