Though the creative team behind it may or may not actually admit it, there's no denying that Willy's Wonderland is pretty obviously a ripoff of Five Nights at Freddy's. A cursory glance at their most basic concepts makes the similarities painfully obvious; Willy's Wonderland is roughly the same idea without several years' worth of lore. But unlike the the poorly made, microbudget ripoffs and cash-grabs that you expect when something that fits into the "mockbuster" label, Willy's Wonderland is one that is an absolute blast from beginning to end.
It does more than badly imitate a more well-known property's ideas, it does more than take the basic "someone is trapped in a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff with a bunch of killer animatronics" idea and make something with no heart or soul. Willy's Wonderland completely embraces the inherent B-movie insanity of the whole thing to create something I found to be utterly captivating, and I cannot say enough good things about it.
The movie focuses on a silent drifter (Nicolas Cage) who finds himself stranded on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere after a spike strip left in the road takes out all four of his car's tires. The super-sketchy local mechanic only takes cash and there are no working ATMs for miles, so a deal is struck: a sleazy local businessman will cover the repair bills if the drifter spends the night doing janitorial duty at an abandoned children's entertainment center called "Willy's Wonderland."
Sounds simple enough, right? That's where you're wrong. Just when Willy's Wonderland's new janitor begins what sounds like a mundane new job for just a night, he discovers the restaurant's eight withered animatronic mascots are alive, possessed by the spirits of a satanic cult and determined to kill anyone who walks inside. But the janitor won't let that, nor the dispensable group of teenagers that break in at some point during the movie, stand in his way as he cleans up the place as he'd been hired to do.
I first saw Willy's Wonderland not long after it was released back in 2021 and immediately fell in love. Not one single frame of the movie's entire 89-minute runtime is meant to be taken seriously. It is a batshit insane combination of every silly cheap slasher movie trope and cliché played fast and loose. Simply put, Willy's Wonderland is utterly bonkers.
Director Kevin Lewis and writer G.O. Parsons treat the movie as if it were something made by Sam Raimi if he got his start now instead of 1981. There's a paltry budget and a cast and script that might not be all that great, but there's also an energy there that can and will keep people engaged with what's on the screen. There are parts that are sluggish, but I found myself willing to overlook those moments because the rest of the movie made up for it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the rest of this review gushing about Nicolas Cage and his performance as the silent badass credited solely as "the janitor." He is the biggest reason why this movie is so much fun. You absolutely will not give a shit about any other actor or character in this movie. I said before that the characters are disposable, and that is 100% true. They're solely there to be numbers for an episode of Dead Meat's "Kill Count," caricatures of characters you'd see in some cheap slasher movie with the actors giving performances that match. All that's asked of them is to deliver stilted dialogue and do stupid things that you've seen in a hundred other horror movies. And let's face it, you're not gonna remember or even care about the locals that are in on the whole thing or the idiot teenagers that have shown up to burn the place down, but split up to have sex and smoke weed despite knowing the place is a death trap. You're here for Nicolas Cage.
The janitor almost doesn't belong here, with Cage himself saying in an interview on the DVD special features that it was a "Pale Rider meets Killer Klowns from Outer Space" situation. That's a fun way to describe it, because it feels like the janitor escaped from an action movie or a Western and somehow ended up in a cheesy slasher movie. It's like if someone dropped the Doom Slayer into one of those post-Scream horror flicks from just before and after the turn of the millennium, only if the Doom Slayer were a little bit more kooky.
Much like the Doom Slayer, the janitor doesn't speak one word of dialogue throughout the entirety of the movie. We only ever hear Cage's voice through the occasional grunt while he fights the merry band of monsters. A quiet hero is nothing new, his silence would make him just as menacing as the villains if this were any other movie. But this isn't any other movie. It loops around and becomes hilarious when he never bothers to respond to anyone and stays focused on simply doing his job as a janitor and, much like a normal employee, having his regularly scheduled breaks. When one of the teenagers tries talking him into leaving, giving the janitor (and the audience) the backstory of the place, he seems like he's outright ignoring her. He doesn't respond, he doesn't look at her or even acknowledge that she's even talking to him. The janitor just goes on about his business.
It's as if he's taking his job so seriously that fighting the monsters are just a part of it and everyone else there is slowing him down. He mops up after every fight and throws what's left of the animatronics in the garbage, makes sure his uniform is tidy, and occasionally stops by the break room to have a drink of soda and play a round of pinball. And he takes that seriously too, stopping to take his breaks even if a fight is about to begin before he returns to start the fight once his break time is up.
In the that interview on the DVD I mentioned earler, Cage said that he drew inspiration from Harpo Marx, Buster Keaton, and Charles Bronson's performance in Once Upon a Time in the West to prepare for Willy's Wonderland, and I absolutely believe him. He plays it as both a comedic and a serious role at the exact same time. Cage cleaning an abandoned building and beating monsters to death while intermittently playing pinball and chugging soda feels like it's prime Nicolas Cage. The career resurrection he's had as of late makes something like this fit right in with the roles he's had in stuff like Mandy and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
I've long forgotten specifically who I heard it from, but I once heard an online film critic say, "A movie doesn't have to be good to be awesome." And that's a perfect way to sum up Willy's Wonderland. It is not a perfect movie by any means, but it damn sure is a fun one. I've watched it more than once and it's still one of the most entertaining B-movies I've seen in a very long time. This movie goes all in in the silliness, which is one of the big reasons I prefer it over the Five Nights at Freddy's movie. I don't need Blumhouse playing this concept seriously while trying to please fans of a bunch of video games I'll never play, I just need Nicolas Cage being his most Nicolas Cage while fighting monsters. That suits me just fine.
Final Rating: ***½
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