According to IMDB there are only a few Nic Cage movies that are ranked below 4 out of 10 possible “stars” in the 110 odd movies he has appeared in. Those films are as follows from worst to not great. 

• Jiu Jitsu (2.9)
• Left Behind (3.1)
• The Wicker Man (3.8)
• Between Worlds (3.9)

Of these, I’ve already watched Left Behind (laughably bad) and Wicker Man (also bad, but in a kinda great way) and now Between Worlds (2018) (ugh). 

I have not yet seen Jiu Jitsu (2020) yet which audiences hated worse than any film he’s ever made! This is pretty impressive since it was perceived as worse than watching Nic Cage getting buried beneath the crumbled World Trade towers for 90 minutes AND also worse than watching him navigate sharky waters for 60 minutes while stranded in the South Pacific in U.S.S. Indianapolis. For me, I’d hoped that 2017 would be the lowest point in the bottom feeding, but now I’m starting to see that there are still going to be some real stinkers still left on the horizon, starting with Between Worlds. 

The World According to Joe (Again)

We saw a pretty good flick back in WATC(H) #66 with a character (and film) named Joe. That Joe could be related to this Joe Majors (Nicolas Cage) in Between Worlds (2018) as they are both blue collar redneck guys who are coping (but not too well) with some past traumas in the current day. 

This Joe, is an alcoholic truck driver, who has recently lost his wife and daughter to a tragic accident (hint: where there’s smoke). When the film opens, Joe has stopped to fill up his rig at an Alabama (?) gas station. When he hears a struggle in the restroom, he intervenes and prevents a man from choking a woman to death in a bathroom stall. 

To Joe’s dismay, the woman is upset that Joe interrupted and beat the man up severely (was it kinky sex stuff Joe asks?) but the two escape to his truck before the police can arrive and ask questions. Joe meets Julie (Franka Polenta) and they learn a little bit about each other. Joe shares that his family (wife and child) are dead and Julie shares with him that her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) was in a tragic motorcycle accident just that morning. 

Julie needs to get Mobile to the hospital to be with her (since she is in a coma) and Joe agrees to drive her in his big rig. 

On the way Julie explains to Joe why she asked a stranger to strangle her. She’s had an out of body experience before during her own “brush with death” as a teenager. When she almost died in a frozen lake, she was able to leave her body and make contact with those who helped her (or something like that). This happened a few other times to her when she was at the point of death. Julie’s plan to help her daughter (on death’s doorstep) was to go out-of-body one more time to guide her daughter “between” worlds. From death back to life, but before Julie could do help Bille, Joe happened by. 

At the hospital, Billie talks to her mom briefly but then flatlines again. Panicked, Julie pulls Joe into a stairwell and convinces him to choke her to death again (in order to try and save Billie yet again).  While she is passed out / inbetween worlds, Julie is present in the hospital room and sees her daughter and a hospital attendant. Billie is mumbling in that netherworld about a man “who walked out the door” whom she never saw him again, and the hospital nurse asks Julie ominously “you don’t know your own daughter, do you?” 

Then Julie sees another vision, someone (unclear who) in a bed having sex with Joe. Julie comes back to consciousness. When they return to Billie’s hospital room, the nurse from her vision is there and tells Julie to “keep an eye on her,” since she’s “been to the other side.” Joe looks freaked out.

Billie, out of her coma again, is now possessed by the spirit of Joe’s first wife Mary (Lydia Hearst), but Joe and Julie are none the wiser. 

Back at Julie’s home, the two start hooking up.  

The rest of the film is focused on an awkward redneck love triangle (or quadrangle). Joe really wants to be true in his relationship with Julie, but 19-year-old Billie (possessed by his “ex” wife Mary) is always acting moody, seductive and psychotic, and rarely wears clothes, and tries to hand job him a couch. Whenever Julie is out of sight, Billie / Mary is in hot pursuit of Joe’s flabby masculinity.

