WILLY’S WONDERLAND (2021)

 

(Director: Kevin Lewis. Screenwriter: G.O. Parsons.)

Storyline

A stranded-for-the-night drifter is tricked into doing janitorial work in a shuttered Chuck E. Cheese-style pizzeria where its animatronic mascots eat the janitors.

 

Review

A mostly silent drifter─billed as “The Janitor” (Nicolas Cage, COLOR OUT OF SPACE, 2019)─is tricked into working a one-night janitorial gig in a shut-down pizzeria, Willy’s Wonderland. The Janitor is not told his task will involve more than cleaning.

While this happens, a teenage girl, Liv (Emily Tosta), plots to torch Willy’s. As a younger girl, she witnessed her parents being killed by the eatery’s supernatural animatronic mascots, led by Willy Weasel. In the now, Liv’s guardian, Sheriff Lund (Beth Grant, CHILD’S PLAY 2, 1990), handcuffs Liv to a pipe to keep her from following through on her fiery intentions.

The Janitor─locked in the building by the restaurant’s owner (Tex Macadoo)─cleans the semi-trashed building. Time passes, the animal- and fairy tale-themed mascots come after The Janitor, who does not seem too surprised. Meanwhile, Liv─with help from friends─escapes her cuffs. They make their way to Willy’s to rescue the energy drink-swilling Janitor (a stranger to them) and burn Willy’s down.

WILLY’S is good up until this point. Once the kids find themselves stuck in the Chuck E Cheese-style fatty food palace, the movie goes to s**t. While The Janitor proves himself a worthy adversary for the possessed mascots, the kids─even the initially spunky and smart Liv─are mostly useless as they try to find a way out, plot conveniently forgetting about the barely boarded-over windows they could bust through, or how they could help The Janitor kill the remaining satanic threats (especially the seductive, ultra-creepy Siren Sara). Twenty-plus minutes bloat the film to its mandatory ninety-minute mark with the kids running around and getting picked off while The Janitor hunts and fights the monsters.

WILLY, with a few minor plot and character tweaks, could have been an excellent future cult classic─all of the ingredients are inherent in the film’s barebones set-up and its characters. Its cinematography (courtesy of David Newbert), production design (Molly Coffee) and its makeup/FX crew make this feel like a goofy, gory 1980s video flick. The early-on stage-setting and editing are top-notch. Perhaps one of the more egregious failings of WILLY’S is that the filmmakers did not make a movie that matched the loopy, masterful weirdness of Cage’s performance as a wordless, bad-ass Janitor (Cage wanted to play him like a silent actor would), whose quirks sometimes border on bewildering.

The rest of the actors are good, but this is Cage’s show. Even though I felt let down as a viewer (due to WILLY’S flaccid last third, dumb teenage characters and bad CGI at the end), this still has its fun moments, and Cage works his quirkiness in fresh ways here. I wouldn’t recommend it for most people, but if you’re hardcore about Cage, you should check it out at least once─for free, if possible.