Once upon a time, in the 1900s, a mysterious threat descended upon the world: The Y2K bug. Maybe—maybe!—when the clocks all struck midnight on the last day of the century, computers would freak out. Everything would go haywire! The end of the world! Or at least a moderate amount of chaos.
It didn’t happen. That New Year’s Eve was as anticlimactic as any. But maybe if it did, it might have looked like Kyle Mooney’s Y2K, a horror comedy that—in the trailer, at least—is light on both the laughs and the horrors, leaning instead on references, Can’t Hardly Wait vibes, and Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.”
The summary is brief: “On the last night of 1999, two high school juniors crash a New Years Eve party, only to find themselves fighting for their lives in this dial-up disaster comedy.” One of those juniors is a boy (Knives Out’s Jaeden Martell) who has a crush on a girl (West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler). The rest of the cast includes Julian Dennison, Lachlan Watson, Alicia Silverstone, director (and SNL alum) Kyle Mooney, and… Fred Durst.
Given the references packed into this trailer—Tamagotchi! Tae bo! AOL! Varsity Blues!—one can only assume there are an assortment of era-appropriate cameos hidden away until the movie’s release. For now, we get teens, screaming, and some rather clever little robotic creations that do murders as best they can when they are only a foot or so off the ground. Bigger robots appear as the trailer goes on, along with a lot of chaotic wiring. (If there isn’t a Hackers joke at some point, what are we even doing here?)
Y2K is written by Mooney and Evan Winter (the music video director, not the fantasy novelist). It’s in theaters December 6th.
