WILLY'S WONDERLAND

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND BAFFLEMENT

There's really not much to say about this bizarro nonsense in which Nicolas Cage fights a bunch of animatronic robots in an abandoned family fun arcade - especially given than Cage himself doesn't have anything to say as he has precisely zero lines of dialogue. It's an odd gimmick: to take one of the most verbally unusual actors of our time and then not have him speak beyond the occasional grunt, and it doesn't really come off as they don't give any reason for it, and it deprives the audience of one of Cage's trademarked Bug-Eyed Shouty Freakout scenes which in some of Cage's lesser movies can be the sole redeeming feature: it's rubbish but at least he did some wild gesticulating and bellowing nonsense in a funny voice. Unfortunately there's none of that here.

Instead it's an occasionally meanspirited but 15-rated splatter movie in which Cage's unnamed drifter ends up having to clean out the abandoned Willy's Wonderland arcade, which the owner is hoping to reopen after a history of bloody carnage. On the same night, a gang of local youths plan to finally burn the place to the ground, not knowing that the cute singing robots (Willy The Weasel, Tina The Turtle, Ozzy The Ostrich etc) are possessed by the spirits of serial killers, fed  unwilling victims by the townspeople after a deal to stop them murdering all the families...

It's not very good: not even up there with the film of The Banana Splits a few years ago which was scarcely a masterpiece, and Cage is hardly a sympathetic presence when he casually abandons a fight halfway through to go and have a fizzy drink and another go on the pinball machine, leaving a teenage girl at the mercy of an eight-foot murderous puppet. Also it feels unnecessarily callous to merrily kill children in what is ostensibly a silly horror-comedy. Sure, it's not the worst thing you'll ever see, but there are so many films that aren't the worst things you'll ever see that merely not being the worst thing you'll ever see isn't enough. Some amusement, but it's not really worth it.

**