Thriller is high on schlock, low on shock By: Randall King Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Friday, Apr. 16, 2021

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/04/2021 (1665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The movie adaptation of the horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s is reportedly beginning production this spring with director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) at the helm. It’s potentially exciting stuff given Columbus’s flirtations with the horror genre. (Columbus wrote the screenplay of Gremlins and spent years trying to remake the Vincent Price classic Theatre of Blood.)

In the meantime, if you’re truly desperate for a substitute, there’s the shambolic thriller Willy’s Wonderland that — ahem — pays homage to Freddy’s premise, in which a night watchman must survive in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese-like facility where the animatronic characters come to homicidal life.

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Instead of a security guard, we get a nameless drifter in a muscle car, played by a slumming Nicolas Cage. The guy gets stuck in a small town when his tires are punctured by a suspiciously placed spike strip on the road. A sleazy auto repair guy wants to charge him an even $1,000 to repair the damage. Suspiciously, a blowhard businessman shows up to offer the drifter the necessary money to get his car repaired, if our hero will spend the night cleaning up the long disused restaurant/emporium of the title.

At the same time, a young woman named Liv (Emily Tosta) attempts to burn down the establishment, compelled by her own tragic history with the place. In her second try, she is joined by five friends, who constitute this movie’s designated kill count.

They end up breaking into the place, only to find Cage’s “Janitor” already taking the restaurant’s cast of homicidal robots in hand with the same OCD aplomb he takes on removing graffiti from the bathroom walls or cleaning an oven.

The film takes the time to create a backstory for the restaurant, which in its before-times was staffed almost entirely by serial killers, it turns out. (The killer-to-robot transformation is facilitated by a voodoo ritual straight out of Child’s Play, another horror property blithely ripped off here).

The character of The Janitor, by contrast, is kept an enigma, enhanced by the fact Cage utters nary a word of dialogue.

Apparently, no one connected to this film saw it as a problem that Cage doesn’t speak. People like to hear Cage for the same reason they like to hear actors such as Christopher Walken. They love the cadence and the eccentric rhythms of their speaking style. Instead, we get an offbrand Cage-in-a-rage, silently attacking the creepy robot malefactors by thwacking them with broom handles … and that works, somehow.

There is little else to hold our attention other than the obligatory gruesomeness as Liv’s friends are slaughtered by an assortment of animatronic psychos who resemble little more than furries gone loco.

It might be scary if the characters weren’t egregiously stupid, with one couple even resorting to that most awful slasher cliche, having sex at the most inappropriate time in the most awful place. For those who came for the kills, the movie seems content with randomly splattering lots of fake blood all over the set without explicitly showing how it happened.

Worst of all, director Kevin Lewis has no discernible gift for creating atmosphere, which is the main selling point of Five Nights at Freddy’s.

The video game’s ingenuity (also seen in Danishka Esterhazy’s horror-accented take on The Banana Splits) was to tap into a childhood delight and transform the elements of warm-and-fuzzy nostalgia into a nightmare.

The most nightmarish thing about Willy’s Wonderland is the horrible downward arc it reveals, that being Nicolas Cage’s career.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing