Willy's Wonderland at the IMDb
I found this soon to be cult classic on Amazon Prime and have to say that, despite myself, I actually quite enjoyed it. The film stars Nicholas Cage and appears to be from his ‘filmed in an afternoon to pay the tax bill’ phase. Its budget is listed as a lowly $5m and it was sponsored by the Malaysian film industry to the tune of 30%, which is confirmed by the credits list that suggest most of the post production was carried out overseas.
With a foreign backer to appease the film took the bold decision to have its star have literally no lines of dialogue whatsoever - I imagine that saved plenty on the dubbing costs alone. Apart from a few grunts Cage has nothing to say at all, and if the intention was ‘mysterious’ it came across as ‘constipated’.
Cage plays ’The Janitor’ a drifter, who for unexplained reasons, has a high end sports car. He drives through a small town when he hits a spike trap on the road causing a low end come to a stop - no budget for a big smash here. We quickly learn that this is small town movie cliché number one, with corrupt officials and police putting their well used plan into action. Cage doesn’t have the money for car repairs but a local businessman makes him a strange offer - clean up the abandoned fun house overnight and the $1000 repairs will be covered. Sounds like a good deal? HUGE mistake.
Whilst Cage gets his mops and brushes organised, we have a side plot with a bunch of high school kids who are plotting to burn down the titular fun house. These are your typical teen slasher fodder and I don’t think a single one registered with me.
Despite having no lines, Cage does show character depth - he drinks a can of energy drink every hour and plays pinball, even when fighting off a hoard of rampaging animatronic characters. Yes, the fun house is inhabited by 8 mascots all of whom have murderous intent. In a large info dump from the sheriff, we learn that the fun house was owned and staffed by a bunch of child killers. When the game was up they carried out a ritual suicide which caused their spirits to inhabit the mechanical fun house hosts, like you do.
The robots were the best bit of the film with a good mix of creepy and exaggerated clown features with various animals and creatures depicted like a crocodile, woodland nymph and the titular Willy the stoat himself. As you’d expect the bad guys gamely line up for individual battle with Cage whilst their contemporaries take out the kids. We learn that the townsfolk lure in strangers to appease the bad guy spirits, lest they once again return to the town to seek their prey there. They should have called Cage in the first place, because as The Janitor, he quickly cleans house.
I was setting up to dislike this film. The opening has a lot of fast edits and has a washed out sepia tone. The gimmick of having Cage not speaking quickly wears thin and there are a lot of awkward scenes were a line of dialogue would move things on, whereas we get Cage looking awkwardly for a way out instead. His character and motivation are wafer thin but the fight scenes are decent and brutal with no time wasted with complicated explanations or justifications. The teens could have been wearing t-shirts marked ‘Fodder’ and their fates would have been no less obvious. Down the cast you’ll recognise no one apart from the lady sheriff who has a few decent credits, but was trying too hard to channel Darlene out of ‘Ozark’ to be effective here.
Overall this was a throwaway piece of nonsense that had just enough to keep me interested. The violence is fun and extreme and it demands nothing in terms of your attention or powers of deduction. The animatronics were well realised although it was clear that it was people in costumes for the fights and they weren’t as tough as invulnerable as the locals would have you believe. Guess you just need to hire the right janitor to take out the trash!
Best Bit : Need a new t-shirt
'W' Rating 15/23
