Fantasia Fest 2021 reviews: Exploding testicles, a J-POP musical, and sickening zombie ultraviolence

Prisoners of the Ghostland

Nicolas Cage teams up with Japanese director Sion Sono (Suicide Club) for the wild Prisoners of the Ghostland, a demented western meets samurai mashup bursting with eye-popping visuals and exploding testicles.

Cage stars as a violent armed robber (simply listed as “Hero”) who gets sprung from jail by a powerful warlord dubbed The Governor (genre legend Bill Moseley) to search for his adopted granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella). The deal is seemingly straightforward, but there’s a twist; The Governor offers Hero a shot at freedom if he can bring back Bernice, but to ensure he doesn’t hightail it, The Governor straps Hero with a number of bombs, including one next to each testicle.

With echoes of Mad Max, Hell Comes to Frogtown, and beloved Sergio Leoni westerns, Prisoners of the Ghostland sets off on a familiar narrative path while displaying Sono’s incredible sense of visuals and out-there stylistic choices. There are beautifully choreographed dance numbers, a striking design palette that mixes a post-apocalyptic desert landscape with classical Japanese flourishes, and an overall sensibility that feels completely unhinged and unique.

Set amidst all these incredible visuals is the always unpredictable Cage, who on this go-around is somewhere in the middle of his roles in Pig and Mandy in terms of the Cage shout-o-meter scale. Cage is mostly stoic and reserved here (fitting for a western), but he does get to unleash his true powers during one instantly memeable scene that has him screaming to the heavens from a mountaintop about his testicles.

It may not make much sense, but if you can align with Sono’s fluid approach to storytelling, the overwhelming visual style, and Cage’s intense performance, Prisoners of the Ghostland may be worth the journey. It’s a scattershot hodgepodge of ideas, genres, and tones, but it’s an often fascinating assault on the senses. For better or worse, there’s truly nothing else like it.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is in theaters and home video on September 17, 2021.

Love, Life and Goldfish

There’s something reassuring about the ambition behind Love, Life and Goldfish, a Japanese musical filled with rousing J-POP songs that feels intimate in both scope and concept.

Makoto Kashiba (Matsuya Onoe) is a banker at a top Tokyo firm but gets demoted following an outburst and is sent to work in a quaint Japanese town. Depressed about his new surroundings and worried about the impact the move will have on his social standing and career, his view changes when he meets Yoshino, the owner of a peculiar establishment where customers compete to scoop up goldfish. Makoto falls head over tails for Yoshino, and sets out to earn her affection by winning a goldfish scooping completion, a task that will force him to change the way he sees the world and his place in it.

Adapted from the Sukuttegoran manga, director Yukinori Makabe (I Am a Monk) delivers a well-crafted romantic comedy filled with catchy J-POP songs (and even some English rapping) about the need to remain open to life’s changes and live in the moment. The film eschews some of the grandeur of most musicals (either for budgetary or storytelling reasons) and instead focuses on Makoto’s evolution and the few friends (and rivals) within his new world.

There’s not that much to Love, Life, and Goldfish, which partly feels by design. It’s a charming and colorful film that will keep you humming along, the perfect palate cleanser when you’re over a dozen films deep in a festival that also features something as stomach-churning as The Sadness. (How’s that for an awkward transition?)

The Sadness

Taiwanese horror film The Sadness is the first film in Fantasia’s 25-year history to generate a trigger warning from the programmers, which is really saying something for a festival renowned for its adventurous audiences. Readers; the warning is well deserved.

Rob Jabbaz’s feature debut is a zombie film fit for these pandemic times. The Sadness is a bludgeoning, nihilistic, and sickening look at what it would be like if humanity’s worst instincts took over (the North American equivalent is, of course, Florida).

The film focuses on a young couple, Jim (Berant Zhu), and Kat (Regina Lei). They live in a crowded high-rise, and through news reports and snippets of conversation, we learn that the country is in the grasp of a mutating virus. Experts are pleading for the government to take the strain seriously, while the general population already seems to be over it; they just want to get on with their lives.

Once Jim drops Kat off at work, The Sadness suddenly rockets into high gear; we see victims of the virus instantly turn into bloodthirsty beings when exposed, tearing people apart limb from limb while their sexual drives take over, resulting in rashes of rape and murder (and everything in-between).

Rob Jabbaz is clearly intending to shock audiences with The Sadness, and one’s “enjoyment” of this film will entirely depend on whether you can tolerate having your buttons (and gag reflex) repeatedly put to the test. There is no comedy or joy about any of this; it’s not like the blood-soaked horror-comedies that Peter Jackson made his name on. This is brutal and horrific and yet, is shot with such incredible style and verve that it’s hard to turn your eyes away from the bile-inducing carnage on-screen, which somehow gets increasingly more twisted and disgusting as the film unfolds.

In many ways, The Sadness feels tailor-made for notoriety, the sort of film teens will challenge themselves to watch once it becomes widely available. Yes, one can view the entire exercise as a commentary on the base desires we keep hidden deep within us and how that can be exploited by a deadly and contagious virus, but that reading feels like a flimsy frame from which Jabbaz gleefully gets to unleash one revolting set-piece after another. It’s hard to recommend The Sadness in any traditional sense of the word, but it’s somehow reassuring that a movie like this even got made in the first place.