Prisoners of the Ghostland(2021)

SHORT VERSION:
One day, Hero announces to the Ghostlanders that they are all leaving this place tomorrow and revolting against the Governor, and Bernice backs him up on this, telling the Ghostlanders that, if they don’t stop the Governor and his forces, they will set out to take over the world, and she, Hero, and everyone else here in the Ghostland will be their prisoners forever. When Hero and Bernice start to lead the Ghostlanders out the next day, they are halted by the mutant ghosts of the convicts that were on the prison bus that got caught up in the nuclear disaster years ago. Hero has a chat with their leader, Psycho, who was his old partner in the bank holdup at the start of the film. He asks Psycho to let him leave the Ghostland so he can help the ghosts of the people that they have hurt, explaining how they recently came to him for help in a dream that he had. Psycho agrees to, but he tells him that the real predator in this is the Governor, so he and Bernice had better finish him off because it is time for all of them to be free.

Hero and Bernice return to Samurai Town that night, and Hero brings Bernice before the Governor, Sheriff Takato, and the latter’s deputies in the town square. However, when the Governor refuses to give Hero the key to his bodysuit so he can shut off all the explosives on it, he pretends to take Bernice hostage. The Governor summons Yasujiro to help him, but then Susie – mentally unstable from years of taking the Governor’s abuse – finally snaps and uses a minigun mounted nearby to slaughter Takato and a bunch of the deputies until one of the deputies non-fatally shoots her to get her to stop. This triggers the start of a series of events that results in the rest of the deputies and a majority of the town’s villainous samurai getting killed by Hero, Bernice, and Yasujiro, the latter of whom decided to turn on the Governor because he never honored his end of a deal that they made where, in exchange for Yasujiro becoming his bodyguard, he would release Yasujiro’s sister from his stable of sex slaves. Yasujiro then squares off with Hero in a swordfight out of respect for him, but Hero slays him, and Bernice ends up confronting and gunning down the Governor. Hero then gets the key to the bodysuit and turns the explosives off. A female Ghostlander who witnessed everything then runs back to the Ghostland and tells the others there that the Governor is dead and Hero has won, and the now-liberated Ghostlanders rejoice.

In Samurai Town the next morning, Hero, Bernice, and Susie are shown sitting together and observing how peaceful and freer things are becoming now that the Governor and his associates are dead and gone, and Hero remarks that this town will be a beautiful place one day. They then leave for elsewhere.

LONG VERSION:
Hero (Nicolas Cage) finds Bernice (Sofia Boutella) in the Ghostland among a display of women encased in broken pieces of mannequins, but she is in a near-catatonic state and unable to talk because of it. Enoch (Charles Glover), the leader of the Ghostland tribe, tells Hero that the horrors of the Ghostland have taken away her ability to speak, and she must reclaim this ability on her own. After letting Bernice know why he has come for her, Hero puts her on a cart, gets some gasoline from the Ghostland’s automotive expert and parts scavenger, Ratman (Young Dais), and heads back to the site where he crashed his car upon entering the Ghostland. After he and Bernice get there, the device attached to the left arm of Hero’s bodysuit makes a noise, and then the Governor’s (Bill Moseley) pre-recorded voice comes on and asks Bernice to say her name into the device’s microphone. Hero tells her to say her name so he can get an extra two days to bring her back to the Governor before the timer hits zero and all the explosives on the suit blow at once, but she doesn’t say a word. Hero then decides to remove the mannequin outfit from her body, and during the process, he notices that she has a unique scar on her inner right thigh. However, the neuro sensor in the explosive on his left testicle misinterprets his actions as him trying to have his way with her sexually, so it detonates and destroys his testicle.

