Willy's Wonderland

And Dungeons And Dragons On The Yard

If you ever want to be in a soul-sucking, demeaning, dispiriting environment that nonetheless allows you to get reading done, prison is for you. Like me, you’ll find the readers, and you’ll know who to approach to trade books. Which is how I ended up with the “Willy’s Wonderland” comics, created for the movie and serving as prologue. In those pages, you find out that the Janitor (as played by Nicolas Cage) has a long history with the stuffed animals at this particular themed restaurant that bares more than a slight resemblance to “Five Nights At Freddy’s”.

None of that history is in the film, and upon reflection, I don’t think that history added much to the premise other than more gruesome gore. This is a plug-and-play movie, with little to recommend. The premise is what it says on the tin – there’s a restaurant with furry automatons a la “Chuck E. Cheese”, and at night they kill. Cage’s mute Janitor (no explanation for his silence in the comic) is stuck in this small town and willing to trade car repairs for a night working in “Willy’s Wonderland” cleaning the floors and fixing random junk. Catching him by surprise, the abandoned playplace is visited by a group of vaguely-more-than-interchangeable teens, who wake the singing, preening monsters.

But first, we’re going to waste time. In addition to the ongoing melodrama between the kids (which ties into the origins of Willy’s Wonderland), there’s the suspense that must build regarding the idea these programmed performers might find a life of their own. You probably know the premise, and what you’re expecting to see, so why does the movie wink at the idea that maybe these mascots aren’t alive? There is no explanation as to the shift from the comic: on the page, they move like either animals or suits with people inside of them. The movie goes a different route, and has the kids evading bloody murder from robotic automatons.

Cage shows up in a tight t-shirt and cowboy boots, and he’s got that custom Cage swagger. But before he can rescue these kids, he’s got to play pinball. We don’t learn much about the Janitor, but we do find out that the guy loves his pinball. It’s one of the movie’s few jokes: as these beasts are prepared to destroy these kids, the Janitor HAS to get several pinball games out of the way, finding near-sexual pleasure in rocking the machine with his hips. His character remains silent the entire time, allowing the actor a chance to pantomime and posture. Later on, he’s stoic, unfeeling as he begins to dismantle each and every mascot that stands in his way. Cage is having fun with this character, and as long as the camera is on him, you will too. But between you and I, he was doing a lousy job giving the place a scrub even before he started murdering possessed robots.

Genre fans will gravitate towards the amount of blood spilled (if never really being clear about why they’re spurting from these theoretically-programmed creatures). But once you’ve gotten past an Oscar-winning actor as a silent killing machine against a bunch of restaurant robots, there’s plenty of runtime and not much amusement left. Veteran actor Beth Grant gets to chew a bit of scenery as a local cop who knows a bit more about Willy’s Wonderland than she’s letting on. But it’s a testament to Cage that she gets a couple of good lines, and she’s still not enough of a distraction from Cage. He looks fit and muscular in this, and he also looks like, in his advanced age, he knows it. That can be a pleasurable hook for the undemanding horror viewer. But you don’t take the most distinct leading man of his generation and render him mute. Not a great use of resources.

I do wish pinball was available among the inmate population. You know what game you DID see in prison, in every location I visited? Dungeons and Dragons. The tabletop classic, which I had never previously played, was immensely popular among inmates. Some institutions followed rules about allowing the game onto the compound via the mail, and others were more lax. The mail staff didn’t always do their job, as you’d be stunned to realize. And so many inmates had the thick resource/guide books, boards, and sometimes even game pieces.

It makes sense why the game would be so popular – it takes so much leisure time, and many men have nothing better to do. It was also an attraction because of how forbidden it was. B.O.P. guidebooks have been cited to argue that, in essence, Dungeons and Dragons can be classified as “gang behavior”, and gang behavior is often observed and banned by officials. That’s right, nerds. That’s Lvl. 5 gang behavior.

I have always been averse to the game, but I took the plunge and played a bit while I was down. Not particularly for me, sorry, and maybe even too slow and uneventful for an environment like prison, where you would have no other distractions. I could see how it might be enjoyable if you had a savvy Dungeon Master (D.M.) who was skilled at storytelling, but I seemed to only find myself under the leadership of men who learned about narrative from video games. At one point my character married a centaur, which rankled one specific D.M., mocking me before revealing that centaurs were only men. I insisted my centaur was a woman, and that centaurs were not real, and shortly after, I fled that particular campaign. This was after making the mistake of asking how you “win.”

Sadly, the majority of inmates playing Dungeons And Dragons were sex offenders. If I may play Armchair Psytherapistdoctor, I would say it was part of a larger dissociative trait within that demographic that rationalized the sexual abuse of the vulnerable, and that D&D was an alternate world (much like religion to many of them) where they could escape accountability for hours in the day and play dumb towards the harm to others. Whenever new inmates arrived, we’d all take time to guess at what their charge would be. Usually first impressions were fairly accurate, but many of them left nothing to doubt when they would immediately ask others, “What’s your gaming situation here?” It may not be healthy psychological behavior, but healthy psychological behavior was a luxury in prison.

A short word before we go… I urge you to sign this petition for the end of slave labor in Alabama. This is specifically in regards to what I wrote about here, the exploitation and abuse of prisoners to make products for slave wages while behind bars. Make your voice known.

Next week, put your cape on. We’re going All Marvel! Excelsior!