Movie Review: Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

Willy’s Wonderland is a movie written by G.O. Parsons and directed by Kevin Lewis. For those unaware, the concept of this movie is somewhat similar to the popular video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s”. The setting is a “Chuck. E. Cheese”-esque establishment where parents can bring their kids for video games, pizza, and also an animatronic band that sings songs.

This film stars Nicolas Cage, who plays a guy who has a tire blowout on the road, and a towtruck driver tells him that he can work to pay for repairs. Enter Tex Macadoo (Ric Reitz) who offers him the job. The job is to simply clean “Willy’s Wonderland” overnight so he can re-open it for business. Once he is done, the car will be waiting for him outside in the morning. It’s the type of establishment mentioned above and has been closed down for some time because of a dark past.

Nicolas Cage agrees to do the job, and Tex Macadoo explains what needs to be done, hands him a Willy’s Wonderland t-shirt, and chains the building from the outside, locking him in for the night. Once he’s inside he begins cleaning. It doesn’t take long before he gets a weird vibe from the creepy animatronic band, and sure enough, he is attacked by one and has to survive the evening.

As we like to try to stay as spoiler-free as possible, we will just note some of the positives and negatives that we noticed here and summarize our thoughts below.

What we liked:

The concept is great. Animatronic bands are already creepy enough, and having them come to life and try to kill people is a long-overdue premise for a horror film.

Nicolas Cage doesn’t have any speaking lines or even a name in this film and has a very mysterious vibe.

The design of the animatronics and set were pretty great.

Beth Grant (Child’s Play 2, No Country For Old Men) was in this as a sheriff.

The cinematography was pretty good.

What we thought could have been better:

The animatronics weren’t as scary as they could have been. It seems like they held back too much on the atmosphere, which detracts from the overall theme they were going for. It seemed like they were trying to get it dialed in, but it just felt like it was missing something.

Overall:

Willy’s Wonderland is a great concept that on the horror level, could have been executed better. It was entertaining to watch, and there were some pretty good moments, but the animatronics were all somewhat lackluster in the scare department and when Nic Cage was fighting them, it looked more just like a person fighting a mascot.

We did really enjoy the mystery behind Cage’s character. They left a lot of questions on the table. Why did he have to stop what he was doing at that very moment to drink a pop? Where did he come from? Where do we go from here?

Ultimately, Willy’s Wonderland is a fun movie to watch as it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We do hope that we get answers to some of these questions in maybe a future film with this character as it seems like there are a lot of directions they could go with this character and universe, should they choose to expand on it. We would recommend giving it a watch, but keep your scare expectations on the low side.

You can currently rent Willy’s Wonderland on Google Play for $10 or Amazon Prime Video for $20.

Check out the trailer below: