Film Review

Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

A drifter is tricked into a janitorial job at a condemned children’s amusement park, where he must battle its possessed animatronics.

Nicolas Cage’s career shifted to a straight-to-DVD twilight around the time of Drive Angry (2011), where he’s become prolific in order to pay off debts after squandering his $150M fortune. His last decade of movies have been mostly junk undeserving of a theatrical release, but there are occasional indie gems (Mom and Dad, Mandy, Color Out of Space), plus zanier projects that only seem to get made because his name still carries weight (Primal, Jiu Jitsu).

Willy’s Wonderland is firmly in the latter camp, as Cage was drawn to the project after stumbling upon the screenplay on the Blood List; a horror-focused version of the famous Black List, championing good unproduced scripts. It’s where Maggie (2011) and Bird Box (2014) were discovered. A short four-minute film had already been made based on this idea in 2016, Wally’s Wonderland, directed by its screenwriter G.O Parsons, but he was displeased with the end-result. A few clips have since found…