Main cast: Nicolas Cage (The Janitor), Emily Tosta (Liv Hawthorne), Beth Grant (Sheriff Eloise Lund), Kai Kadlec (Chris Muley), Caylee Cowan (Kathy Barnes), Terayle Hill (Bob McDaniel), Christian Del Grosso (Aaron Powers), Jonathan Mercedes (Dan Lorraine), David Sheftell (Evan Olson), Ric Reitz (Tex Macadoo), and Chris Warner (Jed Love)
Director: Kevin Lewis

Welcome to this remote town called Hayesville in Nevada. Once upon a time, a group of serial killers treated this place as their playground. Led by Jerry Robert Willis, they were staff at the popular Willy’s Wonderland, a family-friendly eatery. They loved picking a family out of the crowd for a special “birthday party” for the kid, only they never informed the family that the party games involved lots of stabbing and worse. When the cops caught up with them, Willy and his gang performed a ritual suicide that transferred their consciousness into the animatronic mascots in the restaurant. Now sentient, these cute robot animals and such now commit murder for kicks until the new owner of Willy’s Wonderland, Tex Macadoo, the town mechanic Jed Love, and the sheriff Eloise Lund made a bargain with them. The three of them would lure people into the diner and lock them in, essentially offering these sods as sacrifices to these robotic monsters in exchange for the locals being left alone.

Well, this arrangement works for years, until one day when their trap causes the vehicle of Nicolas Cage’s character to experience flat tires. Jed Love’s standard gimmick is to charge a grand to replace all damaged tires, and he will accept only cash. Because all the ATM machines in the area seemed to be down, the victim is unlikely to have enough cash on them—as in our never-named, never-say-a-word lead character’s case. Jed will then suggest that our hero spend the night cleaning up Willy’s Wonderland as payment, and once he is inside, Jed and Tex quickly chain all the entrances so that our hero is trapped, a sitting duck waiting to be killed.

Well, this is Nicolas Cage we are talking about here, so of course he is no sitting duck. Powered by energy drinks and sodas as well as a swing at the arcade machine at regular intervals, he is soon demolishing each animatronic that dares to try to even scratch him. Of course, it will be no fun to just see him plow his way through the animatronics, so the movie introduces Liv Hawthorne, Sheriff Lund’s adopted daughter that wants to burn down Willy’s Wonderland because she knows of its sinister inhabitants (in fact, she saw them kill her parents when she was a little girl). She and her friends break into Willy’s Wonderland so the animatronics have fresh meat to enjoy.

Now, Willy’s Wonderland will easily be one of the my biggest film disappointments of 2021. On paper it sounds good, but the execution turns out to be a big snooze.

Maybe Nicolas Cage doesn’t want to get his hands too dirty or risk a hernia by doing too many kicks, but his character’s fight scenes with the animatronics are so non-happening. They just stand there and let him beat them stupid! Am I supposed to take these animatronics seriously as threats? Sure, some of Liv’s friends die pretty gruesomely to these monsters, being torn apart and all, but even then, don’t expect too much gore. This movie practices choppy editing when it comes to these scenes, with the lighting either turned down low or exploding into seizure-inducing stroboscopic nightmare to avoid having to show the gruesome stuff directly

Then there is Emily Tosta. My goodness, is this young lady seriously claiming to be an actor? She is as mechanical as her last name would suggest, so much so that for a long time, I am expecting a twist where Liv will be revealed as an animatronic as well. Now, Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage. His character displays zero believable human emotion, and his abilities to fight seem to stem more from his caffeine addiction and his opponents’ stupid tendency to stand there and let him beat them up. But because his character doesn’t speak, it is easy to buy the campy fantasy that Mr Cage is selling through his character—the character is probably like those mysterious protagonists in animes and Westerns that waltz into a town and kill all the baddies, before waltzing out again. Liv could have been the female counterpart to such a character in a way, except that this character has lines.

This is a problem because Ms Tosta is unable to deliver her lines with the correct tone and emotion even once. Throughout the whole movie, she sports either a blank expression or she looks like she’s trying not to laugh for some reason. Liv is a character that feels utterly disconnected from the movie, as a result, and every scene of hers ends up being composed of 60% awkwardness and 40% cringe. Her fight scenes are, predictably enough, unrealistic as well. Still, I believe this character could have been salvaged if Ms Tosta, like Mr Cage, had zero lines in this movie. Not only would this mask Ms Tosta’s complete failure as an actor in this movie, having two sullen and silent lead characters will also double the amusing camp factor of this movie.

In its current form, this movie has disappointing gore, underwhelming fight scenes, and a most anticlimactic confrontation between the lead character and the lead bad guy. The villains come off as inept because they just stand there and get beaten by Nicolas Cage’s character, and Emily Tosta is just pure cringe to watch. What’s the point of this movie, aside from promoting soda as an essential component of the five food groups for kids wanting to grow up and become Nicolas Cage?

Shame, really. Willy’s Wonderland could have been a fun spiritual successor to Drive Angry, as it is easy to imagine that the lead characters of both movies are one and the same. Instead, it is just an underwhelming bore despite its intriguing premise. For a far better movie with killer animatronics, I’d recommend The Banana Splits Movie instead.