You could go to see “Sucker Punch” this weekend — a lot of people probably will, and a few may even admit as much back at the office on Monday — or you could try to make it yourself, which might be more fun, though not necessarily cheaper. Here’s what you will need: a bunch of video-game platforms; DVDs of “Shutter Island,” “Kill Bill,” “Burlesque” and “Shrek”; some back issues of Maxim; a large bag of crystal meth; and around $100 million. Your imagination will take care of the rest.

Zack Snyder’s imagination is certainly feverish, though not exactly fertile. Mr. Snyder, whose previous live-action films are, in ascending order of quality, “300,” “Watchmen” and the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” specializes in recombining pulp pop clichés into grotesque and bloated spectacles that show just enough visual bravura to be disappointing rather than merely awful. With “Sucker Punch,” his first movie not based on pre-existing material, he runs wild through the dank corridors of a gothic mental hospital, the velvety rooms of a high-end bordello and combat landscapes that evoke World War I, samurai epics and science-fiction futurism.

All of these might actually be the same place, as filtered through the mind of a young woman with enormous eyes and pouty lips who goes by the name Babydoll (Emily Browning). Confined to a creepy, windswept New England loony bin by her nasty stepfather in the wake of family tragedies, Babydoll slips through a series of mental trapdoors.

The hospital becomes a brothel, its imperious Polish chief psychologist (Carla Gugino) an imperious Polish madam and ballet instructor, and its sadistic head orderly (Oscar Isaac) a sadistic pimp named Blue Jones. Instructed to dance for clients — her virginity is being preserved for a half-mythic customer called the High Roller (Jon Hamm, who also plays a lobotomist) — Babydoll slips into a trance and passes, along with four of her fellow inmates, into a digitally rendered maelstrom of swordfights, aerial battles and big explosions.