Kid-Thing

Where I grew up, I knew some bad kids. David Zellner, who wrote and directed Kid Thing seems to have known some bad kids in his life, too. Kid-Thing isn’t the first movie to be about kids with a lack of a moral compass acting in shocking ways that rock and startle us because they’re outside of the conventions of our society, and it’s not even the most famous. But, to me, it’s one of the most real.

Kid-Thing is about Annie (Sydney Aguirre), who’s left to her own devices all day. Her mom is gone. Her dad is barely there, and when he is there, he’s either drunk or asleep. We spend much of the film’s run time going through a “normal” day for Annie. She steals junk food. She gets into fights with other kids at the playground. She uses a paintball gun to tag up the rotting carcass of a cow. Normal kid stuff.

Normal for a small-town kid without any parental guidance, anyway. And that’s the difference between a movie like Kid-Thing and so many allegedly shocking features that “want to tell you the truth about youth”. Annie isn’t trying to be bad. Or when she does do something she knows is bad, it’s a cry for help and attention and the guilt eats her up inside.

One day, while playing by herself, she hears a voice call to her. A woman has fallen into an open pit and she needs help, or she’s going to die. This is the film’s central moral dilemma: Does a child who has no strong grasp on right and wrong do the right thing by helping this woman? Annie is so detached from reality, she never fully understands the gravity of the situation. She does grasp parts of it and helps in her own strange way, but Annie is never certain if that call for help is from a real person, in her head or something more sinister, like a trick from the Devil.

Esther, the woman in the pit, is voiced by Susan Tyrell (Cry-Baby and the Angel film series), and she’s probably the most famous person in the cast. Zellner uses a cast of mostly unknowns, like an uncredited guitar teacher with a physical disability in his hands but plays music beautifully. It’s these little moments that help the movie feel alive, like something inspired by the Italian neorealism movement.

There are little moments in Kid-Thing that help it feel lived-in, to enhance that feeling of being “alive”. Like Annie’s airbrushed shirt you’d get at a swap meet and she wears for days on end without washing. The little storage room in her house is filled with items that are in that limbo state, somewhere between garbage and nicknacks, that you can’t seem to part with.

Kid-Thing was written and directed by David Zellner and was produced by brother Nathan Zellner, who also acted as the film’s cinematographer. There’s a homemade quality to its technical specs that heightens its sometimes-exaggerated reality. Instead of opting for a traditional cinéma verité, it opts instead for a home movie quality, something you could feasibly shoot in your own backyard, utilizing only a few borrowed locations.

While Kid-Thing is shocking, in its way, to see children struggle with forming compassion, it has less in common with a movie like Harmony Korine’s Gummo and feels more inspired by something like David Gordon Green’s George Washington. Kid-Thing is a complex, nuanced movie that finds an equal in its complex, nuanced character Annie.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Kid-Thing is presented on a single Blu-ray disc, which contains the feature film and all other supplements. The disc is housed in a standard case with reversible cover art and a 32 page booklet including a script excerpt, a weekend shooting schedule, and an interview with the Zellner Brothers.

Kid-Thing is presented in 1080p HD video from an HDCAM print. The visual quality of Kid-Thing isn’t outrageously gorgeous and is rife with technical errors like colors running together in busy shots, pixelization on some finer details, and a lot of shots that have a soft focus where features aren’t totally clear. I’m not going to hold these “faults” against the film, because it’s all a part of a very intentional low-budget aesthetic. There’s a clear difference between these issues occurring due to amateurism or shoddy workmanship, or when they’re intentionally recreated for a specific purpose. But when Kid-Thing wants to look beautiful, it looks impressively beautiful, almost exaggeratedly so, like some sort of dream, contrasted with the nightmare of regular life. It’s strange to think, but it’s a recreation of that “retro” early 2000s video quality (I feel old writing that), but significantly more attractive. Factory25’s release is true to Kid-Thing’s specific look and the Blu-ray looks, I believe, precisely the way the filmmakers intended it to.

Unlike most Blu-rays released today of films made in the past 30 years or so, there is no 5.1 surround option and there is no lossless DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD option. You’re getting a Dolby Digital encoded 2.0 stereo mix. And, sure, a 5.1 surround option would have been nice, given the beautiful, haunting score by The Octopus Project, and the ambient natural soundscape of rural Texas, but the stereo mix here is pretty good. Effects and music are layered in nicely. It all feels very full, and the two front channels actually see a decent amount of movement from one to the other when characters are walking from one side of the room to the other.

If I do have a complaint with the sound mix (and I do), it’s that it has that muddy mumblecore tradition of having certain dialogue sequences be damn near indecipherable. No doubt, this was an intentional choice, one to heighten realism, particularly when it comes to characters who would not necessarily enunciate, project or speak clearly, but it’s a personal pet peeve of mine.

Kid-Thing on Blu-ray comes packed with special features. Features related to the actual film itself are sadly lacking—there is no audio commentary and the behind-the-scenes featurette is only a few minutes long and doesn’t feature much about the production history. There are, however, a ton of short films from the Zellner Brothers, music videos and the inside booklet with interview excerpts. Fans of Kid-Thing will have plenty to watch after the main feature.

• Behind the Scenes (HD 5:57)

Short Films

• Sasquatch Birth Journal 2 (2011) (HD 4:22)
• Rummy (2003) (SD 15:01)
• Quasar Hernandez (2004) (SD 9:50)
• The Virile Man (2004) (SD 7:58)
• Flotsam / Jetsam (2005) (SD 5:12)
• Foxy and the Weight of the World (2005) (SD 8:59)
• Who is on First? (2005) (SD 5:15)
• Pardon My Downfall (2006) (SD 4:48)
• Redemptitude (2006) (SD 11:42)
• Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane (2007) (HD 9:54)
• Fiddlestixx Ep 1, 2, 3 (2009) (HD 9:07)
• Black Something (2016) (HD 3:11)

Music Videos

• Kid-Thing Song-Thing by Mauntaji (2012) (HD 1:52)
• This Old World by Ola Podrida (2009) (HD 4:15)
• Wet Gold by The Octopus Project (2009) (HD 2:52)
• Truck by The Octopus Project (2007) (HD 2:15)
• Nutella & Gummi Bear Sandwich by Precarious Warehaüs Dwellers (2003) (SD 1:25)
• Bulbovian PSA (2002) (SD 1:05)

Kid-Thing pulls off a tough balancing act: It says something about humanity, that tenuous safety net we have called society, and imagines a scenario without that net. What does this character do? What makes them tick? And it does this without reveling in misery or succumbing to cynicism. The A/V quality aren’t top-tier, and rank somewhere between DVD and Blu-ray, but it’s in service of a rough-around-the-edges homemade aesthetic that works in its favor. Fans of the film have tons and tons of features to wade through. Factory25’s release of Kid-Thing comes Highly Recommended.