I don't know, but I've been told that Willy's Wonderland is a kind of an unofficial adaptation of a horror game Five Nights at Freddy's. I've never played the game, nor does it interest me the slightest, but I've gathered it's about a kid's theme park where animatronic puppets kill people. That's the premise of Willy's Wonderland as well, but with additive Nicolas Cage.
The nameless protagonist (Cage), ends in a car accident when a spiked chain rips his tears off. It doesn't take long for a tow truck to appear and silently Cage is led to know, that he has to pay in cash for the repairs. As the only ATM of the backend town of Haysville is busted, but luckily, a local entrepreneur Tex (Reitz) offers a solution: Cage should stay a night at his rundown kid's restaurant and clean it up. Little does Cage know, that the town has done a deal with the evil animatronics of the place. It's later explained in the movie by Liv (Tosta) and sheriff Lund (Grant), that Willy's Wonderland was previously owned by a group of serial killers, who ended up committing a ritualistic suicide, which transferred their souls to the dolls. To stop the dolls from killing the townsfolk, they agreed with the lead of Sheriff Lund to get sacrificial offerings to them.
That story actually matters very little, as it's by far the worst thing in the whole movie along with all the acting that goes on outside Willy's Wonderland and Cage. To make this fully clear, the movie is bad and the only reason to watch it is Nicolas Cage as the nameless, mute protagonist kicking the asses of the animatronic dolls. The movie is about 1 and a half hours long and it frankly feels at least 40 minutes too long. Had it been 40 minutes of silent Cage drinking energy drinks and beating up dolls, it would have been a perfectly fun and bizarre ride.
Besides Cage beating up animatronics, a b-plot of the movie is about the sheriff's adopted daughter Liv, whose parents were killed in the restaurant. She wants to burn Willy's Wonderland, but she doesn't want to kill the nameless man in the process, so in a typical fashion, a group of teens end up locked in and die horribly in the process. They would have stayed alive, had they known that Cage always knew of the dolls and that he wasn't locked in with them, they were locked in with him.
I guess most of the stuff with the teens and the story is meant as comedy, the thing is, it just doesn't work very well as it all is very poorly directed and paced. Everything that takes place outside the restaurant feels flat and forced, especially in comparison to the delicious insanity of Cages character, who keeps kicking up the dolls and drinking energy drinks with timed precision when his watch informs him to chug one down. It's also noteworthy, that he actually cleans the whole place in midst of killing the things, just like he agreed.
There's very little else to say about Willy's Wonderland. It is at its best and funniest inside Willy's with Cage doing what Cage does best while he beats up things. There's little need for anything else in the movie, really. And that's why it is entertaining enough to warrant at least one watch. It is a bad movie, but at least it is, seemingly on purpose, a short and entertaining bad movie and I guess the makers of it knew that as well. Cage was definitely aware of it.
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