Stream It Or Skip It: ‘In the Lost Lands’ on VOD, a slab of CGI slop starring Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista (2025)

Gird yer loins, sci-fi fans: In the Lost Lands (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is the latest slab of indefensible CGI and puckered-bung dialogue from director Paul W. S. Anderson, whose filmography features roughly 17 dozen Resident Evils, the first Mortal Kombat, cult fave Event Horizon and a grim Death Race remake featuring my all-time favorite one-liner (via a hopefully well-compensated Joan Allen), “F— with me, and we’ll see who shits on the sidewalk!” So I went into this new thing – an adaptation of a George R.R. Martin short story – with eyebrow cocked, hoping that Anderson’s wife-slash-muse Milla Jovovich and co-star Dave Bautista might deliver a few campy yuks as they fight dickhead humans and monsters in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But the mistake one might make going into this movie is expecting it to be entertaining on one level or another.

IN THE LOST LANDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Opening shot: BAUTISTA FACE REAL BIG. He narrates right at us: “This is not a fairy tale, and there are no happy endings,” he says, adding that he’ll continue “if you’ve got the time and stomach for it.” Might’ve been better off leaving that last part off, Dave! Anyway, he plays a mercenary named Boyce who roams a ruined world pockmarked with decaying nuclear-plant towers and miscellaneous gross puddles, and blanketed with omnipresent cloud-cover gloom, except when someone needs to turn into a werewolf, and then the full moon shines through bright ‘n’ clear. Demons and suchlike roam the land, but thankfully Boyce has his trusty two-headed rattlesnake, which he chucks at people so they can be ENVENOMIZED – twice! Is now a good time to mention that describing this movie makes me sound (and feel) hopelessly drunk?

There’s only one epicenter for human life on this planet, and it’s the City Under the Mountain. Here, we meet Gray Alys (Jovovich), a witch with face tats who escapes the noose of the local fundamentalists by casting a spell that makes her captors hallucinate, then scampers off to her secret throne room where she sits around waiting for people to walk in and make wishes that she’s obligated (cursed?) to grant. “I refuse no one,” she says, and if there’s a reason for that, maybe you should make it your wish, because nobody here’s explainin’. She’s sort of the silent third wheel of power in this city, which is in a jim-dandy of a church-state vise grip: On one end is the Patriarch (Fraser James), the local Pope type who rules with an iron fist and has a legion of minions at his disposal, led by a brutal woman known as the Enforcer (Arly Jover). On the other is the Overlord, a decrepit old man who’s about to be underground, so his May-December queen (Amara Okereke) is in the saddle around here. Oh, and the queen happens to be schtupping Boyce on the side, convenient for future plot developments.

The queen drops by Gray Alys’ sanctum, and her wish is to be a werewolf, for reasons that escape me. Maybe it’ll make her a more fearsome fascist dictator? Gray Alys has no choice but to grant her wish, which requires her to embark on a quest to a far-off region dubbed Skull River so she can find a wolfman of legend and snatch his power. She needs a guide, so she sidles up to Boyce and hires him and his two-headed snake to help out. Meanwhile, the Patriarch shoves the Enforcer and his vast supply of expendable fundies – garbed up to look like soldiers on a crusade to Hell – into a spew-belching choo-choo train to chase them, hoping to slay the heretical witch for making them look like incompetent dolts (hey, you’d do the same if you rather humiliatingly failed to complete an execution). And so Gray Alys and Boyce get into some adventures, fighting monsters and faceless armed men, our lady of the occult whipping out some nifty spells and a pair of mini-sickles at key points of conflict, making us wonder why she didn’t whip ’em out before situations got dire. But applying logic to this plot will really make you feel like the one who shits on the sidewalk.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s so much amber in this movie, Anderson must’ve bought it at a discount, gently used, from recent productions of Dune. Otherwise, In the Lost Lands is a hopelessly moronic mishmash of Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Tower and Blade Runner.

Performance Worth Watching: I keep hoping for a MILLANAISSANCE, where Jovovich lands a role that scores her an Oscar nomination, because she’s certainly capable, evident by her ability to not look completely ridiculous in the couple-dozen slopflicks like In the Lost Lands she’s anchored. She’s a terrific actor. Watch Besson’s Joan of Arc movie and tell me she’s not!

Memorable Dialogue: “I never saw a man get emotional about a snake before.”

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: Some have come to Anderson’s defense as a master of schlock, but I must hold true to my assertion that he always has been and still remains an auteur du crappe. You know all those garbage B-movie directors who deploy LENS FLARE with rampant indulgent glee? Well, they learned it by watching Anderson, who makes anyone unlucky enough to be placed in front of Lost Lands feel like they’re going the wrong way on the highway at night – you’ll duck and weave the glare like Muhammad Ali. There’s a shot inside a church with dozens of candles and every single f—ing one of them flares like a thousand points of needle-like light penetrating your corneas. Add that to Anderson’s unapologetic use of miserably ugly, relentlessly artificial green-screen effects, and you’ve got yourself an eyesore that travels through the optic nerves and so shockwaves of strain-pain reach every last wrinkle in your poor, exhausted brain.

The only thing that isn’t horrible to look at here is Jovovich’s expertly applied post-apocalyptic lip gloss. She looks great, and is even convincing in her role as the Good Witch of the Wasteland at times, delivering dialogue that otherwise feels like it’s been hauled up from the depths of the large intestine. Bautista doesn’t fare as well, but as an ex-pro wrestler, he may not have much shame about that kind of stuff. The remaining performances and characters are anonymous, sneering pawns of an eminently puntable generiplot.

On top of all this, Anderson wants this thing to be a Western, hence the endless amber waves of pain and the quasi-philosophical convos Gray Alys and Boyce share next to cozy campfires. It also might explain the multiple close-ups of eyeballs (with LENS FLARE reflecting off the iris, of course), the low-angle shots of cowboy boots in the dust and, obviously, the invocation of random werewolf lore. He even takes pains to reference Once Upon a Time in the West, which makes me want to noose him up for heresy. Sometimes junk cinema can be entertaining, but in this case, junk is just junk.

Our Call: Dune’t. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.