Before Five Nights at Friday's There Was the 2021 Nicolas Cage vehicle Willy's Wonderland, Which Also Sucked, But Was Slightly Better
In Billy Wilder’s 1966 dark comedy The Fortune Cookie, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon’s first onscreen collaboration, Lemmon’s schlemiel character spends nearly the entire film in bed at the behest of Matthau’s sketchy lawyer for the sake of a fat, undeserved payday.
Eventually, however, the poor guy leaves the prison of his bed and is so infectiously overjoyed to be up and moving that every movement expresses pure, palpable, irresistible joy in being alive.
It’s a wonderful showcase for Lemmon’s peerless gifts as a physical comedian but it also highlights just how much the movie loses by keeping its frustrated hero immobile and bed-ridden.
There’s something downright perverse about relegating an unstoppable, irrepressible life force like Jack Lemmon to the sidelines and out of action for so long. Billy Wilder obviously knew what he was doing but sticking Jack Lemmon in a bed for pretty much the duration of a film was an audacious move that I am not sure paid off.
On a similar note Nicolas Cage is such a wonderfully verbal, even verbose performer that the under-achieving Chuck E. Cheese-gone-Satanic horror action thriller Willy Wonderland’s decision to cast him in a mute role feels like a waste of the cult hero’s extraordinary gifts.
Late in Willy’s Wonderland, Cage’s unnamed character dances exuberantly to the title song, a gloriously synthetic, plastic synth-pop throwback to the neon Nagel 1980s. For the first time in the film, he feels truly free to express himself.
“The Janitor”, as Cage is credited, is gloriously, unmistakably alive against all odds. His almost inconceivably brutal existence instantaneously transforms into a glittering rainbow-tinted fever dream of retro fun.
A grim exercise in animatronic-animal-on-man and man-on-animatronic-animal brutality briefly comes alive and delivers the fun endemic in a late-period Nicolas Cage taking on a Showbiz Pizza worth of evil killer animatronic singing animals, child-killing Chuck E. Cheeses, as it were, inhabited by the souls of serial killers.
In this sequence, and in this sequence only, Willy’s Wonderland lives up to its enormous potential for trashy fun. Cage doesn’t talk while dancing and playing pinball but he is expressive and joyful in a way that made me wish that Cage’s entire performance, and the film, shared its dreamy, ebullient tone instead of being an anomaly in a bloodbath where Cage otherwise expresses himself through violence rather than movement.
Willy’s Wonderland opens with the tires of the Janitor’s car getting shredded by spikes in Hayesville, Nevada, an evil small town with a sinister secret. The Janitor is doomed to end up in a little slice of hell that’s like Nothing But Trouble’s Valkenvania but without the penis noses and Humpty Hump.
Everything about Hayesville screams, “Leave while you still can. Nothing but agonizing death awaits you here.” Handbills betray that a disconcerting number of people have gone missing in Hayesville, almost as if it’s some manner of death trap.
On the outside of Willy’s Wonderland, a spooky abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like animatronic singing animal-themed kiddie restaurant graffiti reads “child killers” and “Gateway to Hell.”
So when Tex Macadoo (Ric Reitz) offers The Janitor the opportunity to spend a night cleaning up Willy’s Wonderland in exchange for his car getting fixed he acquiesces silently and stoically, as is his way.
The evening starts out creepy enough but eventually the ghoulish, degraded singing animatronic animals begin coming to life and attacking The Janitor in the time-honored one-at-a-time fashion favored by short-sighted cinematic villains everywhere.
If I were minding my own business, attending to some light janitorial work and then a profane, feral, disgusting musical ostrich robot were to become sentient and try to murder me it would instantly and dramatically upend my entire sense of reality, causing me to question everything I know about what is and is not possible.
At the very least, I would be surprised to discover an angry, profane ostrich robot talking shit and trying to kill me. Not the Janitor, however. Nope, he does not flinch at all when alliterative anthropomorphic animals Willy Weasel, Arty Alligator, Cammy Chameleon, Ozzie Ostrich, Tito Turtle, Knighty Knight, Gus Gorilla, and Siren Sara try to kill him.
