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Y2K: SHUT DOWN DETECTED
I don’t believe it! A no-budget horror short that’s actually as good as, if not better than, most bigger budgeted genre features. Yes, we all know the dreaded “millennium bug” was a big fat joke, but you’re advised to catch Y2K: SHUT DOWN DETECTED, an extremely slick little film marred only by the fact that it really should have been longer!
The Package
Y2K: SHUT DOWN DETECTED, conceived as a feature, was made over a two year
period by Trent Shumway, Slava Siderman and John Gonzales, who originally
counted five more prospective filmmakers among them. That number was whittled
down, however, as was the film’s budget and running time. The result lasts a
mere 22 minutes, yet the production was elaborate enough for a feature
film—witness the “making of” featurette included on the DVD (both it and the
film are extras on Shock O’ Rama Cinema’s release of the lame horror flick
DEMONESS), which is nearly three times as long as the film itself!
The Story
It’s December 31, 1999. The employees of a high-tech genetic engineering
lab await the turn of the millennium, secure in the belief that they’re prepared
for the dreaded Y2K bug; they’ve even hired a renegade hacker to help make their
computers Y2K compliant. But when midnight comes everything goes haywire. The
central computer is unable to read the number 2000 and loses its memory, finding
itself unable to recognize the alien material its purpose is to help contain.
The computer locks down the entire facility and, in order to closely examine the
strange material, orders up a tissue sample, unleashing a blob-like mass of
animated goo.
Thus a monster is on the loose amidst the various humans trapped inside the
facility. It doesn’t live long, though, forcing the computer to come up with a
more sophisticated creature, a tentacled what’s-it that takes to attacking the
facility’s employees and turning them into cannibalistic zombies. But the
computer’s experiments aren’t finished: it decides to create a whole new
species, which it does by having the tentacle critter impregnate an unfortunate
woman, in whom a brood of mutant children grow at over one hundred times the
normal rate...
The Direction
Like I said, this film is SLICK. Unlike so many of today’s horror
no-budgeters, it was actually shot on film (not video) and has a stylish,
professional sheen. The constant intercutting between the master computer’s POV
(where thought consists of numerical data and the facilities’ employees are seen
as tiny specks swirling around a nondescript box) and that of the humans trapped
in its lair is intriguing, as is the filmmakers’ refusal to kowtow to the slower
members of their prospective audience—in other words, information is doled out
to us as the film unfolds, with no handy summaries by the performers (no “Oh
no, the computer just created another monster!” silliness here).
The problems arise from the truncated running time and
limited budget. The special FX are good, but there should be more of them. We
never see the mutant babies, for instance (in the original conception they were
apparently supposed to grow to the size of a building and rampage down a crowded
street), although the directors do a clever job of covering up their absence
with a series of quick cuts. The monsters we do see are too few; the conceptual
artwork shown in the Making-of featurette is intriguing, picturing a variety of
amazing critters that unfortunately never made it to the shooting stage.
Vital Statistics
Y2K: SHUT DOWN DETECTED
1:1 Films/Shock-O-Rama Cinema
Directors/Producers/Editors: Trent Shumway, Slava Siderman, John Gonzales
Screenplay: John Gonzales
Cinematography: Slava Siderman
Cast: Jason Fenton, Ellen Horn, Leonard Clifton, John Gonzales, Stacey Seale,
Laura Satterfield, Kat Kuckens, Katrina Elias, Trent Shumway, Jill Bernstein,
Melyssa Flanery, Terri Wright, Armando Landaverde, Sasha Luderer