- Directed by Sion Sono
- Written by Aaron Hendry, Reza Size Safai
- Stars Nicolas Cage, Sohia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWwzX69t3Mc
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
There’s a rough story among the chaos and weirdness of this one. There are zombies, but it’s more of a surreal adventure tale that seems to be inspired by a Manga with an extra dose of weirdness. Nic Cage fits right into this oddity of a movie. All the cast does a great job in fact.
Synopsis
Nic Cage, as Hero, robs a bank in modern-day Japan. Bernice and two friends escape from the governor’s house and get into a car. She wakes up in an industrial, post-apocalyptic setting. Credits roll.
Hero wakes up tied to a chair in what appears to be an old west setting populated entirely by Asian people. The governor arrives and they drag Hero out of the sheriff’s office. He explains that his granddaughter Bernice has gone missing. He wants Hero to go and retrieve her. They stop for a brief musical number.
The road outside the immediate area is populated by bandits, or maybe ghosts. The governor explains that the suit he just gave Hero is loaded with explosive devices. If Hero doesn’t pay along and rescue Bernice, he’s going to explode. If he does, he’s free. Hero dumps the fancy sports car given to him and takes a kid’s bicycle instead.
He soon crashes and wakes up in the same industrial weirdness that we saw Bernice in earlier. This is the Ghostland, a land of no escape. He soon finds Bernice and drags her away on a cart. Then his left testicle explodes.
We flash back to the bank robbery. His partner went berserk and killed everyone in the bank. Young Bernice was there and was shot in the leg; then she went home with the governor.
We return to the present, and zombies attack! No, wait, they all just vanished into thin air.
Yeah, I should have stopped with the exploding testicle thing, shouldn’t I? This movie is just a disjointed sequence of cool-looking but unconnected sequences of things happening. Lots and lots of stuff happens, but it doesn’t necessarily affect the story. The further it goes, the stranger it gets.
Commentary
It’s a very colorful mesh-mash of genres and ideas, sometimes funny, sometimes just weird. The costumes and visuals are complicated and fascinating. I would have guessed that it must have been based on a manga, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It certainly looks like one.
It looks like it was expensive to film. Most of it makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s really cool to see.