THE WEIRD KIDZ (2022)—REVIEW

When Ted Geogeghan forwarded a streaming link of The Weird Kidz (2022), he noted: “While it's easy (and kinda accurate) to refer to it as South Park-meets-Stranger Things, filmmaker Zach Passero has been singlehandedly animating this feature for so long, he actually began work on it before Stranger Things ever began production!” That’s to say that The Weird Kidz was eight years (plus some) in the making; a creative process laid out in the Without Your Head Podcast interview with Passero that preceded the film’s World Premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Continuing on the genre festival circuit, The Weird Kidz boasted its European premiere at London’s FrightFest, played the Annecy International Animation Festival in their Midnight Specials sidebar, and was a Sitges Family Official Selection, as well as being featured in several other film festivals throughout 2023. Fast forward three years and The Weird Kidz is finally available on VOD through Antenna Releasing—just in time for Halloween! An urban tale told around a camp fire becomes an enjoyable tale to watch on television, our digital campfire. 

It’s of note that Passero and his wife Hannah (who painted the backgrounds for the film) were having their firstborn when the project started and their boy is now 12 years old, the very age of Dug (Tess Passero), Mel (Glenn Bolton), and Fatt (Brian Ceely), the titular weird kids coming of age in a desert suburb during the mid-’80s. 

Dug’s slacker older brother Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane, of Richard Linklater’s Boy, now grown up of course) takes the tween trio on a camping trip to a canyon with his new, awesome girlfriend, Mary (Sydney Wharton). Mary has to redirect Mel and Fatt’s attention away from her breasts to her eyes (the two are in the grip of puberty and all its compulsive stares), whereas late bloomer Dug is more into video games and smores. At a pit stop where the boys have been tasked with stealing beer, the gas station attendant Duana (Angela Bettis) warns Dug about “The Night Child”, an ancient creature that feeds on tourists. At first Dug thinks this is just a ghost story to tell around the campfire but finds out they are, indeed, in danger, which is when the film effectively shifts from an awkward coming of age comedy to an encounter with a bloodthirsty insect-like creature. Add on to that threat a local community that propitiates the creature with ritual sacrifice and the campers become potential victims from both sides. 

As Passero notes in the aforementioned interview, it takes the first fifteen minutes to accept the line-drawn aesthetics of the animation, at which point the narrative gains traction and becomes oddly believable, largely through the charm of its naturalistic dialogue and a palpable innocence that informs the characters and speaks to a nostalgic vision of the time. By film’s end not only have the boys grown up but the relationship between Wyatt and Mary matures, and compassion is afforded the creature as well. 

Lucky McKee, a classmate of Passero’s in film school and the director of May (2002) scores a production credit with The Weird Kidz, and the family’s kept tight with Angela Bettis (who played May) voicing the role of Duana, and Passero’s sister Tess voicing Dug.  

The Weird Kidz succeeds because it’s sincere in its love for the movies we grew up with. The characters expand past their stereotypes, complicated by compassion and self-insight. Between the popcorn farts and the blood sacrifice, the hijinks and the horrors, viewers are rewarded with a heady dose of inspired, devoted and singularly unique animation.