Everything is Terrible! spreads film, live puppetry and performance vibes at Underground Arts

Everything is Terrible! is not so bad after all, not since a smartly sarcastic group of Ohio University students joined forces in 2007 and put together their multimedia-focused collective minds — and dumpster diving, thrift-store hunting hands.

The group radically reedits found VHS tapes and creates new found-footage short films and full-length documentaries often ripe with fresh social-conscious meaning.

While most of these new found-footage fantastias can be found on their Everything is Terrible! website and daily blog (watch.everythingisterrible.com), the group collective – now based in Los Angeles – have also taken their self-created psychedelic screenings on the road, and, in a recent turn of events, added live puppets, bands, comedians and more to their club presentations.

Their newest cinematic showcase and live event, Kidz Klub 2023, will bring Everything is Terrible! to Philadelphia for the first time at Underground Arts in the Eraserhood on Aug. 8.

“One of the things that I am most proud of when it comes to Everything is Terrible! is that it is impossible to explain,” said the group’s video chief, Commodore Gilgamesh. “Other than to say that we are incredibly successful at just that.”

Using the same mash-up capabilities that drive their defining, experimental found film footage documentaries such as their 2009 full-length ‘Everything Is Terrible! The Movie’ and 2018’s The Great Satan — “literally thousands of diverse clips edited together” — the collective creates their own “furry costumed characters and puppets so to soften the blow of the occasional horrors of what you’ll see on screen,” said Gilgamesh. “I think our live show around each movie screening makes everything more palatable and fun.”

And its newest film, Kidz Klub promises “all colors of the rainbow joining forces to destroy the tyranny of adult civilization once and for all” featuring “skateboarding web-surfers, rapping math equations, gigantic baby ducks, and maybe even a wizard or two- created for kidz… by kidz!”

Commodore Gilgamesh believes that what Everything is Terrible! does best is present “counter propaganda” to that which the mainstream media doles out daily. Like the cut-up technique of author William S Burroughs, collage maker Byron Gysin and the multi-media mirth-makers at Negitvland, the team at Everything is Terrible! is looking to create a more beautiful – or at least, honest – world through re-arranging already disseminated information in which to create new truths.

“We follow in a long line of found footage and collage creating innovators,” said Commodore Gilgamesh. “The world of TikTok and YouTube is creating an entire universe of found footage makers, past, present and future, all subverting all brands of messaging.”

Approaching the world of social commentary with a manipulative eye toward DIY punk aesthetics – think of Everything is Terrible! as drawing mustaches on the Mona Lisa – their mocking art form always is meant to punch up.

In Commodore Gilgamesh’s words, “Everything is Terrible! is about attacking systems, never people or individuals, while making everyone laugh. And think.”