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Kaboom (2010)

Director: Gregg Araki

Time Out rating

Average user rating

10 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

It’s the end of the world again! Time for a fix of Gregg Araki. Never a filmmaker to pass up the all-bets-are-off charm of the end times, Araki claimed a place in the New Queer Cinema with 1992’s ‘The Living End’, about a pair of HIV-positive outlaw lovers on the lam. Then came a ‘teen apocalypse’ trilogy (‘Totally Fucked Up’, ‘The Doom Generation’ and ‘Nowhere’) that put Cronenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ and the Illuminati through a queer blender.

Next were the threesome comedy ‘Splendor’ (1999); the achingly beautiful ‘Mysterious Skin’ (2004), with its alien abductions, underage fisting and ecstatic Fruit Loops; and the stoner interlude ‘Smiley Face’. An eclectic bunch, then, unified by an alienated, bottom-up perspective on society, saturated-verging-on-lurid mise-en-scène and a blasé but not unemotional approach to sexual liberation.

‘Kaboom’, as the title suggests, finds Araki back in teen apocalypse mode. Smith (Thomas Dekker, pictured) is an averagely fucked-up freshman who’d be enjoying film studies (which he compares to ‘studying an animal that’s on the verge of extinction’) were it not for the bad dreams. What starts out as a savvy information-age campus sex comedy, involving ‘ass-tards’, jealous witches and a surfer called Thor, takes a Lynchian, conspiratorial turn with the arrival of sinister animal-masked men, a secretive online cult and intimations of nuclear armageddon.
Araki’s work is not for everyone; the plotting can feel arbitrary and the characters vapid. But that’s kind of the point – if shameless West Coast homoeroticism and eyeball-rolling snark ring your bell, this will grab you.

But there’s more going on than that. Araki uses smart photography and location work to build a darkly dreamlike sense of uncanny peril. If there’s an undercurrent of impending cataclysm in today’s culture, ‘Kaboom’ senses that feeling, seizes it in a surreal clinch and hurtles with
it off a cliff.

Author: Ben Walters

Time Out London Issue 2129: June 9 - 15, 2011

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User reviews of this film

Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jul 07 2011 12:52 I'm just popping back again to kick this film in the nuts. It's still without a doubt one of the two most tiresome films I've ever seen (the other was Jefferson in Paris).

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jun 18 2011 07:51 Never one to miss a chance to follow the crowd, I'm dumping my own 1 star's worth, too. All being well, the distributor will lose money on this and to have them exhibited, Araki will need to make better films or just disappear.

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Sada K said...

Posted on Jun 17 2011 03:03 Terrible mish-mash of old US teen dramas with supposedly sharp and witty dialogue which is neither sharp nor witty, just real old fashioned. And this tripe receives 4 stars!? The director should have written an actual end to his story rather than the stoopid I've run out of ideas so i'll pull a bs abrupt end, because I'm cool. I've news for Araki, your time as a cutting edge original indie director is well and truely over.

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Jools said...

Posted on Jun 16 2011 11:39 Funny, wild, dizzy. Loved it. So much sex, yet so completely unerotic and an entire cast of utterly unlikeable characters, apart from a smidgen of humanity from the leading man, but that could be my age. It didn't float this menopausal woman's boat. I enjoyed the anarchic romp though and it made me smile

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jun 11 2011 19:45 I apologise for doubting you, Mike. But it's gospel that I'd never seen anyone do a movie walkout till yesterday when a lad left after about an hour. I followed ten minutes later. The only film that I disliked as much as this was a Merchant Ivory flick with Nick Nolte called Jefferson in Paris. It may be that I'm too jaded (or just too old) to be held or aroused by the simulated sex. If you take that element of friskiness out, you’re left with what a Denis Wheatley film might look like if the adaptation was scripted by the less-able administrative staff employed by Bromley Council. I love films of all sorts and this was one of the very, very few which actually bored me. There is a happy ending to this story though because I went to Foyles with the time I saved and read some Wallace Stevens poems.

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Mike said...

Posted on Jun 11 2011 14:53 @Phil Ince: Tut, tut, Phil! Didn't you say something recently about the number of people who walk out on some of the films I've seen? I think you said something about no one ever leaving the films you see. But I'll certainly take your advice and miss this one. Thanks.

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Caleb said...

Posted on Jun 11 2011 12:32 Hopelessly vapid rehash of Araki ideas circa '96. Lazily filmed, lacking energy, a worthwhile story and treading stagnant water. Save your time and money rewatch his classic 'Nowhere' instead of its pointless remake.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jun 10 2011 21:35 Christ!, after only 70 minutes it seemed to have been on all day and I felt as if I was nearing the end of some uninspiring TV show box set. But it just showed no sign that it was ever going to stop and so I left; only the second time in my life I've left a cinema from boredom. I saw Archipelago 4 times; Enter the Void, 3; In the City of Sylvia, twice; this summer, I've seen and loved Thor, Mammuth, Heartbeats, Fire in Babylon, La Quattro Volte, Taxi zum klo, Source Code, A Screaming Man but only this film defeated me. Wouldn't be fair to score it because I didn't stay to the end but on the evidence of what I saw, I'd give it 1 star for the boys and that's it.

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Anthony Babajee said...

Posted on Jun 08 2011 14:21 I saw Kaboom at this year's London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. I loved it - so funny, silly and sexy! And what an explosive way to pop my LLGFF cherry!

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Jon M said...

Posted on Oct 28 2010 11:32 Watched it at the London Film Festival last night. Absolutely brilliant, a load of fun! has given me the urge to watch all of Araki's other films.

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