YMMV / Willy's Wonderland

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack by Émoi is remarkably blood-pumping for such a small project. Of particular attention is the "main theme" of Willy's Wonderland, which plays in the film while The Janitor is playing the pinball machine and dancing to the tune.
• Cargo Ship: When he first discovers the pinball machine, the Janitor touches it rather... lovingly. When he cleans, he all but caresses it.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The Janitor utterly destroying the animatronics is abundantly satisfying, especially since they contain the souls of Jerry Robert Willis and his colleagues, who were responsible for the deaths of numerous families.
  • The gruesome death of Sheriff Lund is also vastly satisfying given that she sacrificed innocent people, including Liv’s parents, to the animatronics.
  • Seeing Sara blow up Tex and Jed is also pretty satisfying, since they were the ones who roped the Janitor into the whole thing in the first place.
• Complete Monster: Jerry Robert Willis was the owner and founder of Willy's Wonderland, using the entertainment center to mask the fact that he was one of the 20th century's most twisted, sadistic serial killers. Originally a serial killer who butchered 4 families, Willis recruited other murderers at a mental asylum before staging a breakout that saw the entire staff slaughtered. Working with his depraved staff, Willis would butcher and cannibalize entire families for years, eventually committing suicide in a Satanic ritual that transferred the souls of Willis and his employees into the animatronics populating Willy's Wonderland. Becoming "Willy Weasel", Willis continued to kill children and even slaughter his way through Hayesville's schools and shops before striking a deal with Sheriff Lund to spare Hayesville in exchange for regular sacrifices. With a body count unfathomable and a lack of care for his fellow killers, Willis spends the film having a group of teenagers picked off one by one before bisecting Lund herself for failing him.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With The Banana Splits Movie, another movie centering around abhorrent animatronic animals.
  • And of course, Five Nights At Freddys itself, which kicked off this genre in the first place. Though the fandom's relationship with the 2023 movie is, for the most part, a different story entirely.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The Janitor helping out Liv and almost training her to take down the murderous bastards.
  • Lund, upon hearing that Liv is in Willy's Wonderland, immediately heads out to save her and the other teens.
  • The Janitor playing with the pinball machine and dancing is just adorable.
  • Tex and Jed handing over the Janitor's car without much issue, and despite roping the Janitor into the whole situation, are just grateful that the nightmare is finally over.
  • The Janitor basically adopting Liv.
  • The Janitor gathering the bodies of Liv's friends and respectfully covering them with a tarp and closing their eyes, despite not knowing any of them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Arty, one of the animatronics, is an alligator. Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach introduces Montgomery Gator, meaning that the game franchise that inspired the movie now has an alligator as well.
  • Similar to the above, the Janitor is incredibly easily able to deal with the Animatronics, with his ways of taking them out being quite gruesome. Come Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, and Gregory is able to take out the animatronics in similarly gruesome ways (the difference being that they don’t actually die).
• Just Here for Godzilla: Most curious observers watch this film because it has Nicolas Cage.
• Memetic Badass: The Janitor, of course. Some fans have likened him to the Doom Slayer or Levi Ackerman, but with murderous animatronics.
• Memetic Mutation: The surreal scene of The Janitor playing pinball and happily dancing to the beat (while everybody else is dying/dead) is fast on its way to becoming another Nicolas Cage classic. Not surprising, given that he apparently improvised the whole thing.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Jerry Robert Willis crossed the line a long time ago, when he murdered countless children and families who came to his restaurant. It's made even worse by him transferring his soul — as well as those of his similarly-murderous colleagues — into the bodies of the animatronics in a Satanic ritual when they were about to be brought to justice, all for the purpose of continuing to inflict agony and death upon countless innocents.
  • Sheriff Lund had also crossed the line when she sacrificed many innocent people to the killer animatronics, purely to save her own skin.
• One True Pairing: Surprisingly, some fans have shipped the animatronics together, and the main pairings seem to consist of Knighty/Sara and Tito/Cammy.
• Retroactive Recognition: Some might recognize Aaron, the teen who gets impaled by Knighty Knight, as Christian Del Grosso; a popular Vine star.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Of Five Nights At Freddys, in that it's a movie about an employee of a Suck E. Cheese's family fun center working the night shift and having to contend with a band of killer animatronics especially since the place has a dark secret. Only this time, the silent protagonist is a janitor who fights back against the evil animatronics with some outside help and he only signed up for the job to fix his car. The plot twist of the demonic animatronics in Willy's Wonderland being reincarnated serial killers is quite similar to William Afton transferring his soul to Springtrap in Five Nights At Freddy's in addition to having a series of mysterious murders at a pizza restaurant as a major element of the story. Hilariously enough, one of the names listed in the credits is a man named Mike Schmidt, who happens to share a name with the protagonist of the first game (he's the Sound Mixer, if you want to check for yourself).
  • Finally, while a very off-kilter comparison, the overall plot of a drifter showing up and having to dispatch supernatural and evil robots in hand-to-hand combat that "bleed" oil everywhere as he dismembers them is straight out of one of the filler episodes of Samurai Jack. The protagonist is even a silent, stoic figure who repeatedly gets subjected to Clothing Damage!
    • Relatedly, a badass drifter in a sexy black car going to small town Americana and getting wrapped up in a supernatural murder mystery in which he uses his extreme combat training to just kill the supernatural murder beasts? Dean Winchester solo mission.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Liv is forced to watch her parents get slaughtered by the animatronics.
  • The death of the birthday boy and his family in the flashback. He was having so much fun being entertained by the mascot of the establishment, only to be unceremoniously killed; punctuated by his corpse falling headfirst into his own birthday cake.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: All of Liv's friends are given the barest hint of characterization and all of them end up making increasingly stupid decisions as they enter Willy's Wonderland, being swiftly killed off. Of particular note, you have:
  • Kathy, who's the one to calmly free Liv with a hairpin when they all find her handcuffed in her trailer while the boys freak out, hinting at hidden depths that are never explored.
  • Chris, who is the most vocal supporter of Liv's plan to rescue the Janitor and burn down Willy's Wonderland, but who the others insult for only supporting Liv because he has a crush on her.
• The Woobie: Liv. Her parents were brutally slaughtered by the animatronics when she just a little girl, and all her friends get killed by the same animatronics when she tries to stop the problem once in for all. On the bright side, she develops a close bond with the Janitor, who adopts her after all the animatronics were destroyed for good.

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