Director: Gregg Araki
Stars: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Chris Zylka, Roxane Mesquida, Juno Temple, Kelly Lynch
Smith (Dekker) is a college student suffering from surreal, intense dreams close to his 19th birthday. He has a string of sexual adventures all the while becoming involved in a bizarre plot where people in animal masks are hunting him, and the reasons why may lie in his associations with London (Temple), his roommate Thor (Dylka) and others.
Gregg Araki direction another movie, Mysterious Skin, which I absolutely loved, although the subject matter makes it very difficult to watch. Kaboom is completely different as it’s billed as a comedy with a sci-fi edge to it.
At times it’s surreal and hazy with a vibrant color palette that gives the movie a dreamlike feel, almost as if it is set in the future, but as far as I can tell it’s set in the present. Most of the action takes place on the college campus, a place that’s described by one of the characters as an intermission between stages of life where all you have to worry about is sex. Smith classes himself with a fluid sexuality and shares intimacy with a range of people, while his best friend Stella (Bennett) becomes involved with a psychotic witch who gets too attached.
Yes, there’s a witch in this movie. And one of the things I liked is that the bizarre things are treated as completely natural by the characters. The fact that there’s a witch is accepted instantly by Smith as if its a real thing, and this just adds to the surreal nature to the film. Yet it’s also a film in which nothing much happens, and I wouldn’t say the dialog is anything spectacular, nor are the interpersonal dynamics anything new, but I found myself engaged throughout the film and was waiting for the sci-fi elements to emerge. When they did it was with very heavy exposition, but it was shared between two groups of characters and this helped to lessen the effects of the information dump.
But after this I was hoping that the mysterious threads would come to a satisfying resolution. Indeed, the story felt as though it was heading to a strong climax right up until the end when it completely fell apart and I was left wondering just what I had watched. I don’t know if the film ran out of money or the director just lost interest in the story, but it feels unresolved. I’ve been trying to decipher some deeper meaning or symbolism, and maybe I’m missing something but as far as I can tell there isn’t any, at least not anything that’s readily apparent.
Kaboom feels like it’s building to something but it ends with a whimper and although I was intrigued throughout the film it was because it hinted at a payoff. When that didn’t come I was left feeling underwhelmed and as a result I cannot recommend it. I loved the style and aesthetic but it doesn’t offer anything remarkable and with the ending it has it feels like a waste, which is a shame because for a long time while it didn’t seem special it felt different, and I’m disappointed that it ended the way it did. Also, even though it’s billed as a comedy it’s not a funny film. I don’t even know why it’s categorised as a comedy since everything is played straight, perhaps if the comedy was more overt then the ending may have worked better, but as it is it’s a film about a guy who has a string of sexual partners, and then some other stuff happens right towards the end.
Kaboom is kaput.