Everything Is Terrible! Brings Latest Fever-Dream Film to Meow Wolf

A great desert pyramid constructed solely from discarded Jerry Maguire VHS tapes. A pedophile-hunting yellow dinosaur. A penny loafer-wearing, dancing preteen demigod named Duane.

These are just a few of the mad visions and creations the found-footage artist collective known as Everything Is Terrible! has contributed to the canon of modern civilization since forming in 2007, after a group of friends at Ohio University started digging up and mocking cringey videos and movies online.

The results since then have been disturbing, as the collective has grown into a full-blown cultural phenomenon that includes being featured on Tosh.0, pop-up art installations, eight feature-length films and subsequent tours. The L.A.-based weirdos even teamed up with Meow Wolf's Convergence Station in Denver to create the Pizza Pals Playzone in all its animatronic glory.

“We just want to keep getting away with it. We have so many projects,” says founder Nic Maier (aka Commodore Gilgamesh).

The group's offerings are still found on its main website, with daily posts of unsettling clips, but Everything Is Terrible! has long escaped its digital domain to roam throughout the real world. The media maniacs are back at it with their new film, Kidz Klub, which is the collective's “most mind-melting movie to date,” as they put it.

“Watch in awe as all colors of the rainbow join forces to destroy the tyranny of adult civilization once and for all!” is the official tagline.

“Like most of our extremely stupid ideas, it was really natural for us,” Maier explains. “The bulk of the media that ends up in our pods is for kids. That’s when all of this started for all of us, being manipulated by media, which is the seed for Everything Is Terrible! It only makes sense that we would make a movie for kids by kids.”

Convergence Station will welcome the Everything Is Terrible! Kidz Klub extravaganza on Tuesday, August 15. While the content is children-centric, the show is meant for viewers sixteen years of age and older.

The exact premise and angle of the movie cannot be definitively described, but Maier suggests that “going in blind is the best way to enjoy the Everything Is Terrible! live experience.”

“I can say that with extreme confidence at this point. It will fill you with joy and dread at the same time,” he adds. “Just that feeling where you’re laughing, you’re having fun and you’re like, ‘Oh, God. Why am I laughing? Am I a monster? Is there a monster behind me that’s going to eat me?’ When you see a show and you walk away just feeling one thing, I feel like it’s not as much of a success as walking away being like, ‘The world is complicated. I’m complicated.’ We need to feel many things at once.”

“Media criticism” is at the nucleus of what Everything Is Terrible! does, Maier continues, especially since he and his comrades came of age during a time when the footage they now sarcastically manipulate first came out. The content was meant to be dead-ass serious by the adults who produced it, which was no better than “insane, twisted propaganda.” The same applies to Kidz Klub.

“I remember sitting in a stupid room that I was forced to go to for Sunday school and being like, ‘This video is stupid. I’m smarter than the adult who decided to play it, the adults who are acting in it and the adults who spend money to make it. I’m smarter than all these people as an eight-year-old,’” he says. “I think that central wisdom of kids seeing through the BS of the world is what Kidz Klub is all about.

“I think we all know what we need to do in the world to build a better world, but they’re trying to stop us,” he goes on. “It also fucked us up.”

At this point, Maier has “become numb to the insanity, because you just keep finding things that you can’t believe that a group of adults got together and spent money to make it, and they thought that kids would like it.” Like a video called “Singing Babies” that includes real toddlers but swaps their facial features out for adults who are crooning nursery rhymes in baby voices.

“When I saw that, it totally just cracked something open in my mind for what was going to happen with this project,” he says, adding, “You realize that we’re all just insane people in an insane world.”

But Everything Is Terrible! struck a collective nerve and has become like The Rocky Horror Picture Show when on the road, so don’t forget to bring a Jerry Maguire tape when you go to a show.

Building a Jerry Maguire pyramid started as “a dumb joke,” says Maier, and “if people wouldn’t have taken it and run with it, it would have just fizzled out like any other dumb idea.”

They now have over 40,000 copies to work with, and even hosted immersive-art installations in L.A. and Denver disguised as regular stores that carried nothing but the 1996 Tom Cruise movie.

“I bought maybe a thousand. The rest have just been carried to us by worshipers,” he adds. “We have surpassed the number that we need. We’re good, but we’re going to keep taking them, and it’s going to be stupid.”

Everything Is Terrible!, 7 p.m. Tuesday, August 15, Meow Wolf's Convergence Station, 1338 First Street. Tickets are $20-$25.