In the Lost Lands (2025)
Every wish has a price.
All the gang are off doing other stuff tonight, so I fired up the projector and scrolled through my back log of “watch later” movies, wondering which would be the most fun to throw at it after having not used it for probably well over half a year now. Well, at a sale price of only like 10 dollars, One in particular caught my eye - one that I haven’t really heard anything good about yet, but looked like it could be fun to me on the trailers. Maybe not good - but fun. Since there is no collateral to complain about my choices, I thought it’s the perfect time to go venturing out In The Lost Lands.
We have a fairy-tale story here. What do I mean? Well, we got evil and not evil (although unlike one of our lead’s intro monologue of the movie, I wouldn’t go as far as to call anyone here “good”), queens, terror, oppression, werewolves and a seventeen stage apocalypse that has the world properly themed like Mega Man stages. Our other lead - arguably the main character despite us starting with the other lead - is a witch, and she’s in a bit of a bind as it seems some religious types have decided she should hang. Enter eye-lock witch powers that cause people to see all manner of illusions, and now she’s free and got the local oppressed manual labor murmering about “The witch who can not hang” and all that jazz. The current queen pays a visit to this witch, as word is around town (and continually pointed out by said witch throughout the movie) that she can turn down none when it comes to granting a wish and said queen really wants to be a werewolf. Her infatuated underling’s wish is for that wish to fail - which immediately leads a bit to the mind wondering how she can accomplish both these asks, but one doesn’t just doubt a witches power - they question the monkey’s paw of any djinn-related activities if they are smart. Enter our second main, a hunter who gets recruited to take the witch to the lair of the werewolf so she can kill it and take it’s powers for the queen. Oh, but those church people from before are still not happy with the witch being free, so they also are chasing them down.
Straight forward plot on paper - people want wishes, questing needs to happen to make wishes happen, and danger and death lurk everywhere. Usually here, we’d hop into the acting and characters, but I’d like to go a bit more in on the story and what I feel like the movie is supposed to be right now, as I feel like the fact that I didn’t think this movie was as bad as some were saying (spoiler alert, I liked the movie) is somehow going to need justification and that can only go through the logical steps that got me here. The entire thing struck me from the trailer that it was going to be a bit artsy - maybe not high-brow, maybe not super intellectual, but definitely one of those movies where it will feel a lot like style over substance. Go in wrong and you end up with a Suckerpunch situation where everyone trashes the movie outside of the action scenes even if it does in fact have a good deal of stuff going on for it. Now, that’s not to say I found a ton going on in this movie, as I still had my brain largely turned off as I do, but the important part here is I expected a lot of interesting set piece style scenes - and from the trailer a real heavy feeling of blue screen - and in turn an attempt at feeling exactly like ole male lead himself says - a fairy-tale. Everything feels like it’s kind of off in appearance - almost comic like at times where you could grab a still and print it to a page and just paste some text over it and call it a day without it feeling out of place.
To make a point that’s dragging out get more focused, this comes into play in things like the acting and the characters. The characters have a surprising amount of depth to them and why they are doing their actions, and it’s almost gauranteed to do a Grimm’s at some point and get dark and twisted past it’s surface level. The deliveries can feel a bit camp - if not be a bit camp - as the movie goes on. Our fanatical church-going killers are pretty much straight up like the chrome-huffing warboys of Fury Road, except somehow with even less vocabulary. The ones that do speak are typical canned feeling lines of religious fervor as though you would expect from a zealot whose also a bad guy. The body language actors pull out is well done - but at the same time even that can at times feel pretty corny, or out of nowhere. Our female lead has some great facial expressions at moments of the movie, but then at others it’s just so stoic and middle-ground that the others feel almost comical with how expressive they were. I wouldn’t necessarily call it great acting - but at the same time it does feel like it’s where the movie kind of wanted it to be. I wouldn’t complain if this was a step further towards stage play over-acting, but that’s a bit my own acquired taste. The head of the church also could a hundred percent get away with playing a young Forest Whitaker with his line deliveries and mannerisms if you ask me and I spent a good few moments wondering how they did such a bang up job on making him look so much younger until I got some good shots of him and realized that no - this is a totally different man.
