Features > Movie Reviews > Kaboom…

Kaboom is a cheeky micro-budget dorm room black comedy sprinkled with surreal supernatural elements, paranoia, and buckets of sex.

If you’re an Araki virgin, this may not be the best place to start but it will certainly give you the full flavour of what he’s about.

Thomas Dekker (who plays John Connor in the Terminator TV series) is Smith, a cinema student at an unnamed California university. He’s officially sexually undeclared, but that doesn’t stop him from lusting after his hunky roommate, the splendidly named Thor (Chris Zylka).

Mind you, he’s also happy to share his bed with the sexually precocious London (Juno Temple – in her element), who has decided that straight guys are gayer than gay guys (and not in a good way). Meanwhile some semblance of  a plot hoves into view when Smith’s best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) sleeps with a witch, Lorelei (Catherine Breillat discovery Roxane Mesquida), who popped up earlier in Smith’s troubled dreams.

What on earth is going on? That is the question. Araki has a theory or two, but mostly leaves them hovering out of focus in the background while he focuses on his sexy young stars wearing very little in various permutations.

If you enjoy sex as much as Araki seems to, then you’ll likely get off on Kaboom, which is punch drunk on possibility and never mind the hangover.

Admittedly, it’s pretty raw. Araki is a visual stylist, but he’s also working on the margins, and the film’s bright, poppy look doesn’t entirely camouflage a production budget that might have been more appropriate for a daytime campus soap opera.

You will also have to swallow a wacky David Lynch-ville conspiracy scenario, and the kind of inverted comma “movie talk” that’s a degree or three cooler than real life. (“You meet some guy on a nude beach and after five minutes you’re downloading his hard drive in the back of a van?”).

Apparently it was the pope of bad taste himself, John Waters, who encouraged Araki to go back to the kind of provocative black comedy he made in his 20s and 30s (he’s in his 50s now). I have to admit I prefer the more mature style he came up with for 2004’s Mysterious Skin, but this return to the ironic punk idiom is a lot of fun. In a strange way, it’s also mellower than The Doom Generation (not hard, admittedly) or The Living End.

It unravels towards the end, no question – but I think it would be a mistake to take this movie too seriously. After all, Araki throws in spiked cookies (an echo from his own stoner comedy Smiley Face) and a clip of Bunuel’s surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou, sure signs that the normal rules have been suspended. Just lie back and think of England…