After he passes out from the pain, he has a nightmare about the bank robbery he committed years ago with his partner, Psycho (Nick Cassavetes), and we find out that Psycho was really the one who murdered all those innocent victims during the holdup. Hero started a brawl with him after seeing that one of the victims was a child, but just after Hero pushed him outside through the front doors, the police arrived. Psycho shot at the cops, but they returned fire and hit him twice in the torso, and after they noticed Hero trying to flee the scene, they tried to shoot him as well. Unfortunately, one of their bullets killed the mother of the young Bernice, and another bullet hit Bernice in her right thigh, resulting in the unique scar she now has. Hero and Psycho were both arrested, and the Governor approached Bernice and took her in to make her into one of his sex slaves (or “granddaughters”). Hero then regains consciousness, and he walks over to Bernice and apologizes to her for inadvertently causing her mother’s death.

Moments later, he and Bernice come under attack from the band of ghostly mutants he encountered when he first entered the Ghostland, led by a deformed man driving a prison bus. As Hero and Bernice struggle to keep the mutants from overwhelming them both, Bernice tries to get a hold of Hero’s arm, but he grabs her arm to keep her from doing that and orders her to get away somehow. As he does this, the neuro sensor in the explosive on his right arm misinterprets this as an attack against her, and after he pushes her to the ground, the explosive is set off and badly injures his arm. The force of the blast also knocks the mutants onto their backs and causes them to vanish, along with their leader and the bus moments later, and Bernice falls into unconsciousness. Just after he watches the leader of the mutants fade away, Hero passes out again and has another nightmare, this time of him and Bernice standing with the Ghostlanders in front of their village’s clock tower. He and Bernice then watch as the mysterious Ghostlander Chimera (Cici Zhou) and her servants go over the story about the collision between the prison bus full of violent convicts and the tanker truck full of nuclear waste and how this incident triggered the atomic disaster that resulted in the Ghostland becoming what it is today. When he asks the ladies how he can get out of the Ghostland, they don’t give him a straight answer; they tell him that he is a hero because he found Bernice, an innocent soul, and gave her a chance. Meanwhile, in the real world, Bernice awakens, and we find out that the explosion has freed her from her catatonia when, after hearing the Governor’s voice come on over Hero’s arm device again, she crawls over to Hero and says her name into the microphone, giving him the extra two days he needs. However, she comes to think that Hero is dead when he won’t wake up.

Meanwhile, Bernice’s friend, Stella (Lorena Kotô), escapes from the Ghostland, but she is captured by the deputies of Samurai Town’s sheriff, Takato (Takato Yonemoto), and brought before the Governor at his mansion that night. The Governor demands to know from her if she gave Bernice the idea to run away, but she truthfully replies that Bernice masterminded their and Nancy’s (Canon Nawata) escape. Unfortunately for her, the Governor doesn’t believe her, so he summons for his samurai bodyguard, Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi), to deal with her, and Yasujiro reluctantly beheads her with his katana. The next morning, Bernice appears before the Ghostlanders in the village square and tells them that Hero is dead due to an attack from the spectral mutants, but Hero surprises everyone when he walks into town soon after. He tells everyone that he has always had the same dream of the people that he has harmed (referring to the ones who died in the catastrophe because the bank robbery played an accidental role in bringing it about) standing and suffering in some ruins in the Ghostland, but yesterday, they came to him and helped him, and he understands why they did (they told him that they were going to give him “another life” because he had a duty to complete). The morning after, he stands in front of the clock tower and declares to the Ghostlanders that they are all getting out of here tomorrow and revolting against the Governor, and though Enoch restates to him that there is no way for them to leave the Ghostland, Hero tells him that there IS a way. Bernice backs him up on that, then tells everyone that if they don’t stop the Governor and his forces, they will set out to take over the world, and she, Hero, and everyone else here in the Ghostland will be their prisoners forever. Hero tells the Ghostlanders that they can stay here and take their chances if they want to, but he is going out to tear everything apart, so they can either help him or rot. He then approaches Ratman and asks him what is it going to take for him (and his “rat clan”) to get all his cars ready so they can get out of here. Ratman and his gang get to work on fixing up the vehicles, with Hero, Bernice, and the other Ghostlanders helping them out, and the work goes through the rest of the day right up to the following morning. Hero also creates a brace for his injured arm and installs a katana blade on it, and he hides the whole apparatus in a bandaged false arm.

