Kyle Mooney's Retro Horror-Comedy Y2K is the Superbad/Terminator/Chopping Mall Mash-Up We Never Knew We Needed

I've got to praise it like I should!

This is as good as I will ever look.

Every year I hope to see “Weird Al” Yankovic, Phish and Insane Clown Posse live. I’ve written books about all three artists. When I was researching and writing You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me and Weird Al: The Book, The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al, all of which you can, and SHOULD buy from the store at my other site (plug, plug), I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to go to a “Weird Al” Yankovic, Phish or Insane Clown Posse show as a fan and not someone professionally obligated to write books about inarguably the three greatest acts in musical history.

That did not happen this year. Phish didn’t play Atlanta, nor did “Weird Al” Yankovic and I did not attend the Gathering of the Juggalos because I am old and broke and exhausted and no one wants to pay me money to write about Juggalos.

The only big concert I attended this year was Limp Bizkit at the Ameris Bank Ampitheater, which I dig because it’s only a twenty minute Lyft ride from my home.

I was less interested in Limp Bizkit than opening act Corey Feldman, a sad, hilarious trainwreck of a human being I am unhealthily obsessed with.

In a deeply unsurprising development, Corey Feldman did not perform that night. Why? I don’t know. Feldman popped up briefly during Limp Bizkit’s set in a way that just made his absence even more annoying.

I wanted the whole Corey Feldman experience. Then I realized that Feldman being too stoned or unprofessional to play what should have been an important gig in front of thousands of fans was the Corey Feldman experience. It was a purer representation of his essence than a spirited, hour-long performance would have been.

I did not get to see Feldman but I stayed for Bizkit and had a blast. In this world, you’ve got to chase joy wherever you can find it, including a concert by a top nu-metal act of the late 1990s and oughts. Limp Bizkit are essentially an oldies act that trots out the hits for red-hatted middle age nu-metal fans nostalgic for the late 1990s, when they were young and beautiful and the world radiated boundless promise.

More specifically, Limp Bizkit Brought me back to the heady days of 1999, when I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the head writer for The A.V. Club in my spare time.

1999 was also the year of Our Dumb Century, which I had nothing to do with. I knew at the time that I was part of something special but I don’t think I realized just how special.

1999 was big for me. It was huge for The Onion. And it was epic for Limp Bizkit. It was the year of Woodstock 99 and Significant Other, a multi-platinum smash that was the 88th top-charting album of the 1990s. Even more impressively, it was the 118th top charting album of the oughts.

Durst doesn’t just appear in Y2K; he dominates its third act the way his poppy brand of rap-rock dominated American pop culture at the turn of the millennium, when everything was stupid as shit, and consequently awesome.

That’s one of the many reasons I felt like Kyle Mooney had made Y2K specifically for me. I also felt that way about Mooney’s starring debut, 2017’s Brigsby Bear, which I write about glowingly in my upcoming book The Fractured Mirror, and his retro 2021 television show Saturday Morning All Star Hits!

Mooney has a very specific sense of humor and a very specific sensibility that I relate to on an almost uncanny level.

Y2K hit me square in the generational sweet spot. The nostalgia was overpowering.

Music plays a huge part, and I’m not just talking about the roles Durst and, to a much lesser extent, Wes Borland, play in the story.

I knew damn near every song on the soundtrack by heart because it features the kind of ubiquitous mega-hits that everyone knows by heart.

Music has a more direct connection to emotion and nostalgia than any other art form. It has a sneaky power that is difficult to put into words because it’s something that you feel rather than something that you think about.

A lot of it has to do with memories. “Tubthumping”, for example, figures prominently in the proceedings, which made me think of when I performed that song onstage at the Vic with They Might Be Giants with the rest of my colleagues from The Onion and The A.V. Club.

That was a good memory! It’s the kind of thing you clumsily shoe-horn into articles because you want the whole world to know about it.

“Tubthumping” sent me on a Proustian reverie but EVERYONE remembers “Tubthumping”, and Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”, Sisqo’s “The Thong Song” and other bangers that brought me back to a more innocent and stupider time.

Y2K felt at times like Now That’s What I Call Music: The Movie. I mean that as high praise.

Jaeden Martell, who you probably don’t remember as Henry from The Book of Henry, plays Eli, a lanky geek who wants what all teenagers want, in teen movies and life: to get laid.

That’s also the life goal of Danny (Julian Dennison), a New Zealand extrovert who is the Jonah Hill to Eli’s Michael Cera. In a perhaps related development, Jonah Hill is one of its producers.

Y2K is inspired by Superbad but also all of that movies that inspired it, like American Graffiti and Dazed & Confused.

In their quest for sex, drugs and rock and roll the pals are smoked out by Garrett, a hippie stoner video store clerk played by the co-writer/director in quite possibly the single most authentic depiction of a crunchy, dreadlocked marijuana enthusiast in film history.

Garrett may be a fictional character but I feel like I nevertheless lived with him in a co-op in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s not a generic stoner, but a nuanced, multi-dimensional representation of a ubiquitous archetype.

At the stroke of midnight all hell breaks loose. The technology at the turn of the century was adorable in tacky uselessness. They wanted to help. They really did. Clippy and his brood wanted nothing more than to assist newbies in surfing the worldwide web.

It can be hard to believe in a world with limitless free pornography, but in the late 1990s, dedicated onanists would gladly wait five minutes for a printer to finally spew forth a picture of Cindy Margolis in a bikini.

Y2K imagines an alternate past where our annoying little electronic assistants and stooges turn into crazed assassins with a murderous grudge against a human race that, to be fair, makes them do a lot of dumb shit and also, objectively, kind of sucks.

Mooney’s film envisions a worst-case scenario in which every electronic device and doo-hickey in the world spontaneously decides to rebel.

Primitive 2000-era technology doesn’t just break bad; it levels up as well. It evolves/devolves almost instantly. Everyday technology turns sentient and destructive but low-budget, homemade killbots appear suddenly with an insatiable hunger for human blood.

Rachel Zegler costars as Laura, the popular hacker girl of Eli’s dreams. When the Singularity arrives, Eli and Rachel and some partiers-turned-survivors embark on an all-out quest for survival assisted by Mooney’s affable space cadet.

In its second half Y2K turns into a full-on horror movie about an unlikely apocalypse where Tamagotchis stops behaving like digital pets and begin acting like human hunters.

Then Fred Durst enters the equation, after just barely surviving a nightmare that took out most of his band and things go from silly to even sillier. He’s having one of those days but it’s the evil army of electronics who want to break stuff, most notably human bones and bodies.

I cackled like an idiot throughout Y2K. It’s a giddy, glorious goof on the technology and fear of an increasingly distant past.

Y2K appealed very directly to the Nathan Rabin demographic but it should appeal to everyone with the exact same taste, sense of humor and life experiences as myself.

If that describes you, then you will love Y2K. Mooney’s directorial debut is the Superbad/Terminator/Chopping Mall mash-up we never knew we needed.

Four Stars out of Five