The 2021 Nicolas Cage Vehicle Willy's Wonderland is like Five Nights at Freddy's But Good
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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As I have documented extensively in the Big Whoop blog, my nine-year-old son Declan is obsessed with Five Nights at Freddy’s, the video game turned multi-media franchise that has captured the minds and imaginations of our young people.
Actually, “obsessed” doesn’t do justice to the intensity of Declan’s fixation. We both have ADHD and one of its symptoms is hyper-focus. So while we have a difficult time focussing on most things we have a frightening ability to focus on subjects of interest.
For Declan that’s Five Nights at Freddy’s. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that he literally cannot talk about anything else. It rivets him. He can’t help it. He needs to discuss it. It’s a fever that consumes him. It burns hot and bright all day and night long.
I both do and do not understand that. I am not as enamored of Five Nights At Freddy’s as he is. Very few people are, and that is an extraordinarily popular franchise.
But I certainly understand obsessing about one particular corner of the pop culture world with all of your heart and soul and with a ferocity that even you find a little disconcerting.
I am, after all, a man who wrote a book where he analyzed every single track on every “Weird Al” Yankovic. I’m nearly done writing a 700 page book about American films about movie making, The Fractured Mirror and I am of course nearly finished with my epic journey through the filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
Thankfully Cage keeps churning out movies at such a rapid clip that the Travolta/Cage podcast and Travolta/Cage Project won’t be done for another six months at least
One of my preeminent obsessions overlaps with the ghoulish video game rocking my son’s world in 2021’s Willy’s Wonderland. It’s a low-budget action comedy with essentially the same premise as the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie: a desperate loner gets locked into a defunct family fun eatery and must battle evil, possessed animatronic animals.
They say that there are only five or six real plots. One of them, inevitably, involves luckless souls forced to confront animatronic kiddie entertainers possessed by Satanic evil.
I did not care for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie. Don’t tell my son! He must never know! True, he’s probably reading this right now so I’m not going to swear but I honestly felt that Five Nights at Freddy’s could be better.
I gave Willy’s Wonderland a negative review when it came out, but I dug it this time around. I think the problem was that I initially compared it, unfavorably, to Citizen Kane. I said that the cinematography wasn’t as ground-breaking or dynamic as Gregg Toland’s pioneering work on Orson Welles’ classic debut and the screenplay isn’t as rich as the one written exclusively by Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz, the smartest, most talented man in the history of the universe.
Mank was so unbelievably gifted that he made his screenwriter brother Joseph, who wrote and directed All About Eve seem like a drooling, mouth-breathing simpleton/village idiot by comparison.
If judged on its own merits and not compared to a popular choice for greatest film of all time Willy’s Wonderland is a lot of fun. It gave me everything I wanted, needed, and angrily demanded from a movie where Nicolas Cage battles animatronic animals inhabited by the souls of Satanic child murderers, namely Nicolas Cage beating the junk out of evil animatronics.
Things that irritated me about the film amused me this time around. I enjoyed the absurdity of a plot that’s nothing but holes and craziness and crazy holes.
It’s one of those movies where people who really should know better make a bargain with a figure of infinite evil and then expect the exemplar of all that is wrong in the world to be honorable and hold up their end of the deal.
In this case the not so good people of Hayesville, North Carolina tell Willy, who is inhabited by the soul of the serial killer who owned and operated Willy Wonderland, that if they limit their murders to the Willy’s Wonderland complex they’ll make sure to feed them an endless series of drifters who fall for new owner Tex Macadoo’s (Ric Reitz) offer to have their car fixed as long as they spend one night at Willy’s Wonderland.
Willy’s Wonderland shows a police officer, acting as a representative for the whole town, approaching Willy with her proposal, which he accepts but they frustratingly do not show the negotiation process so we don’t know what kind of haggling went on between the law enforcement officer and the animatronic weasel inhabited by the sinister spirit of a serial killer of children.
They seem nice.
The rest of the film is just as ridiculous. In another detail that angered me before but tickled me pink the second time involved Tex re-opening Willy’s Wonderland after it was shut down due to the rampant child-murder and satanic sacrifices.
Tex adorably hoped that folks would just forget about the unpleasantness involved in the mass murder of children and a restaurant that’s like an even more evil version of Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza. Willy’s Wonderland apparently exists in a world without the internet or true crime podcasts because they would be obsessed with what went down at Willy’s Wonderland.
Instead the whole damn world has developed amnesia about the unfortunate outbreak of Satanic child murders.
I found this unrealistic, but I just listened to a true crime podcast about seven people being murdered at a Brown’s chicken restaurant in Chicagoland. The owners wanted to re-open that as well. They wanted people to focus on the delicious food and quality service, not the seven people who were slaughtered.
Nicolas Cage plays an unnamed drifter, who, judging by his instincts and fighting skills, was probably some manner of Navy SEAL or top CIA operative at some point, who accepts the offer after his sweet ride has its tires shredded in the cursed town.
Cage does not utter a single word in Willy’s Wonderland. It is an entirely silent performance. That bothered me before because Cage is very good at talking. He’s one of the best! I’ve spent years chronicling Cage’s career in its entirety in no small part because I love his voice.
It consequently seems perverse and counter-intuitive to cast someone with so much personality and such a gift of gab as a straightforward man of no words who just want to finish the job and get the hell out of town.
There’s a lot to be said, however, for the sleek minimalism of Cage’s performance. An actor who usually vibrates with energy and life has ratcheted down his natural magnetism and charisma to play a man as straightforward and goal-oriented as the video game protagonist he often resembles.
Willy’s Wonderland was released after Five Nights at Freddy’s became a video game phenomenon but before the release of the wildly successful feature film adaptation. Willy’s Wonderland solves two of Five Nights at Freddy’s fatal flaws in lasting a brisk 90 minutes, twenty minutes shorter than FNAF. And the tone here is fun and goofy instead of oddly solemn and dour.
Instead of a survival game Willy’s Wonderland resembles a fighting game, with Willy as the Big Boss the Janitor must fight and defeat. Like a true working man, the Janitor does not let the fact that he was trapped in a Showbiz Pizza from Hell by people who want him dead keep him from diligently cleaning the abandoned restaurant when he’s not pummeling evil animatronics with his fists.
The Janitor seems strangely unsurprised the first time an animatronic comes to life and tries to kill him. It’s as if he always suspected that a day would come when he’d have to kill a series of deranged satanic animatronics and his whole life had been building to that moment.
They may be killers possessed by child murderers who also worship Satan but Willy and the gang are no match for the Janitor and his fists of fury.
There’s something tremendously satisfying about watching Cage destroy a Rock-afire Explosion of Satanic evil. It’s even more enjoyable watching him dance ecstatically to a theme song that, adorably lays out the film’s plot.
In my earlier review, I complained that the animatronics are nightmare fuel from the start and that there is a profound disconnect between stationary animatronics and stuntmen and women in costume.
Willy and his devil worshipping colleagues make for some supremely ugly animals but Willy’s Wonderland is a minimalist action movie as much as it is a dark comedy and a horror movie.
Willy’s Wonderland is profoundly silly and a whole lot of fun.
I sincerely enjoyed it this time, if not quite as much as Declan enjoys every Five Nights at Freddy’s. Then again, I’m not sure I like anything as much as Declan likes Five Nights at Freddy’s, and, like my boy, I am a man of obsessions.
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