'Y2K' is a totally '90s sci-fi horror comedy

Pre-millennium tech turns deadly in Kyle Mooney's directorial debut

The robot monsters that terrorize teenagers in Kyle Mooney’s “Y2K’ are assembled from disparate parts – an iMac monitor here, a stereo speaker there. And similarly, “Y2K” feels put together from discarded pieces of other movies, fusing together pieces of slasher horror, sci-fi disaster, stoner teen comedy and snarky social commentary.

Which gives Mooney’s movie a scrappy charm (in that it’s made out of scraps) as it lumbers forward in fits and starts, finding the occasionally clever gag along the way. But there are times when you wish “Y2K” was a machine that operated a little more smoothly.

For those who didn’t live through the Clinton Administration, “Y2K” was a technological panic in 1999 where some feared that computers, unable to register the shift from “1999” to “2000” in their coding on January 1, 2000, would malfunction. (Nothing happened, leading many to believe it was a hoax, but a very clever documentary, “Time Bomb Y2K,” shows how governments and corporations worked together to debug the bugs.)

Things go very differently in “Y2K.” For the first half-hour, Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter’s movie is a straight-up “Superbad”-style comedy. Shy Eli (Jaeden Martell) and brash Danny (Julian Dennison) are outcasts in high school, yearning to run with the cool kids. Eli has a crush on popular Laura (Rachel Zegler), although their friendship is largely confined to AOL Instant Messenger.

Mooney and Winter have a lot of fun with cultural touchstones of 1999 like AOL. Bullies at school wear puka-shell necklaces, skaters are blasting Limp Bizkit from their boomboxes, and Eli’s dad (Tim Heidecker) marvels that he can get news headlines on his phone (“Something about Enron.”).

(Photos courtesy of A24)

It seems like such an innocent time – until the clock strikes midnight at a New Year’s Eve party. Then the machines don’t just malfunction but turn into murderbots. This is the best part of the movie, as hapless teens are dispatched by dishwashers, remote-controlled cars, even a front-loading VCR. The machines may become a bigger threat when they combine into giant robots, but “Y2K” lost a little of its freshness for me at that point. It’s just more fun to see someone get killed by a Tamagotchi.

A few survivors, including Eli, Laura, go on the run, searching for a way to defeat the robots (the solution, not surprisingly, comes from another ‘90s movie). Along the way, they’re joined by Mooney playing a cheerful weed-smoking video store clerk who could have been one of his characters from “Saturday Night Live,” and a cameo by a notorious musician of the era playing himself. I won’t spoil it, but I will say it’s the first time in a quarter-century I’ve at all felt positively about this guy.

“Y2K” has its moments, but the pacing feels off as it lurches back and forth between horror comedy and teen drama, and it doesn’t quite have the juice to make it all the way. The decision to kill off a very compelling character early on might have been a mistake – I’m all for a shock kill, but maybe think about how that absence is going to affect the rest of the movie.

Although perhaps it’s fitting that a movie about the destructive consequences of the Y2K bug didn’t plan ahead.

“Y2K” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace, AMC Fitchburg 18 and Flix Brewhouse.