On the contrary, The Janitor seems to have been preparing himself from a young age for the inevitability that he would someday have to kill a series of super-powered, hate-filled Satanic Animatronic critters after being sacrificed to the evil spirit of the prolific serial killer who now inhabits the body of Willy Weasel.
The Janitor is the Jason Bourne of destroying off-brand versions of the The Rock-afire Explosion. Just as it seems a goddamn waste to silence someone as good at delivering dialogue as Cage it’s foolish to take someone with all of the charisma and personality in the world and reduce him to a silent, glowering killing machine. See also: Dwayne Johnson in Black Adam.
Cage was a badass who could handle himself in a chainsaw fight and was bad news for evil cultists in Mandy as well but in that instant cult classic Cage had a role that allowed him to be sad and vulnerable and lost in grief and any number of achingly human emotions that Willy’s Wonderland wouldn’t have any idea what to do with.
Meanwhile a gaggle of generic horror movie teenagers show up at Willy’s Wonderland to burn down the abandoned restaurant and all of the evil that it contains and, to a lesser extent, smoke weed and have premarital sex.
Does it go well for them? It does not. For it seems that Willy’s Wonderland’s original proprietor was Jerry Robert Willis (Grant Cramer), a notorious serial killer who used the family entertainment center to lure children into its ironically and inaccurately named “Super Happy Fun Room” for the sake of brutally murdering them.
Willis and his team of fellow serial killers commit group suicide via a Satanic ritual that allows them to inhabit the bodies of the anthropomorphic animatronics.
Willy’s Wonderland shuts down in a hurricane of bad press but a decade later a new owner is willing to give it a go until an unfortunate string of child murders cause it to go out of business all over again.
I’m sorry but if John Wayne Gacy and all of his fellow serial killers had a kiddie carnival called John Wayne Gacy’s Happy Fun Land and it became notorious for all of the children that were murdered there it’s going down in the annals of true crime history.
There are going to be dozens of true crime podcasts and Netflix mini-series about it. You’re not going to be able to re-open it a decade later with a sign reading, “John Wayne Gacy’s Happy Fun Land: Gala Re-Opening Under New Management; No More Serial Killing or Clowns” and expect even a single goddamn customer. No, people would avoid a place like that like it was pure evil on account of it obviously being pure evil.
Yet Willy’s Wonderland is not atom-bombed out of existence to kill its Satanic, powerful evil. Instead the people of Hayesville make a Satanic bargain with Willy: his monstrous brood of singing animals will refrain from terrorizing the town as long as they are fed a steady diet of “sacrifices” like the poor Janitor.
You can’t trust figures of pure evil but Hayesville’s town elders nevertheless feel like they can trust the Satanic, child-killing serial killer now inhabiting Willy Weasel’s body. That reflects seriously poor judgment.
Willy’s Wonderland feels unmistakably like a video game, with a non-verbal protagonist steadily fighting his way through a series of challengers en route to a climactic showdown with the big boss, Willy Weasel.
The internet fell in love with the idea of Willy’s Wonderland despite its premise being close enough to both the video game series Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Banana Splits Movie to inspire legal action.
Willy’s Wonderland boasts a seemingly can’t miss premise that ends up whiffing pretty badly due to a total lack of scares and surprises.
The shocker’s juxtaposition of faux-childhood innocence and adult brutality would be more haunting and effective if there was any element of Willy’s Wonderland that was at all innocent or appealing.
Instead the creepy creatures of Willy’s Wonderland are pure nightmare fuel from the get go, raggedy, ugly and dirty little monsters that move as quickly or as slowly as the screenplay requires at any given moment.
Willy’s Wonderland wants to be Mandy lite. It has all of the punishing Cage intensity but none of the pulp artistry and grindhouse lyricism that make Mandy special. It’s minimalist to a fault in its perverse eagerness to silence one of the most audacious voices in pop culture.
Willy’s Wonderland sadistically deprives us of Cage’s voice. Even more disastrously, it deprives us of his personality as well.
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