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.

King Cobra: True Crime Gets Deadly Dull

It is supposedly a crime drama based on Andrew E. Stoner & Peter A. Conway’s nonfiction book Cobra Killer: Gay Porn, Murder, and the Manhunt to Bring the Killers to Justice, but it only takes the cops about thirty seconds to arrest the perps. Maybe the term “manhunt” is used euphemistically. Despite the intentionally lurid subject matter, you will be hard-pressed to find a duller, dingier, more vacuous film than Justin Kelly’s King Cobra (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

In the early 2000s, apparently anyone with a digital camera and a website could become a player in the gay porn industry. For Stephen, his nocturnal side light as producer-host “King Cobra” was the only relief from a life of quiet desperation. He was already moderately successful when he recruited seventeen-year-old Sean Paul Lockhart (mistakenly believing him to be eighteen), but the videos the performer shot under the name “Brent Corrigan” took his company to a whole new level. For a while, everyone enjoys their success, but when Lockhart decides to leave King Cobra, he discovers the spurned producer holds the trademark on the Brent Corrigan name.

Meanwhile, escorts and self-styled pornstars Harlow and Joe really want to work with Corrigan. Deep in debt, they are convinced a video co-starring Corrigan and Harlow will solve all their problems. Of course, it has to be Lockhart under the Corrigan name. He is willing, but King Cobra is not.

One of the many problems with King Cobra is the murder and the subsequent investigation are compressed into the final ten minutes. The overwhelming majority of the film is devoted to Lockhart’s hopes and dreams and angsts and insecurities of the killers. Frankly, this material couldn’t sustain a fifteen minute short. Clearly, Kelly hopes we will be distracted by the naughty business, but it quickly gets boring (particularly if it doesn’t float your boat to begin with).

How mind-blowing is it to see Alicia Silverstone playing Lockhart’s mom?  Actually, she is not bad—maybe the best thing about Cobra. To be fair, Christian Slater is also very good playing the profoundly sad Stephen (the King), but the film’s general crumminess is in keeping with the recent underwhelming additions to his filmography, such as The Adderall Diaries (another utterly unwatchable James Franco joint), Stranded, and Playback. Franco probably considered Joe the Psycho to be another opportunity to display his gay-friendliness, but it is an awfully schticky, perilously clichéd character. At least we notice him, whereas neither Garrett Clayton nor Keegan Allen have any presence or depth as Lockhart/Corrigan or Harlow.

To reiterate, the real problem with the film is not the subject matter. It is just an unforgivable snore fest. Arguably, it takes unique talent to make pornography and murder boring as Hell, but somehow Kelly pulled it off. He even squanders 1980s icon Molly Ringwald in an entirely inconsequential role. Tedious yet still sleazy, King Cobra is not recommended for anyone when it opens today (10/21) in New York, at the IFC Center.