Backstory spoiler: While still alive Mary felt constantly abandoned by Joe, since he was always leaving her to be a trucker. Since “she doesn’t do good on her own” she always tries to keep him home but he balks. When this whining doesn’t work, Mary decides she’s going to kill daughter and herself and be found by Joe–as a vengeful final stroke. But after she kills Sarah (their daughter) she accidentally burns the house down with a cigarette so he assumes it’s an accident. Oops. Still tragic, but it lacks that vindictive punch.

Back in the world of the living, Joe owes money to his trucking company and they confiscate his ride. Inside the cab of the truck are mementos he cares about (photos of his wife, child, letters, and Mary’s wedding ring). He’s torn up that he can’t afford to get them back without paying his old boss some of what he owes.

While Julie is off paying Joe’s debts to get the personals, Joe tries to brush off Billie’s sexual advances and instead fixes up her broken motorbike. Julie starts to suspect Billie and Joe are hooking up behind her back, evoking many a Jerry Springer episode. Then Billie reveals to Joe who she really is (his post-humous wife in an upgraded bodily form) and they two do end up hooking up. 

Because Mary never wants to be alone again (she has abandonment issues), she convinces Joe to run off with her–they shoot one of her old pals and wound her boyfriend, and end up in the burned down remnants of their first house together (where Mary and Sarah died). Joe sees lots of ghosts of Sarah roaming around, he gets drunk, and learns of Mary’s devious plan to kill their child and herself. He’s a blubbering pile of suffering after that. 

Meanwhile, using the old choke-me-for-otherworldly-knowledge trick, Julie gets Bille’s boyfriend to help her find out where Mary / Billie / Joe / Sarah are at, and they follow them to the burned out house. Billie and Julie struggle (since everyone knows Mary is possessing Billie now) and Julie gets shot. She sees Mary “in between worlds” and Mary throws another temper tantrum that she’s going to be stuck there “alone” again (even though Sarah is there waiting for her.) 

In the end, Joe cradles a charred Jack in the Box and then dousing himself in gasoline and lights himself on fire in his grief. Billie returns to her body and we must assume Julie is dead. Bilie and boyfriend escape the house with the two dead bodies and drive away to the song Leader of the Pack.

And just when you are convinced it’s over, as Joe lies in the charred remains of his daughter’s room, you get one more vision. You discover that Joe, as a child, murdered his abusive father with a shotgun as his mother watched. 

OK? Makes total sense. 

This is Between Worlds.

Oddities in this Film

• It’s scored by Angelo Badalamenti (xylophones, and atmospheric keyboard vibes) so it feels very much like a David Lynch film, but a pretty terrible knock-off one (which is exactly what it is.) The director mentioned that she wanted to do this David Lynch style fever dream kind of film.
• Julie is played by the gal from Run, Lola, Run, but now she’s mid-life and a bit flabby (but who am I to judge such things.) 
• The trashy sex scenes are strange and sloppy because half of the shots have one or both participants in their underwear rather than fully or partially nude. At one point we see Julie removing her bra and in the next cut she has it on again (as if we are seeing the sex scene in random chronological order). It’s either bad editing (my guess) or very ill-conceived idea of what will appear artistic (also very possible). 
• Lots of sex dreams within sex dreams where a character keeps waking up and then waking up and then waking up.
• At one point, Joe is having sex with Billie (in the real world) and Mary (in the spirit realm or the past) and he’s reading a book of poetry by Nicolas Cage called Memories. Pretty meta. The best Cage-bonkers line from it: “Your peach juice cascaded over and upon my golden cock.”
• The director of this pile of mostly hot garbage was Maria Pulera who allegedly tried to sell spyware to Egypt IRL. What?!?

