Kaboom

Written & Directed by: Gregg Araki
Full credits at IMDb

Kaboom plays like a kitschy, queer-eyed spoof of Donnie Darko, so much so that, following the lead of Friedberg-Seltzer, you could call it Richard Kelly Movie. By day, Araki's flick is campy and brightly colored, like a college-campus comedy; by night, it adopts the steely pallor of a Platinum Dunes slasher. The mix is, uh, awkward--like a surreal and flamboyant neo-noir, written by Bret Easton Ellis and aired on the CW; it's part Buffy and part Brick; part Twin Peaks and part 90210.

Am I making it sound better than it is? Set among carping homos, lusty undergrads and powerful drugs, Kaboom stars Thomas Dekker, channeling Wes Bentley through an emo filter, as a freshman with a hard-on for his straight Scandinava-hunk roommate (Chris Zylka) and a FWB fucklationship with Haley Bennett. (As for his major, he's "undeclared"--get it?) But a few weird dreams and hallucinogenic drugs later, he's witnessing homicide by assailants in animal masks. Voo doo dolls are involved, as are threeways, a bona fide witch (doubling as a lesbo psychostalker), and an epic conspiracy to facilitate an encroaching apocalypse. It builds to an awesome FTW ending, literally and not. But the 80 preceding minutes of loud and literal melodrama are a real turn off. Grade: C-


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