[Review] Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: The Weird Kidz

Zach Passero’s The Weird Kidz premiered this past week at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. The feature was written, directed, and animated by Passero over the course of eight years. The production of the film itself is incredibly impressive, particularly having been completed by a single artist, and the basis for the plot is inventive and heart-warming. That being said, the 80s-coming of age homage creature feature is stuck in its reliance on late-90s/early-2000s style gross-out humor which detracts from its strong original concept.

The Weird Kidz is about a group of aforementioned weird kids in the 80s as they join our lead teen boy Dug (Tess Passero) and his older brother Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane) on a camping trip. Wyatt brings along his girlfriend Mary (Sydney Wharton), a continuous punchline and distraction for the adolescent boys. Along their trip, they are warned about “The Night Child,” who turns out to be a gigantic bug who is also a leader of a local cult. Chaos and shenanigans ensue to defeat the monster as the boys grow in their relationships with  each other and come of age among the grossest circumstances possible.

The film opens on Dug and his friends Mel (Glenn Bolton) and Fatt (Brian Ceely) playing video games at a gas station. Mel and Fatt happen to take notice of a man flipping through a porn magazine called “Boobs” and are distracted as the man tells them that this is “something to look forward to” while opening the centerfold for them. This sets the tone for the entire movie, and though this scene is here to tell us that these are teen boys who are discovering themselves and their sexualities, the writing still relies on the objectification of women that is only encouraged by all the male characters.

When Wyatt picks the boys up, they load into the car and we are introduced to Mary with a close-up of her cleavage. Mary tells the boys to move their eyes up to her face, which does try to signal to us that perhaps Mary is aware of this behavior and trying to correct it, but considering she is the only female character who is not part of a murderous cult, it should not be her responsibility. The character of Mary in general only exists to serve as the punchline for sexualized jokes made by the teens and as a means for the character growth of all the boys. She does have a developed personality and makes decisions on her own, but her character’s purpose and function in the film is primarily to serve the male characters.

Later in the film, before the creature feature aspect of the film really takes off, Wyatt and Mary leave to have sex in their tent. The group of boys can see the shadows, but have a lack of sex education, so they do not know what is going on and believe that Wyatt is attacking Mary. They send in Mel’s dog to try to break up what they believe is a fight, but the male dog is seen trying to have sex with the couple, which is then used as a punchline and joke multiple times in the remainder of the film. Perhaps the nature of dogs to hump anything around them is a humorous aspect of the nature of animals and could successfully be turned into a joke, but this scene plays as very distasteful and is fully unnecessary. The line between the intended humor and bestiality is crossed when the act is used as a joke later and it comes across as a joke made primarily for shock value.