MPAA Rating: NR
Director: David Zellner
FilmPulse Score: 1/10
David Zellner’s newest film Kid-Thing centers around Annie (Sydney Aguirre) a young girl devoid of parental guidance and/or supervision, a moral compass, direction, feelings…anything really. She does come up with numerous ways to kill time that seem, somewhat, enjoyable to her; I mean enjoyable in the sense that these actions have a way of occupying her days including thievery, biscuit dough throwing, paintballing dead animals, paintballing shit and playing soccer.
This is my first 1/10 review!
Annie does live with an adult, or should I say an adult meaning technically speaking, age-wise, he’s considered an adult. This man is Marvin (Nathan Zellner) and the film never fully discloses his relation to Annie, he could be the father, the brother, or maybe second cousin; you could say that he is the quote-unquote guardian in Annie’s life, but outside of teaching Annie how to hypnotize chickens and being a surface on to which stickers can be placed he really provides nothing for Annie. He doesn’t even know that Annie is on the verge of being kicked out of her soccer league for excessive red cards.
I guess I should mention the plot, which is that Annie comes across a woman trapped in a well in the middle of the woods. Faced with the prospect of helping this woman, Annie must arrive at the right decision without parental involvement and without parental involvement Annie comes to the conclusion of furnishing the woman with stolen Capri Suns and handmade (literally made with her hands) PB and Js to go along with the well-woman’s terrible line delivery. There might be some subtext within this little development in Annie’s life but by the time it arrives the viewer couldn’t give two shits about any of this.
The viewer is subjected to real-time goat milking, close-up shit paintballing, close-up dead cow paintballing, an extended sequence involving Marvin and his buddy Caleb (David Zellner) laughing, for what seemed like 2 full minutes, in regards to Caleb winning a busted-up arm at the demolition derby and much, much more. Kid-Thing consists of a series of superfluous happenings, amateurishly framed and shot, coupled with terrible acting, sparse dialogue and, of course, your categorical nature shots – the combination of these things result in a feature-length film designed to waste your time. I honestly see no other reason for David Zellner’s film to exist, outside of time-killing and/or annoying boredom.
The things I did enjoy were few and included the soundtrack, the fact that this film taught me how to hypnotize a chicken (thank you David Zellner) and the visuals of man shooting fireworks at a retreating car in the night. All of these things culminate into a score of one out of ten and if it were not for a word minimum this review would merely consist of the phrase shit pile of dreck. Unfortunately, for me I had to waste my time, not only viewing this film but subsequently wasting my time putting into words how Kid-Thing was a waste of time – a lot of time was wasted.
David Zellner’s Kid-Thing is the cinematic approximation of a pile of shit, staring at that pile of shit for some time, then deciding to hit said pile of shit with a stick and finally arriving at the conclusion that the best possible thing to do at this exact moment in time with said pile of shit, is to brandish your trusty paintball gun and unleash a hellfire of paintballs into the shit-pile until you grow tired of the proceedings, retreating to your home for a nightcap of prank calls and Nintendo 64.