We Come For the Cage

Perhaps the biggest selling point of these sub 4 rated films is that Nicolas Cage is usually allowed to do pretty much whatever he wants. He’s off the hook and has free reign. He’s allowed to be however Cagey he wants to be–which is always entertaining, even if the film is unwatchable. We know that at this point in his career he has no desire to attempt acting in a “natural” way and allows himself the liberty of full avant garde expressionism. In watching Cage untethered, we are treated to an acting clinic for what “ man on the verge of a nervous breakdown” might look like: 

We’re here for it:

• When he uses his hands to express EACH. EMPHATIC. WORD. Like he does when he tells Julie, “WHAT the HELL, does that have to do, WITH GETTING STRANGLED.”  Each ALL-CAPS represents a wave of the hand like Doctor Strange casting a spell.
• When Cage is waiting at the door for Julie with his head hung low, like he’s Elvis starting a concert only to look up, giggle, and ramble into the home like a 5-year-old.
• Wearing his alligator boots (reminiscent of Wild At Heart) and his alligator tooth necklace and his alligator iron-on Tshirt.
• Wearing at least eight big rings on his fingers.
• Watching Cage have rambunctious loud sex while reading from his own book of poetry. Legend.
• When he water dances like he’s in a wet Tshirt contest under the garden hose while Billie sits on his motorcycle spraying him.
• The full range of emotions: from weeping, to irritation, to anger, to stoned-giggling, to ecstasy, to distracted ennui. We get it all and at full volume.  
• Burning himself alive after playing with a charred Jack in the Box for last 20 minutes.

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Joe (again)

• Wearing a camo mesh-backed baseball cap
• Offering a woman No-Drowsy caffeine pills
• Consensually choking a woman to near-death
• Sipping on cough syrup
• Wearing a gator (or shark) tooth necklace
• Dancing in wet tshirt while getting hosed down
• Reading from a poetry book Memories by Nicolas Cage mid coitus
• Wearing alligator skinned patterned underwear (banana hammock)
• Handling a charred Jack in the Box

Recurrences

• Playing a regular Joe (Windtalkers, Joe)
• Wearing cowboy boots (Multiple)
• Drinking booze from a flask (Leaving Las Vegas)
• Waiting in a hospital waiting room (The Weather Man, Seeking Justice)
• Running into vengeful ghost / spirit issues (Season of the Witch, Pay the Ghost)
• Giving into his inner voyeur / peeping Tom (Inconceivable, Looking Glass, 8MM)
• Smokin’ the kush (Army of One, Multiple)
• Tattooed (Multiple)
• Being burned alive (The Wicker Man)

Quotables

“We don’t hurt women down South.” 

“Next time, why don’t you wrestle a man-gator?”

“Wife and daughter? Ooops, they’re dead!”  

“This strangling business is insane? You are aware of that, right?” 

“I smell like three days on the road.”

“How did a nice German girl like you wind up in the U.S. of A, driving a big rig?” 

“Gitty up!” 

“That’s dog shit! That’s not even bullshit. That’s just dog shit!” 

“A man without a truck is no man, you know that.” 

“Remember the exorcist. Remember Linda Blair, when she’s like FUCK ME, FUCK ME!” 

“Does the Tin Man have a sheet metal cock?” [Reply to question: Do you want a beer?]

“You have some respect for my wife, or I’ll spank it into ya!” 

“You want the stars, baby? I give you the stars!” 

“I don’t deserve anybody.” 

Conclusion

This movie was really bad. Maybe one of his worst. I have my own rankings and this may not fall into the bottom 5, but it’s close. If there was a moral or a message, I have no idea what to make of it. But this movie was also good in the sense that we got to see Cage come unCaged yet again. Was he a tragic figure? Yes, undoubtedly. Did he express himself with his singular and characteristic individuality and sense of personal freedom? Indeed, he did. 

Perhaps we are all Between Worlds right now in this WATC(H), i.e. the worst may still be yet to come (Jiu Jitsu) but perhaps the best is also waiting in the wings (Pig, Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Longlegs). 

Somebody please choke me so we can find out.