31 Days of Horror 2022 Day 09 Willy's Wonderland

 

TITLE-Willy's Wonderland

SOURCE-Hulu

Few years back I watched and reviewed the Banana Splits movie for 31 days of horror. A film I enjoyed but people were really split on. Then last year I started hearing about a new film. One were Nic Cage is the lead,is silent through out the film. And this film has a premise similar to Banana Splits.

Cage is a drifter. His car gets a flat in a rural town.A crooked auto repair man tells him he can fix the car but since Cage has almost no cash to pay for the repairs he has to stay the night inside a closed children's eatery Willy's Wonderland is the name of the place. Cage will get locked in and spend the entire night cleaning the place up.

We find out that Willy's which is like Chuck E Cheese was a big thing back in the 80s thru mid 90s. Then closed. but the founder was an evil killer. And all the animatronics at Willy's are evil and alive. So the townsfolk set traps to get drifters to be "fed" to the evil Willy and his gang of animal killer robots.

I was really surprised at how good this was. Yea I know this film and Banana Splits film got made cause of how popular the horror video game Five Nights at Freddys is. I was a young child when places like Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E Cheese opened up. Sure the robot animals were part of the reason I wanted to goto these places,but the main draw to me was the huge selection of video games. Back about 10 years ago I took my cousins then young sons to a near by Chuck E Cheese. The pizza wasn't worth a crap and while we were given a pile of tokens to play the games ,all but 2 of the games were just ticket redemption machines.

The FX work in this is really good. Nice realistic looking gore. Plus the robots looks well made. Like something you would see at a kid's birthday party in 1990.

Nic Cage is great as Janitor,yea his name is never given,he never talks so the credits just list him as Janitor. The rest of the cast is decent. 

If this is on a streaming app you have access too it is worth watching.  Hell it is one of the better modern horror films with Cage.

Willy's Wonderland gets a B-