YMMV / Kids

• Alternate Character Interpretation: What's going through Jennie's head when she closes the door on Telly's and Darcy's intercourse? Despair or bitterness? You'd think the former, but she was told what they were doing upstairs, and leaving a blatantly discomforted child to an older boy's ravishing is not a moment of grace.
• Critic-Proof: Despite critics being horrified at the film's subject matter, it was quite profitable; it was something of a Sleeper Hit, grossing $20 million on a $1 million budget.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The film implies a morbid ending for Casper, who contracts HIV from raping the unconscious Jennie. It's even sadder when the viewer knows that his actor Justin Pierce committed suicide only a few years later.
  • Likewise, the ringleader of beating the man to unconsciousness in the skate park is Harold - whose own actor would be dead a few years later as well.
  • Telly is something of a popular character in-universe. Unfortunately, it went the opposite way in real life for his actor Leo Fitzpatrick. He endured such backlash from people who didn't get that it was just a film that he had to move twice and wasn't comfortable acting again until he was in his twenties.
  • And, of course, a film depicting characters engaging in horrific sexual abuse being distributed by the Weinstein brothers...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Rosario Dawson plays a sexually active girl who doesn't test positive for HIV. Ten years later, she's on the other side playing Mimi in the film version of RENT.
  • Chloe Sevigny plays a girl who has only had sex once in contrast to a more promiscuous friend. Of course, it's rather amusing in light of The Brown Bunny - where she infamously performed unsimulated fellatio on camera!
• Memetic Mutation
  "Don't worry, it's Casper..."
• Retroactive Recognition: Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson as Jennie and Ruby.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Critics at the time were horrified by the bleakness of the story; a protagonist who makes it his mission to take young girls' virginities and in turn is revealed to have HIV and therefore unknowingly spread it. He and his friends also beat up an adult in the skate park, which the screenwriter took from real life. It's something of a Running Gag for viewers to say they watched it as teenagers and didn't realise the true horror until they were older.
• Values Resonance: Teenage delinquency has stayed about the same if not worsened over the years, and Kids's representation of it seems a lot more relevant nowadays.
• The Woobie: Jennie is only a teenager, who's had sex just once, and contracted HIV from it. In 1995, this was practically a death sentence. All she can do is search the city in vain for Telly and tell him he's got the disease. She's taken advantage of by multiple other characters and never accomplishes her goal on-screen.

---