So I have just finished watching Willy’s Wonderland, an American action horror-comedy film directed by Kevin Lewis and written by G. O. Parsons, based on a short film called, “Wally’s Wonderland” that Parsons had made and produced by Nicolas Cage. Well, I’m still in disbelief about what I have just seen; I mean this film is just bonkers, plain outright 90 minutes of insanity.
I will start by trying to explain the plot of this movie. Ok, so a quiet drifter is tricked into a Janitorial job at a now condemned Willys Wonderland when his car breaks down. The mundane tasks of cleaning this children’s fun zone becomes an all-out fight for survival against a wave of 8 demonic possessed animatronics headed up by Willy Weasel.
The animatronic puppets are controlled by the souls of cannibal paedophile satanists who possessed the puppets after a ritualistic group suicide. Yes, this truly is the storyline, so I’m guessing it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon and hopefully you can now understand a bit more why I’m still in a confused stupor.
The main character in the movie is Nicolas Cage playing, well; at this point, it feels like he’s just playing himself. Cage’s character in the movie doesn’t even have a name, he is simply called “The Janitor” nor does he have a single line of dialogue throughout the film. I mean this literally, Cages character does not say a word the entire movie which just adds more eccentricity to the film.
The actions of Cage’s character are quite incomprehensible. He’s not at all fazed, for instance, when he is approached by an animatronic ostrich that announces it is going to rip his face off and murder him for pleasure. Cage simply beats Ollie the Ostrich to death with a broom, then carry’s on cleaning.
In another scene, Cage swigs soda’s as he dances around to hard rock and indulges in a slightly unhealthy obsession with an old pinball machine. I mean it’s truly bizarre and makes no sense whatsoever, as the scene plays no part in the extremely thin plot as it is.
To watch this movie you simply have to let the sheer stupidity wash over you and drink it all in. It’s outright brain-dead, brutal and there wasn’t a single moment where I wasn’t thinking “what the fuck”.
The movie as a whole wouldn’t look out of place as an end-of-year college film project with its simplistic, cliché, unimaginative, and entirely on-the-nose writing paired with some wobbly performances from the cast. B-movie horror fans will love this film.
If you enjoy Nicolas Cage bringing his own brand of insanity to a preposterous, nonsensical giant-furry-funhouse-mascot slasher movie, then this is your lucky day.
As I was writing this post I started to do a little research into Nicolas Cage himself and I suddenly realised that Willy’s Wonderland is as strange as Nicolas Cage’s life. For this reason, I am going to do another post to follow this one about the weird and wonderful world of Nicolas Cage, so watch this space.