Thanks to trying to fit in an entire story of a fairy-tale premise, the scenes flow quick in this. It could be a point of contention, it leads to the pace feeling rapid as everything that comes up is concluded in a quick fashion. Perhaps takes some of the wind out of the sales of the danger that gets pitched by the movie, but great for not making the movie take all night. Unfortunately, that isn’t to say that there isn’t rather slow moments interjected throughout. Some are nice little character building parts, a bunch are sort of just things feeling drawn out - like travel at times - for the sake of drawing it out. It didn’t bother me too much, as like I said it never really stuck to one scene too long regardless, but I feel I should point it out anyways. That brisk pace also can lead to a few spots that feel a bit like you were underprepared as to where things may have been going - even though it actually does at least a wafting of hinting here and there about various things. Well, a wafting hint for those maybe - a rather blunt slapping when it comes to things it spells out like how the world is a big old wasteland. Remember those themed stages I was talking about? How about eternally blazing oil fields? Dried up river full of skulls? Desert? Nuclear towers where all the demons like to hang out? Unlike something like the Shannara series, there’s no forgetting this one is a post-apocalypse movie.
The nice part of the settings is they get to be pretty varied. Yes, you won’t spend a decent time ln any one of them, but they all get to look like distinct zones within the movie space. How real and how computer generated they look might be a different thing though - as some fair far better than others. It also does suffer from a similar issue of a lot of after doom movies - the sepia filter. Yeah, it has moments where it ditches it and we get some better colors and the likes, including times when it can be downright pretty to look at - but if you had a fear of brown tinting this movie would be the absolute bane of your current existence. When we do get effects work in here it’s pretty good. Yes, it’s sometimes pretty obvious it’s an effect, or super-hard look like it’s just someone in front of a screen (which could be because the are or because of the amount of filter and color grading going on to get the specific look I assume was intentional as far as lighting and focus pull goes). Also yes, the violence isn’t overly detailed. We get some stabs and some bites and some gunshots, but for the most part you won’t have hard details in there. Probably the closest you get to really gruesome would be the idiot crusader guy chopping his buddies arm off to save him from a two headed snake instead of just you know, cutting off the snake heads that are lifted up above and away from the arm getting ready to strike? Nobody ever claimed minions were good at their jobs.
Audio was fun at parts, and largely does what a soundtrack does. Lines are all audible despite whats going on in the scenes, and for the most part it doesn’t feel phoned in at all. Again, this isn’t to say that it all sounds or feels good - just that it feels like it was intentional and not someone just wanting a paycheck. For the thinking folks I think there’s actually a fair amount of stuff here beyond just the surface wishes are a dangerous thing. The most obvious part would be someone having something to say about religion and fear-mongering, but the other stuff I’ll let a person find themselves as it does tie into stuff that would probably spoil the ending a good bit.
In a shocking twist nobody saw coming, I had a good time with this movie. I wouldn’t go out of my way to call it great, but it was better than my low expectations at the least. Yes, that doesn’t really say a whole lot - but I also had some pretty decent preconceptions as to what I was going to get - something that had some pretty art-like shots, some Sky Captain style shots that make me question how many people are actually in the shot without being added in post, and a bunch of filters. Sometmes, it gave me things in an unfortunate expectations way - the acting wasn’t bad in my book, but it also could have been so much more in multiple directions. The action scenes weren’t horribly cut together like some movies do the action, but it also wasn’t big elaborate action sets either - a cool flourish here and a little gun-fu there, but not exactly something that makes you feel like the stunt men are really getting used up. I think there’s a set of folks who would really enjoy this - if not for the visual side then for the story feeling like despite being somewhat generic also going above and beyond what was expected. Either way I had fun with it, and although it wasn’t the most colorful return to my projector, it still looked pretty darn good anyways.