Oh boy… In the Lost Lands is twenty pounds of nonsense crammed into a ten pound sack. It’s overflowing with credulity-challenging plot, goofy dialog, and so much slow-mo that both Zack Snyder AND Michael Bay are sitting in a corner feeling jealous. It’s so bad… but it’s kinda entertaining.

It takes place in a post-apocalypse where a queen of the last human city hires Milla Jovovich as the witch Grey Alys to hunt down a shape changer for vaguely defined reasons. She hires Dave Bautista as her guide and they go out to hunt a werewolf. Because this is a post-apocalypse that creates werewolves and witches in a way post apocalypses rarely do.

This film begs the all important question we already know the answer to: does Paul W.S. Anderson really know how to make movies? I mean, the first Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, and Event Horizon suggests he does… but the vast number of his movies – including all those Resident Evil sequels – suggests otherwise.

Or maybe he just shouldn’t be responsible for scripts… because any screenwriter would know not to write nonsense like this. I’m talking the tin-ear overly serious but not natural-sounding fantasy dialog from actors who have shown they can act in other films. But also a plot so hazy and vaguely written that you’ll spend most of the time bewildered by the shortcuts to a plot without recognizing it as an actual plot. Anderson just hand waves everything away… this is a fantasy western post apocalypse… do we really need it to make sense? I say yes, but for shits and giggles, he says no.

This is a bad movie but it wasn’t one that bored me. I was entertained even if it’s just for how clueless it is a narrative. There’s some perplexed shade I gave the screen and a quirk of amusement that THIS is what Anderson does with his time and budget. It’s so much nonsense that it’s kinda fun.

But it’s also just a terrible, mixed-up bad movie. I wouldn’t argue in its favor for anything. But if you want to laugh at a whole pile of nise, frippery, and ado, it might be worth checking out.

<RANDOM ASIDE>Given it’s Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich all over again, I got the sense this was actually an unofficial 7th Resident Evil movie. I mean, Jovovich is playing “Grey Alys” instead of “Alice”… and who says a zombie apocalypse can’t have werewolves too? The last RE game did… and both Alices are known to have vaguely defined powers. I see what you did there Paul, inventing your own nonsense IP so as to not be beholden to Capcom (as if your RE movies had anything to do with the games anyway).</RANDOM ASIDE>

Score: 64