As Hero and Bernice attempt to lead the Ghostlanders out, they are suddenly halted by the mutant ghosts. The leader asks Hero if he recognizes him, and after he removes his sunglasses, Hero realizes that he is Psycho and that he was among the doomed convicts on that prison bus. After they talk about their past, Hero tells him that all the people they hurt are now ghosts, and he always thought that they hated him, but now they have come to him for help. He asks Psycho to let him leave the Ghostland so he can help them, and Psycho agrees to, but he tells him that the real predator in this is the Governor, so he and Bernice had better finish him off because it is time for all of them to be free. After Hero agrees to get rid of the Governor and gives him his thanks, Psycho and all the mutants disappear again in a nuclear explosion-like blast.

That night, Hero returns to Samurai Town with Bernice and brings her before the Governor, his sex slaves, and Takato in the town square, but Takato soon surrounds them with his deputies and the villainous samurai citizens. Hero demands for the Governor to hand over the key to the bodysuit, and when the Governor refuses, Hero pretends to take Bernice hostage by holding her tight to him and putting a knife to her neck. This action causes his remaining explosives to give off their warning signal, and realizing that Bernice will likely get killed if any of them go off, the distressed Governor calls for Yasujiro to help him. However, Susie (Yuzuka Nakaya) – Bernice’s friend and fellow sex slave who has become mentally unstable as a result of years of abuse from the Governor – finally flips out and gets behind a minigun mounted nearby, and she uses it to mow down Takato, most of his deputies, a few of the other sex slaves, and some spectators who came to witness the event until one of the surviving deputies manages to non-fatally shoot her twice in the chest to get her to stop. Yasujiro then shows up with some more deputies, and after one of them non-fatally shoots both Hero and Bernice, Hero lets go of Bernice and starts fighting and killing the deputies (as well as some samurai goons when they appear later on) using both his katana blade and their own guns, and the frightened Governor runs off.

Bernice puts Susie into a cart and tries to take her somewhere away from the fighting, but a group of samurai soon halt them. Suddenly, Yasujiro appears and kills all the samurai, having decided that he has had enough of the Governor (partially because of what the Governor made him do to Stella, but mainly because the Governor never honored his end of a deal that they made in which he agreed to become the Governor’s bodyguard on the condition that the Governor release his sister from his stable of sex slaves). Bernice ends up putting Susie into an alley, then kills a few villainous samurai herself. Hero is then shown fighting one last group of samurai goons when Yasujiro suddenly appears and takes out one of them, and afterwards, Yasujiro – likely out of respect for Hero – squares off with Hero in a swordfight. As they duel, Yasujiro kills the remaining samurai when they attempt to interfere. Meanwhile, the Governor retreats to his mansion, only to be greeted by the sight of his sex slaves looting the place and then abandoning him, having accepted that his rule is coming to an end. Needing comfort, he sets out to find Susie.

Hero manages to slay Yasujiro, and the Governor finds Susie around the same time and starts begging her to give him some attention while she tries to crawl away from him. Susie soon manages to snatch the key to Hero’s bodysuit from around his neck, and Bernice then appears, picks up a dead deputy’s revolver, and points it at the Governor and orders him to get away from Susie. After the Governor throws some insults at her, she unloads the weapon into him and kills him. Hero then appears, takes the key to his suit, and shuts the explosives off. A female Ghostlander who witnessed the entire battle quickly runs back to the Ghostland and excitedly informs everyone that the Governor is dead and Hero has won, and the now-liberated Ghostlanders rejoice. One of the Ghostlanders responsible for keeping the second hand on the clock tower’s clock from moving declares to his fellow workers that they are all free from time and that they can let go of the rope that is keeping the second hand in place, so they all do it and allow the clock to strike 8:15. The entire tower explodes and comes crashing down, much to their delight.

In Samurai Town the next morning, Hero, Bernice, and Susie are shown sitting together and observing how peaceful and freer things are becoming now that the Governor and his associates are dead and gone, and Hero remarks that this town will be a beautiful place one day. They then leave for elsewhere.