Prisoners of the Ghostland Ending Explained (Spoilers)

A notorious criminal must break an evil curse in order to rescue an abducted girl who has mysteriously disappeared.

Prisoners of the Ghostland: Spoilers Below

A settlement called Samurai Town is located in an area of Japan devastated and quarantined years ago after a waste transport carrying highly volatile nuclear waste and a prison transport bus crashed, creating a dangerous and irradiated environment. An evil Governor rules Samurai Town, keeping a harem of adopted "granddaughters" as his sex slaves and has blended elements of the old American West and both pre-modern and modern Japanese society at his whim. Victims of the irradiated environment and half-crazed outcasts inhabit the Ghostland outside of Samurai Town. After a botched bank robbery right before the catastrophe during which Psycho, his partner, brutally murders several innocent bystanders, Hero is imprisoned. We later learn that Psycho was one of the convicts on the prison bus, which set off the disaster by colliding with the waste transport.

One night, one of the "granddaughters," Bernice, gets stranded in the Ghostland with her friends Stella and Nanci after escaping from the Governor's house. The Governor releases Hero from prison and locks him into a bodysuit rigged with explosives. They will go off and kill Hero if he mistreats Bernice in any way, the suit is tampered with, or if Hero hasn't secured Bernice within five days. Hero motions a defiant gesture towards the Governor while departing, which impresses his samurai bodyguard, Yasujiro, whose sister is one of the Governor's sex slaves.

Upon entering the Ghostland, a band of mutated men intercepts Hero, he suffers an accident, and the outcasts take him to Enoch, their leader, in their cult-like enclave. He finds a half-catatonic Bernice among them. Hero triggers one of his suit's explosives accidentally when trying to take her back, rendering him unconscious and destroying one of his testicles. Hero recognizes Bernice in a nightmare flashback as the daughter of a mother trying to escape the police after the bank robbery, with the Governor later taking her in. The explosive that the mutants damaged during the earlier fight go off on Hero's arm, rendering him unconscious just before his attackers vanish. The explosion wakes Bernice from her catatonia.

Meanwhile, upon Stella's return from the Ghostland, the Governor's men quickly capture her; the Governor making Yasujiro execute her is what finally turns him against him. Hero has a revelation while unconscious about his accidental role in causing the cataclysm and riles up the Ghostlanders to rise up against the Governor, aided by Psycho and the mutants, his fellow convicts from the fateful accident. Hero and Bernice return to Samurai Town, but when the Governor refuses to unlock the suit and Hero pretends to take Bernice, hostage, Bernice's friend Susie, traumatized from the Governor's treatment of her, massacres several of his bodyguards with a minigun. Hero, Bernice, and Yasujiro overcome the remainder, then Hero faces off against and kills Yasujiro while Bernice shoots the Governor. Hero, Bernice, and Susie watch as Samurai Town begins to stir with new, freer lives with the oppressor dead and the outcasts liberated.

Prisoners of the Ghostland Ending Explained (Spoilers) - ALL HORROR Tweet it