When his car catches a flat tire on a remote country road, a silent drifter ends up stranded outside of Hayesville, Nevada. Local mechanic Jed Love picks him up and tows his car into town, but the drifter doesn't have enough cash to pay for the repairs, and credit cards aren't accepted.
Fortunately - or so it seems - there's a job available that would solve the drifter's problem. All he has to do is work as a night-shift janitor at Willy's Wonderland, a once-successful abandoned family entertainment centre, in exchange for repairing his vehicle.
Does it seem odd to you that cleaning an abandoned business is so valuable to the locals? Well, of course it is. The animatronic characters of Willy's Wonderland are all homicidal maniacs, and the locals keep them satiated by tossing them an annual sacrifice. The drifter's flat tire was no accident.
The planned blood sacrifice is going to run into two complications, this year. First, there's a local teenager who is determined to see the place destroyed rather. Second, the drifter is not an easy man to kill.
Willy's Wonderland is a decent if not exactly innovative concept. As anyone who has seen one traumatise a child, animatronic characters can be pretty creepy. They do after all have unblinking eyes, flappy mouths and unflinching grins. It's not that hard to imagine them turning into pyscho-killers behind our backs.
The problem with the movie is that, having established this concept, it has absolutely nothing else to offer. The entire thing is the same scene over and over again: 'animatronic character animates and attacks; drifter smashes it". Adding in the teenager and her friends is presumably intended to mix things up a bit (and incidentally, to give the bad guys some victims they actually can kill), but it doesn't really work. Which means that even at a scant 88 minutes long, including credits, Willy's Wonderland feels long and repetitive.
Fingers crossed the similarly themed Banana Splits movie does a better job of the killer animatronics concept, because this one malfunctioned.
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