Mark Reviews Movies: WILLY'S WONDERLAND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 11, 2021

The philosophy of the makers of Willy's Wonderland seems to be that a movie doesn't need a story, characters, logic, much in the way of production value, or an actual sense of purpose when it possesses one thing: a gimmick. This is more of a novelty than a movie, entirely based on and revolving around a single idea. We can't even say it's an original idea, either, as anyone with some knowledge of video games within the past decade will know.

The premise is that there's an old family restaurant, long abandoned and in disrepair, that shut down after a series of unfortunate events involving its cast of animatronic characters. They came to life, essentially, and started behaving strangely—moving around from their positions on stage, saying things they weren't supposed to, killing a kid or two. A random guy is tasked with spending the night—but not five nights, because that would be a bit too on the nose and noted in an intellectual property lawsuit—in the restaurant, where he has to survive the gradually approaching and suddenly appearing creatures.

That's at least a premise with some cleverly sinister potential, but it's also where the ambition and effort of G.O. Parson's screenplay end. Whatever humor, horror, satire, or action could exist within the scope of this setup is basically non-existent. It wants us to be creeped out by and to laugh at the central conceit, and Parsons and director Kevin Lewis clearly believe that goal is enough to carry all of this.

It doesn't, of course. After a brief and vague prologue featuring a young girl seeing her parents being killed by the unseen creatures, we meet our hero. He doesn't have a name, and indeed, he doesn't even have a single word, let alone a line, of dialogue throughout the entirety of the movie. The credits refer to him as "the Janitor," so we'll go with that, too.

The character is played by Nicolas Cage, which, given the actor's reputation for taking on weird projects and sometimes injecting some manic energy into them, could count as a second idea on the part of the filmmakers here. Without a thing to say or much to do when his character isn't fighting the animatronics, Cage's presence here is underutilized and counterintuitive. He glares and sneers his way through this silent performance, only vocal while grunting during the fights or slurping down energy drinks (That habit might be the deepest level of characterization). Otherwise, Cage looks visibly bored.

We can't blame him. For one thing, the character is presented as being unaffected by the horrors happening around and to him, which technically means the filmmakers have a second gag for this story. The Janitor takes regularly scheduled breaks, dictated by the beeping of his watch alarm. Even if a murdering animatronic is about to attack someone, the Janitor goes to chug a caffeinated beverage and play with an old pinball machine.

Beyond the absence of any real character to play, the material doesn't have much to offer, so again, we can't blame Cage for his apparent weariness. The Janitor is conned into the restaurant, under the guise of cleaning it to pay off repairs to his car, which got flat tires on the way through the county.

While he mops and scrubs and fights off assorted animatronic creatures (There might be more cleaning than fighting in this movie), Liv (Emily Tosta) and her friends come up with a plan to burn down the restaurant. They, as well as everyone—from the Sheriff, played by Beth Grant, to the restaurant's current owner, played by Ric Reitz—in town, know it's a place of murder and evil and a dark past, involving a crew of serial killers who committed suicide in a Satanic ritual.

The Janitor quickly and lazily fights assorted plastic and furry creatures—an ostrich, a gorilla, a fairy, an alligator, a frog—leading up to a pair of anticlimactic battles with the restaurant's namesake weasel. Liv's friends are hunted down one at a time after making terrible decisions. Some back story is clumsily tossed into the mix—as if the one thing that's missing from a story about a man fighting killer animatronics is an explanation for how they came into existence and why the Janitor is being offered up as a human sacrifice.

It's strange how Willy's Wonderland rushes through its fights and killings, since those are the only reasons for its existence. That's not necessarily a complaint, though. The movie does end faster as a result.

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