It’s actually one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen…Yes that’s right Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a pure horrorfest that has haunted my dreams for years!!!!!
I will start off by saying that my parents used that knowledge against me. If they wanted me to go to bed when I was younger, all they had to say was that this Gene Wilder, child torture porn film was coming on TV and I was in my bed, under my covers, and clutching my flashlight faster than Augustus Gloop gets sucked up the clear glass pipe to the fudge making room!
“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction this article is going….” Wait!!!! Lets start at the beginning of this whimsical, Technicolor, bloodbath shall we….
Charlie Bucket…living in total poverty…forced to work to help support his family. Father? M.I.A. Mother? Broken down and sad, caring for four elderly parents who haven’t left their bed in what appears to be 40 years, think of it, the smell and human waste issues alone are enough to freak out a young child!
The small town (which I now recognize as the small European city of Slovakia, from the movie Hostel) that Charlie lives in contains the Wonka Chocolate factory….It’s dark and scary looking enough when Charlie passes by until… STRANGER DANGER!!!.. a freak old man harbinger of doom (pushing a cart full of deadly knives and meat cleavers no less!!! Seriously does no one notice that?!?!) declares: “Nobody ever goes in, and nobody ever comes out.”
On to a delightful little late night ghost story with Charlie’s Grandpa Joe after the rest of the family has gone to sleep, where we discover Wonka went hermit and locked out the world after betrayal by his own workers, who sold his secrets to his arch-rivals.
So I’m guessing at this point:
- one of the employees was a German, glutton, who was in charge of the chocolate production line
- one was an American, who stole a top secret recipe for blueberry gum
- another was a greedy accountant who embezzled money from the company
- and finally there was a security guard who watched all of this happen on the security monitors and got kickbacks from the others for his/her silence
Yet the factory still operates…and no one has seen the reclusive Wonka for (potentially) decades as he quietly plotted his insidious revenge, which he unleashes on the world in the form of Golden Tickets.
Yes five (and only five) invites to tour the factory and receive a “lifetime supply” of chocolate send the entire world into total and complete chaos of biblical proportions, and bringing out the worst in people willing to lie, or even kill for the chance to see what (horrors) await inside.
Eventually the tickets seem to be found by the 4 of the most horrible children (and strangely ONLY children…hmmmm) imaginable. Until a man in South America finds the last ticket. Thank goodness Charlie is safe, though his strangely and inexplicably disappointed at having escaped almost certain death.
Charlie finds some money in a storm drain (and obviously covered in horrible germs) and goes into a nearby candy shop to buy some chocolate. Does he wash his hands to get the street sewage off before he eats? NO!!!! NO!!!! But as it turns out the final ticket was a fake! The South American was a forger, and of course, Charlie ends up in the streat unwrapping the extra candy bar he purchased for Grandpa Joe, only to discover he has found the final imperial death decree, er, Golden Ticket, and of course has to run for his very life from a mob ready to (possibly even members of Slovakias’ “Elite Hunting Club” ready to kill him and) steal the ticket from him.
Running through an abandoned and strangely under construction tunnel (which I assume represents the gateway to hell), Charlie runs into if not the devil himself, at least one of the higher level demons, dressed in a bowler cap and black trench coat, offering to give Charlie and his family a small fortune if Charlie will procure for him (their everlasting souls) an Everlasting Gobstopper that he has to steal from the factory.
Grandpa Joe, miraculously discovers the ability to walk again (yeah! don’t get me started there!) and the “magical” day arrives.
First the children are forced (to actually sign away their lives and souls) on a contract with fine print so fine, it would give Once Upon a Time’s (beyond evil) Rumpelstiltskin the heebie-jeebies. Then they are forced into a fun-house of terror that rivals the clown spaceship in Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Oh yes you can eat everything in the chocolate room kids! I’m sure the other kids taste just like chicken too…or as we are about to find out, they will dip anything in chocolate these days.
This is when we meet the Oompa Loompas, which Wonka claims he found in a far away land that doesn’t exist, but we all know was the result of his attempts to clone himself gone horribly horribly wrong!
And this is also where, Freddy Kruger style, Wonka has decided to inflict his revenge upon the children rather than the parents.
Sure Augustus, as mentioned before, ends up in packages of fudge after “falling” into the chocolate river, but as the rest of the movie unfolds, one by one each is tempted and they “fall”. Each part of the factory actually a death trap specifically designed to exploit their “supposed” shortcomings. Each one meets the end of their tour Violent(Beauregarde)ly, with (Veruca)Salt poured in every wound.
Genetically altering blueberry gum,
or trash shoots straight into industrial incinerators.
Until even our beloved childhood friend, TV is used to shrink a child down to the size of a tiny action figure for the rest of his life.
All the while, the Oompa Loompas providing a greek chorus backdrop, delighting in the downfall of the innocents, through song and dance. Do any of them survive? Do they return to normal? We have to take Wonka’s (already proven) less than reliable word for it. We never see them again. Tragic really. Emotionally scaring.
Oh sure they try to put a happy ending on it. After Wonka goes all crazy and yells at him, Charlie gets to own the whole horror factory that Wonka has created (now complete with victims bodies hidden away in its dark recesses.) And then they escape in an untested flying glass elevator…do they ever even return?!?
Oh and one more thing, this movie comes complete with catchy musical numbers designed to help embed the trauma deep within the recesses of your sub-conscious and fuel your nightmares forever.
Don’t watch this G rated (should be NC-17, or better yet regulated under international torture conventions) movie alone…and for your own sake, keep some lights on too.
