INT. WALMART VESTIBULE — NIGHT
THE ACTOR, in his mid-50s but spiritually exhausted, stands unsteadily in front of a REDBOX, struggling to make a Blu-ray selection while the people in line behind him whisper and point. Can it really be him? In a Walmart? Is he drunk or high or having a mental health episode? He’s as distressed as his leather jacket, his hands shaking violently and slick with some sort of condiment. His five o’clock shadow is five minutes to midnight. He raises a finger to the screen and —
KABOOM! The WALMART is rocked by a FREAK POWER SURGE caused by a meth head running a generator above the ceiling panels. A dazzling arc of electricity and sparks passes between the REDBOX and THE ACTOR, who vanishes, leaving nothing behind but a pair of sunglasses and a scorched, twisted pile of high-end leather. The terrified onlookers see that the impossible, the unthinkable, has occurred. Every terrible movie in the REDBOX now stars THE ACTOR. He’s trapped inside it … maybe for good?
This is Red Cage, based on the true story of Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage. An A-list actor, directed by silver-screen titans Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and Rob Zombie, has for years been imprisoned in a shadowland of direct-to-DVD-and-streaming catastrophes du cinema, such as Dog Eat Dog, Mom and Dad, Mandy (actually, this one’s pretty incredible), Looking Glass, Kill Chain, Color Out of Space, Primal, and Jiu Jitsu, to name just a few of the several hundred movies to which Cage lends his prodigious talents. The latest of these — well, probably not by the time you read this — is Kevin Lewis’s horror-comedy thriller Willy’s Wonderland.
Some have speculated that Cage needs money, which he does, the same way the sun needs hydrogen and helium. Weddings, divorces, yachts, cars, so many mansions (the Schloss Neidstein in Germany, Midford Castle in England, the LaLaurie House in New Orleans), million-dollar comic books, illegal Mongolian dinosaur skulls, federal tax liens: These things don’t pay for themselves. But an actor of Cage’s caliber can bring passion and artistry even to his “paycheck movies,” and Willy’s Wonderland is nothing if not gravid with passion and artistry. It stands out from the rest of Cage’s oeuvre, for instance, in that Cage doesn’t speak a single line of dialogue in the whole thing.
Cage’s nightmare begins when his hot rod suffers a blowout in a hick town — shades of Dan Aykroyd’s 1991 masterpiece Nothing But Trouble, or Cage’s 1993 neo-noir Red Rock West — and a mechanic (Chris Warner) presents him with a cash-only $1,000 invoice. The thing is, there isn’t a working ATM for miles around, and our hero must accept an “Augean stable” kind of task. If he cleans the defunct amusement park Willy’s Wonderland in one night, the owner, Tex Macadoo (Ric Reitz), will foot his repair bill. Thing is, the animatronic mascots are all possessed by the murderous spirits of dead Satan worshipers. Cage, billed as THE JANITOR, hasn’t really been hired to clean but to be sacrificed.
As always, Cage is dressed as a third grader’s idea of a cool dude, which is to say he’s dressed like Ghost Rider. He’s got the wheels, the shades, and the leather jacket with red racing stripes. He rocks at pinball and self-administers an off-brand energy drink like insulin at regular intervals. “You one of those guys who don’t wanna look back?” the mechanic asks. “Past lives in the past?” But THE JANITOR, infinitely world-weary, merely stares, glowers, swaggers, the heir apparent to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. In case you’ve missed the subtle significance of his name, he’s going to clean up this town.
There’s a corrupt sheriff (Beth Grant, the dance mom from Donnie Darko) trying to thwart some teenagers with their own plans to clean up the condemned park — by burning it to the ground. (Nothing will prepare you for the way THE JANITOR, played by a nearly 60-year-old man, looks at the de facto leader of this group, Liv Hawthorne, played by 22-year-old actress and YouTuber Emily Tosta. It’s the film’s most credible, and haunting, performance.) When the teenagers end up trapped inside the park with THE JANITOR, they have no choice but to team up. It’s nonstop ultraviolence from here to the end of the line.
For every child who was traumatized by the Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Players, this is the big payback. Cage treats us to scenes of flawlessly choreographed violence, equal parts John Wick and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He wields a mop as gracefully as a kendo shinai. Like a circus strongman, he pulls apart the jaws of a beret-wearing alligator. He takes out an animatronic gorilla — I think I’ve seen this dastardly primate before, playing saloon piano at Wall Drug — with a toilet plunger. Though THE JANITOR doesn’t speak, he does, rest assured, make a lot of Nicolas Cage noises.
Other characters speak lines of Shakespearean wit, such as “I hate to hear a grown man scream” or “I’m gonna feast on your face” or “He’s not trapped inside with them. They’re trapped inside with him!” Well, that last one is cribbed from Jackie Earle Haley in Watchmen, but we’ll just do a Quentin Tarantino and call it “homage.” Willy’s Wonderland pays a similar “tribute” to more movies than you can count, from Westworld (1973) to Army of Darkness (1992) to — I stopped counting. This film has more layers than a beer-battered onion bloom.
Above all, Willy’s Wonderland is a tribute to Cage, a man apart, a defiant artiste, an actor who saw the challenge of living up to his name (Coppola, that is) and did it “his way.”
“I can’t pretend to know what people think or want to think about me,” Cage told the New York Times Magazine in 2019. “I’m not Stravinsky, I’m not van Gogh, I’m not Monk, but these people were not understood, and my favorite artists were misunderstood.”
Take heart, Mr. Cage. I think we understand each other perfectly.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
