Don’t call it a South Park-meets-Stranger Things spinoff, but filmmaker Zach Passero’s feature debut highlights an animated creature-feature storyline with a dash of nostalgia that could make both popular programs green with envy.
The Weird Kidz, which releases nationwide on October 27th via VOD, has been a passion project of Passero’s for eight long years, working as the writer, director and animator of the film, who partnered with his wife, Hannah, the painter of the movie’s many background scenes, along with producers Charles Horak, Lucky McKee and James Fino (Executive Producer of Rick and Morty).
In the film, Dug (voiced by Tess Passero), Fatt (Brian Ceely) and Mel (Glenn Bolton), along with his dog, Grumbles (Oliver T. Pug), tag along with Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane) and Mary (Sydney Wharton) on a camping trip to Jerusalem National Park.
But when a ghost story around the campfire proves to be stranger than fiction, their fates may be intertwined with the mysterious disappearance of some local campers 25 years earlier.
“Food? We don’t need food. We’ve got beer.”
The small-town life of Black Bird, “a real nice place to raise your kids up” since 1975, seems to be filled with hidden secrets and deadly truths, as many of its residents worship “the night child,” a huge, vicious creature that eats human flesh after sporadically awakening every quarter century (a la shades of Pennywise).
Talk about never trusting adults!
An animated, nostalgic creature feature in the vein of Rick and Morty? Give The Weird Kidz a hand!
In what seems like a storyline set during the ’80s in an alternate dimension, this small, Southwestern town feels familiar, while not providing any location-specific details. The same can be said of our preteen protagonist, Dug, who desperately wants to fit in with his friends, even though he hasn’t hit puberty yet (and they have).
That need to relate also connects him with older brother, Wyatt. Together, they are considered “Lost Cause” candidates by their parents, which binds them together.
To say that Dug is an outsider among friends and family members is an understatement, but my favorite character among the bunch is the overprotective, beer-guzzling dog with unusually large genitals, who becomes the butt of quite a few jokes without speaking a word (or receiving much credit), while stealing quite a few scenes.
Grumbles rules.
While the animation doesn’t look too complex — it is most likely more complicated than its surface level appears — the devil is in the details, but its darkness quality prevents many of the finer images to be seen, at times. That being said, as a Child of the ’80s, I enjoyed the storyline, which may be considered a little too vulgar for cable television.
I could easily see this movie fitting in with the regular Halloween rotation of Adult Swim’s late-night programming block on Cartoon Network, naturally paired with Rick and Morty.
Small-town monsters aren’t always creepy critters found in the dark… sometimes they’re the people actually standing right in front of you, hidden in plain sight. The unseen sacrifices made in order to keep a small town safe shouldn’t require the services of a naive, underage boy, but for The Weird Kidz, that’s a necessary evil for surviving a blood-sucking, murderous bug monster.
“I can’t pass the president’s fitness challenge in P.E., but I can outrun a monster…”