Y2K: The Singularity Horror That Wasn’t

New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. took potential Y2K problems so seriously, he appointed a Republican to chair the council’s special Millenium Bug task force. Perhaps in this what-if horror comedy, Vallone appointed a hack from his own conference instead, resulting in widespread carnage. For whatever fictional reason, everything with a chip will rise like the Terminator’s Skynet in director-co-screenwriter Kyle Mooney’s Y2K, which opens today in theaters.

The only girls who talk to Eli and his best friend Danny are the members of the girls’ basketball team, for whom they work as equipment managers. However, even in 1999, they can find plenty of porn on the internet. It just takes a while, because of dial-up. Somehow, Danny convinces Eli to crash the popular kids party, because his longtime crush, Laura, just dumped her college boyfriend. However, at midnight, instead of a kiss, he gets a horror show of appliances and devices coming alive, killing people at the party.

Together with a few stoner outcasts, Eli and Laura take refuge in the abandoned factory, a completely digital-free zone, where Garrett, the local video store clerk likes to get stoned with his friends. Yet, technology still comes looking for them. Once Laura, the super-cool computer coder plugs-in, the kids realize humanity is truly facing the Singularity, with all the apocalyptic ramifications it entails, unless they fight back.

As a period horror-science fiction comedy, Y2K largely gets the look right. The sentient Transformer-like hive-monsters have an amusing DIY feel and texture, but they are not excessively campy. All the old AOL interfaces and other assorted vintage internet graphics also have the right era-appropriate look and vibe. Weirdly, this film brings back memories, especially the music, like Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,’ which becomes the motley group’s unofficial theme song. However, the funniest use of music is actually a rendition of a 1980s hit, George Michael’s “Faith,” performed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, playing himself.

In fact, every scene featuring Durst is pretty hilarious, representing the sort of unexpected swerve into lunacy that rejuvenates the film just when it starts to bog down. In some ways, Y2K is like a throwback to the 1980s mechanized horror of Chopping Mall, but the high school drama and dialogue written by Mooney and Evan Winter largely ring true.

As Laura and Danny, both Rachel Zegler and Julian Dennison develop some surprisingly potent chemistry with Jaeden Martell’s Eli. Mooney even gets some laughs himself as dopey Garrett. Plus, casting Alicia Silverstone as Eli’s mom Robin was a nostalgic masterstroke (since Clueless and The Babysitter both released in 1995). In contrast, the rest of the teen ensemble lagely lacks energy and charisma.

There is a lot of cleverness in Y2K, but there is also considerable dead wood (and bad casting). Nevertheless, its perspective on the turning of the millennium, mixing nostalgia with irony, works more often than not. Recommended as a mostly amusing look back at the early grungy internet and pop culture of the fin de siècle 90’s, Y2K opens today (12/6) in theaters, including the AMC Lincoln Square in New York.