Willy’s Wonderland is one of those movies for me where I heard nothing about it leading up to its eventual release. I had no clue what it was or that it existed. Then, in one week, I heard at least five different, unrelated people mention it in a conversation as something worth watching. Then, nothing about it afterwards. It was like a weird ghost of a zeitgeist film—a ‘zeitghost,’ if you will. It had a week of interest surrounding it, then silence. With the long holiday weekend, I decided to sit down and see the movie for myself. And what a film it is.

What Is It?

Willy’s Wonderland was once a family and kids restaurant and indoor playground, similar to something like Chuck-E-Cheese. It seemed like one that lacked much to do, as there was just a small ball pit and an arcade in the back, separated from everything else. However, it still had the mechanical animal band to play annoying songs for birthday parties and the like. At some point, something terrible happened and the place had to be shut down. Since then, it’s become something of a haunted house in a small, secluded forest town somewhere in America.

One day, a stranger (Nicolas Cage) is driving through when his tires are blown out by a tire trap that has just been left out on the road by someone. With a tow truck and its talkative driver conveniently close by, the stranger is able to get his tires replaced but has to work off the price since he doesn’t have any money on him. So, he’s brought to the titular haunted house to clean up the place for the grand re-opening at the behest of the local mayor as a way of paying for the new tires. After being left alone to do some cleaning, it takes very little time for things to start moving on their own and for the animatronics to begin stalking the new janitor. While the janitor has to deal with possessed robot animals by himself, a team of teenagers led by Liv (Emily Tosta) are trying to find a way to burn the building down.

What Makes It Stand Out?

Style and Personality

If there is one thing that Willy’s Wonderland has in spades, it’s a particular style. There’s a lot of color to the pallet of the film. There are a lot of close-up or quick-zoom shots with snappy editing that have a dynamic look and rhythm similar to Shaun of the Dead. You need only watch the film for the first twenty minutes to see what I mean if the random snapshots from the film aren’t enough to convince you that this movie has a particular look to it.

In addition to the physical appeal of the film, there’s some great music to add to the experience. There are the occasional songs in which the animatronics are supposed to be grating and intentionally annoying to any listener who can’t pick out the darkness in the lyrics. However, the rest of the music has a tone and style that is similar to aggressive synth-wave music. I found myself wanting to find a copy of the film’s score to see if I could listen to songs used in the film that weren’t just dark versions of Chuck-E-Cheese tracks.

Low-Budget Cult Appeal

Piggybacking on the style of Willy’s Wonderland is the low-budget appearance of the film. Aside from Nicolas Cage, the other actors are mostly unknown. The action/horror scenes, the special effects, the film quality, and the sets all give the impression that the film was made on a budget. However, nothing looks ‘cheap’ in the derogatory sense of the word. This is a passion project and it’s obvious. Probably the most expensive thing about the movie, apart from the animatronics and costumes, is Nicolas Cage, but he’s also a producer on the film so he probably didn’t charge too much for his talents.

Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage is the main character and never says a word the whole movie. He is a complete mute for the entirety of the film and only acknowledges other characters with nods and glares. This is an important detail that I think is worth knowing ahead of time for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, it’s just interesting that a recognized actor like Cage would be willing to do a role in a low-budget, independent film and have no lines at all, let alone also be a producer for the film. Cage has certainly had a bumpy movie career that started strong and has now led him to be an actor who’s known for some really trashy flicks. However, every once in a while he does a movie that people recognize as something that specifically suits his style and abilities. I don’t necessarily think that Willy’s Wonderland is anything that would jumpstart his career in a way similar to how John Wick did for Keanu Reaves, but it’s definitely not a bad choice for Cage.

Another reason it’s important to note that Nicolas Cage doesn’t say anything in the whole movie is that this wouldn’t work if it wasn’t Cage. I was thinking to myself as I watched Willy’s Wonderland if there were any possible replacement actors who could do the same thing to the same degree. If it was an unknown actor, talented or otherwise, it wouldn’t have been as effective at creating the awkward quirkiness that Willy’s Wonderland achieves with Cage. The only people who might have been able to do so would have to be equally recognizable and equally unusual in some way. Cage is the perfect choice for the character of the silent janitor. It’s not because he gives an amazing performance. It’s simply because the movie is really not that special or interesting without him doing improvised dances in front of pinball machines after having ripped the head off a murderous animatronic animal. The downside to this is that, if you don’t appreciate Nicolas Cage for his more eccentric qualities in his long film library, his eccentricity here may be lost on you.

Any Downsides?

Weak Writing

I won’t bother to explain the plot of Willy’s Wonderland beyond what I’ve already provided above because the film does a fair bit of that itself. There are a few scenes in the film in which the exposition is extremely thick with explanations of why the place is haunted, how it has affected the town, or how certain characters relate to each other. The storytelling in Willy’s Wonderland is frankly awful.

That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t do interesting things with the dialogue or characters. It has moments in which the awkwardness of a silent protagonist played by Nicolas Cage is used to its full potential. However, the way the story progresses, the way the situation escalates, the way the plot is revealed, the motivations of certain character actions, and a variety of other things in the writing are all lazily handled with little finesse. Willy’s Wonderland is a horror movie, so it gets away with it a bit for that reason alone, but it really isn’t telling a good story without many plot holes.

There were multiple moments when I was watching where I really had to question the motivation of certain characters due to the fact that they were clearly making decisions that no sane or rational person would have made with the same information available to them. You might argue that these characters were not sane. If that’s the case, then they’re some really boring insane characters. As I said, it’s a horror movie so it gets away with a lot. However, I don’t think that should be an excuse to have characters behave completely irrationally or idiotically when given the choice.

When it’s all said and done, the exposition dumps that happen in the middle and toward the end of Willy’s Wonderland create more questions than give answers, and not the type of questions you want your audience to ask. It would have been better off had the plot remained vague and far less detailed; I would have had a lot fewer questions about the plot and the actions taken by certain characters. The argument for the actions of certain townsfolk would also be a little more justified just by making the place of Willy’s Wonderland a much older building with a mysterious and dark history that is as old as the town itself. It could have had more people not believe the place is haunted. It could have had characters who were possibly involved in the dark past of the place for their own reasons before it became haunted. It could have had more characters as willing accomplices to the horrors of the place rather than slightly reluctant ones. There were plenty of ways it could have been improved.

Shaky Cam

Since this is a low-budget indie film, there’s not going to be a whole lot of fight choreography or acrobatic feats in the action sequences in which Nicolas Cage is engaged in combat with animatronics. So, to create excitement and drama in the fights without losing the impact of the attacks, the film compensates with shaky cam. Likewise, during the horror segments in which certain characters are killed off, it’s done so with shaky cam during the moment some animatronics strike. This is done mainly to prevent you from clearly seeing where the character is not visibly being hurt: blood pours onto the screen, the person screams in horror, the animatronic lightly bites the victim, and the camera experiences an 8.0 earthquake as it tries to keep everything in the frame. It’s a low-budget movie, so I forgive the choice to use the technique, but it happens a lot and gets more annoying than anything else by the end.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Overall, Willy’s Wonderland is a unique and fun experience. It’s a flawed film, to say the least, and it might be a little too reliant on a silent Nicolas Cage performance to accomplish its quirkiness and intriguing nature. However, the end result is still a movie that was fun to watch and laugh at as Nicolas Cage suplexes fluffy, murderous animal robots. Hopefully, it does well enough to inspire the cast and crew to do more creative projects in the future, but not so well that anyone feels the need to make a direct sequel, because I don’t think you’ll be able to capture lightning in a bottle twice.