Review of Willy's Wonderland (2021) by Piglordofallham — 23 Feb 2021

One word, "embarrassing.".

Granted, no one was expecting much out of a clearly "borrowed" concept from a little independent horror videogame series that's been around for a few years now, but even the general film's conceptualization takes a few too many turns down "schlock and doofus avenue." Nicolas Cage stars as, well, the only star, alongside some nobody actors and actresses who got roped in to expand the suboptimal runtime without being too much involved. The general plot is literally Nicolas Cage's sweet ride breaks down, he decides to take a shady deal from the owner of a defunct children's restaurant (akin to something like Chuck E. Cheese) where he must spend the night cleaning this unbelievably filthy locale, all whilst having a sneaking suspicion that perhaps the overtly terrifying looking animatronics are moving all on their own (as opposed to moving on their own as just plain stuck-to-the-floor animatronics).

We get an assortment of numerous shots that sort of resemble a movie if you were holding down fast-forward. Cage's nameless, silent character does battle (or at least that's what the film is trying to convey) with several robotic nightmare demon creatures that all look suspiciously like people in poorly designed cheap suits and insultingly shoddy- probably outsourced computer animation. These lead to moments of hilarity where the action of the suit and computer animation aren't even in the same shot, and you often have this bizarre disconnected physical scene where its hard to even tell what is actually happening during these fight sequences.

I have no doubts that this movie was made on the cheap, with an extra serving of "filmed on location." Casting nobody actors with baffling bad dialogue is a really clever way of pretending your screenplay can actually stand up for the full hour and a half that's required for most theatrical releases, but this one barely makes it to the bare minimum and often has to drop pointless exposition to pad the runtime. This is just for the audience, which I find adorable as no one could possibly care about what's going on to begin with.

Look, I get it. Its supposed to be terrible, its supposed to be ridiculous, but am I supposed to laugh at everything happening in the film when it looks like no effort was put into to begin with? Is it trying to be scary? Are the scenes where Cage gets really into a pinball table supposed to be there? Is it trying to be a subversive horror cult masterpiece and I just "don't get it?" Is the concept art for the film better than those crap suits we got? We all know Nicholas Cage probably called a lot of the shots for whatever contract he signed for this piece of garbage, he probably said, "Yeah, uh- I want the film to open with me driving one of my Chevy sportscars, and I want the one women over half my age in the movie to be SUPER into to me by the end." The fact that Cage can still sink lower than "Ghost Rider" is hilarious to me.

People calling this some sort of purposefully terrible, yet "great" cult classic are just mind-numbingly bereft of any cinema knowledge to the point where its either a big joke that they're the only ones in on or they ACTUALLY believe its true. Cage isn't a terrible actor, despite his "meme-like" roles that he somehow is allowed to pick without a manager present, but at the same time, he's not suited for every piece of crap film that has YET to be made.

Is it unwatchable? No, but you certainly shouldn't waste your time or the potential death of brain cells watching it in the first place. For reference, one of the first lines from the mechanical abomination's (an ostrich) is literally, "I'm going to feast on your face." I mean how dumb does this have to be- maybe dumb needs some sort of scale so that it doesn't perform a one hundred and eighty degree spin into "debilitating to listen to.