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.
