Review: ‘Y2K’ imperfect but amusing horror comedy

“Saturday Night Live” alum Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut “Y2K” makes for a fascinating test case for Gen Z’s appetite for all things 2000s. His comedic sensibility, honed through throwback TV parodies on “SNL,” is at once broad and hyper-specific. In the nostalgia piece “Y2K,” he hits the big sign posts that will delight the younger generation craving the simpler times of a pre-9/11 world, but he also gets granular with late ‘90s music, fashion and culture in a way that one could only understand if they actually lived through it. Zoomers just won’t pick up everything he’s putting down, and that may work against this otherwise exuberant and somewhat messy teen horror-comedy.

Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter fuse the “big party” teen comedy formula to “The Terminator” for their “Y2K” script, but it also feels like they just wrote down everything they could remember from the late ‘90s era and threw it at the wall: Enron, the Macarena, PalmPilots, Limp Bizkit, the swing revival. Some are quite obvious and on the nose, others more arcane. Add in some teen movie tropes, a list of outrageous horror movie kills and a “TRL”-friendly soundtrack and that’s essentially the movie.

Jaedan Martell, one of the preeminent horror movie sad boys (see: “It,” “The Lodge,” etc.) plays Eli, a dorky kid who loves his ebullient best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) and has a crush on Laura (Rachel Zegler), whom he hopes to kiss at the big 1999-2000 New Year’s Eve party after he finds out she’s broken up with her college boyfriend (Mason Gooding). But in a bit of revisionist history, the Y2K bug is real — so real, in fact, that every electronic device and appliance bands together into freakish robotic monsters in order to kill the teens, enslave the parents and achieve “the singularity.”

Despite the deep wealth of millennium culture on display, “Y2K” doesn’t necessarily feel lived-in — it’s a bit too wink-wink, nudge-nudge with it, and it feels forced, especially with the wall-to-wall needle drops. There are fun nods to era-specific tribes and trends with quick nods to the swing kids, ravers and rap-rock skater types, but where Mooney and Winter’s approach excels is in the deep cuts for the real ‘90s-heads out there, like Daniel Zolghadri’s character as CJ, a conscious hip-hop kid, wearing baggy khakis and a bucket hat, talking about his rap group “Prophets of Intelligence” and scolding his peers for their “corporate” music taste. Mooney is also a standout as Garrett, a burnout video store clerk with white guy dreads, who represents jam band stinky hippie culture, and he nails every single note-perfect inflection.

But references like this will likely sail right over the heads of a Zoomer audience — you simply had to be there in order to get it.

The surface pleasures of “Y2K” are outlandish fun, but plot-wise the film is structurally unsound. While it cribs formulas and pieces from already all-too familiar genres, it’s too loose in how scenes flow into each other or how the story progresses from A to B.

What’s interesting about Mooney’s vision is that he’s packaged contemporary technological anxiety into a memory piece. Fears about the singularity and artificial intelligence taking over humanity is a modern concern, but it wasn’t what we were worried about with the Y2K bug.

Still, there’s also something kind of profound in contemplating the year 2000, even if it is refracted through this silly lens. In the 24 years since, it’s been decades of terrorism, war, political instability, a widening wealth gap and rapid technological advancements that have rewired our culture, our brains and how we relate to each other.

Perhaps 2000 was indeed a fundamental switch, which Mooney has zeroed in on through the imperfect but amusing “Y2K.” Ultimately, his project is a success, because he made this millennial — who was age 16 in 1999 — profoundly nostalgic for what seems a more innocent time.

(“Y2K” contains bloody violence, strong sexual content/nudity, pervasive language, and teen drug and alcohol use)

“Y2K”

Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common, South Bay Center, Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport and suburban theaters.

Grade: C+