Does anyone remember those type of made for TV AIDS scare movies in which we watched in horror sitting in our health class, as we learned that if you stick your sausage in the wrong slot you were doomed for a quick death due to the crippling disease known as AIDS? Well one such movie made it into theaters back in 1995 and caused controversy and was regarded as a classic, this said movie was called Kids and it is so completely awful, one cannot believe how many suckers bought into such grotesque awfulness.

The feeble material follows the daily exploits of a teenager who doesn't believe in protected sex, because it's a pain in the ass (He even has a friend who thinks AIDs is bullshit) so his form of safe sex is to nail as many underage virgins, so he basically drinks booze, smokes pot, doesn't work and has sex. However one girl from his past has AIDs (and he's the only one she was with) and now she tries to warn him before he gives another virgin AIDs.

Wow, what an embarrasment! You know, there are of course teens like this out there and you know where you find them? They're on the Maury show getting paternity tests to prove they're not the father.

Oh and unlike a decent made for TV special about the dangers of AIDs, we get no glimpse of anyone actually confronting the problem at hand. So basically, Kids labors to deliver a message that AIDs is so very bad, and you shouldn't fuck so much, but yet it never even shows the teenagers in question actually learn their fate. So basically we watch as these really obnoxious Gen-Xers party, beat up black guys, insult gays, smoke dope and even rape passed out chicks, but what is the point, I ask? The truth, there is none and therefore this has no reason to be validated as the classic cautionary tale it is often labeled as.

However the biggest failure of this movie is that it's meant to shock you, it's meant to make you cry, it's even meant to titilate but in the end it becomes quite obvious that most of the time you want the kids in the movie to get wiped out by a mad slasher. In fact, I can't think of a more likable portrait of the HIV virus, essayed in this movie, in fact in a movie filled with such scuzzy characters, the only thing to root for was indeed the AIDs virus. And when a movie about the horror of AIDs ends up getting you to root for the virus, well, it just goes to show you just how feeble, Larry Clark's handling of the material is.

However making a bad movie is bad enough, but Kids isn't content with just being bad, no it has to plumb depths into creepy territory and by this I mean moments that got me to suspect that Larry Clark is a pedophile. In one creepy sequence we see four twelve year olds smoking dope while completely shirtless, it is shot so exploitive that it comes off as porno. It's really quite offensive. Also there is something exploitive and creepy about the way Clark films the sex scenes (One including a twelve year old boy, mind you!) in that he strives for a porno feel, and at times he succeeds in making it seem like authentic porn. I'm not one to ever claim about political correctness but come on this isn't art, this is porn! I mean how many twelve year old boys smoke dope sitting on a couch together while completely shirtless? So while porno in itself isn't offensive, putting underage kids in such situations is very offensive, oh and it's also illegal.

Also it doesn't help that the movie has no conviction in its plot. The movie is so repetitive, with the characters going through the same situations over and over again, so that we end up bored out of our minds. Not to mention forced to be in the company of asshole teens who every single minute of screen time, warrant our scorn and wear out our patience. Kids is the type of terrible movie, that the arthouse type get so giddy about as if it was a new thing that teenagers are sexually active assholes who cause trouble when not around their parents. I learned this back in my teens, and such a lesson only breaks new ground for the Amish.

However it stands to reason though, that this movie would be embraced by the Gen-Xer crowd, the kind who listened to grunge music, smoked dope, didn't work and discussed politics they didn't know jack-shit about, it stands to reason that this movie would be their mainstream representation. Because like the average Gen-Xer spouting philosphy back in the mid-90s, Kids is hopelessly inept, grotesquely hypocritical, creepy and just plain a pain in the ass. So in that retrospect perhaps this movie is accurate in it's depitcion of the Gen-X teens.

The question is, do you want to spend 90 minutes with such jerk-offs? I know I don't.

Hamlin Grade:

Ryan