Filmmakers always run a risk when they attempt to make a current events film. Yet the directorial tribunal responsible for trying to bring “Y2K” to the big screen picked themselves a film topic with a whopper of a built-in deadline. I don’t think they made it. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999 at Kirkland Biotech Industries, a hi-tech DNA and cloning research facility, and lead computer hacker Neil (Jason Fenton) is racing the clock to install his anti-Y2K software before the big moment strikes. Though he gets the program installed all right, something still goes wrong. Shortly after the stroke of midnight, the green ooze in the lab somehow comes alive, gains sentience, and starts knocking off humans in search of a suitable candidate to impregnate.
A year ago or so, at the height of Y2K hysteria, would have been a perfect time for this film to premiere. With Y2K-ophiles predicting everything from massive black-outs to airplanes falling from the skies to accidental nuclear war to aliens taking over the planet, the public would have been in the proper frame of mind for “Y2K: Shutdown Detected.” Unfortunately, this composite of representative short scenes and the trailer, produced to entice investors into funding a feature length version, must not have convinced enough prospective investors in time to mount the full length feature version before Y2K fizzled worse than soggy fireworks. Like those Mir cosmonauts stranded on their space station while the Soviet Union blinked out of existence, the creators of this film most likely find themselves stuck in these post Y2K days with what’s essentially a sexier, electronica-tinged version of a standard monster movie with a laughably outdated Y2K gimmick.
A hard sell for an ambitious project may have become impossibly difficult; cancelled due to a profound lack of interest. Still, there are some decent moments here. The graphics, while cheesy, are at least of Full Moon quality and the editing gives this video some sizzle. The directors’ hopes of turning this into a full-blown feature may have disappeared with the passing of the 1900s, but they should be able to at least use this as a calling card for a project not fatally rushed by the end of the millennium. How’s about a Y3K update, guys?
