[Film Review] Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

In a world where heroes don’t say a word and heroines make nothing but bad decisions – one man named The Janitor will Nic Cage the fuck all over animatronic Satan worshipping serial killers. This world is Willy’s Wonderland, and it’s…definitely a movie. 

Opening deep within Willy’s Wonderland, a dilapidated Chuck E Cheese-like play club, a couple struggles to stay together while trying to fend off entities that are invisible to the naked eye. The man is quickly dispatched off screen with a splatter of extra red blood on the walls while the woman has a moment to see a pair of small, scared eyes staring at her through a door before being attacked, again, by an unseen force. 

The story picks up some years later with a car ripping down the road at top speed. The presence of Nicolas Cage is palpable. The audience feels him, anticipates his introduction with quivering giddiness, and soon enough, there he is, after the car tires are flattened by spikes in the road, Cage emerges from the car – his black(ish) hair glistening in the camera’s light flare like Jesus returned. This is no exaggeration. These are the exact details of this scene. And at that moment, the audience will realize that, no matter what happens from here on out, this is a movie that was created not for horror fans, but for Nic Cage fans. 

It makes sense, as the story goes that Cage came across the script, written by G.O. Parsons, and agreed to both star and produce after reading it over a 48-hour period. One of the draws of the script for Cage was that his character, known only as The Janitor, speaks not a word of dialogue in the entire 89-minute runtime. Director Kevin Parsons has talked about the difficulty in finding funding for the film, saying it worked in large part due to Cage insisting, “This is exactly the kind of movie that needs to be made.” This is obviously a labor of love, though the film feels more laborious than lovely. 

The Janitor is tricked into indentured servitude after being unable to pay his auto bill (the small town he landed in doesn’t have internet, atms, or, apparently, banks), and he ends up at Willy’s Wonderland, where he is tasked by owner Tex “fake ‘stache” Macadoo to spend the night cleaning in exchange for his car. The Janitor is all nods and snarly lipped grimaces, but he doesn’t seem to mind the job, as long as he has his Punch energy drink. 

There are many aspects of this film that feel half baked. The story includes Liv (Emily Tosta), a young woman with a close connection to the evil within Willy’s Wonderland, and her six friends - paper doll characters who represent the most cut out stereotypes of every other genre film. This group must suffer from short-term memory loss, because they go to Willy’s to burn the place down and end up separating once inside the building. One lets an animatronic chameleon convince him that she knows the secrets of the universe, two think it’s a good idea to fuck in the Satanic ritual room, and the rest do equally stupid things that result in a lot of disappointing off-screen deaths. Over and over, The Janitor is forced to alternate between (quite easily) dispatching the evil entities and mopping floors, until the last animatronic has been black bagged. 

The film features a few cool fight scenes, a sort of intriguing mythology around the animatronic animals, and at least one pretty awesome scene where Nic Cage gets to dance and play pinball. But these sporadic stylistic moments don’t make up for the overreliance on bad CGI, a plot that gets very redundant, very fast, a lead actress who severely over-pronounces her dialogue, and a bunch of Chekov’s guns that never fire. 

Willy’s Wonderland isn’t scary enough to be horror, it takes itself too seriously to be camp, so what we are left with is a film that has little heart (unlike the incredible Psycho Goreman), and even less genre-specific batshit cool madness (like from, say, Mandy). It is a wholly missed – and mourned – opportunity.

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