When gender divides are very blurry

GREGG Araki's Kaboom is perhaps best categorised as a black-comic macabre sex-farce mystery with supernatural science-fiction elements.

Kaboom

KABOOM, written and directed by Gregg Araki, is perhaps best categorised as a black-comic macabre sex-farce mystery with supernatural science-fiction elements, admittedly not a large category, even for US indie filmmakers with low budgets and high ambitions.

The lines most frequently heard are "What's going on?" and "Will someone please tell me what the f. . k is happening?" Good questions. For much of the time, what's happening in Kaboom is sex - boy-girl, girl-girl, boy-boy, boy-girl-boy, girl-boy-girl (I can't vouch for the details). Among other things, according to the publicity, Kaboom explores the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender scene, presumably as practised in American colleges of higher education.

Smith (Thomas Dekker) is plagued by nightmares. There's many a shot of him waking up with a start and staring blankly at the camera. One night, helped along by hallucinogenic cookies eaten at a party, he imagines he has witnessed the gruesome murder of a red-haired girl. In waking life Smith learns someone has stolen the victim's torso, which may be hidden in a mysterious red chest he's seen in his dreams. The suspects are three people wearing animal masks. We can rule out Smith's best pal Stella (Haley Bennett) and gay surfer roommate Thor (Chris Zylka), he with the blond looks and oiled torso, who spends time in the dorm doing flexibility exercises. But keep an eye on Lorelei (Roxane Mesquida), a witch with red eyes, lusty appetites and the power to assume different body shapes.

Kaboom is so flamboyantly ridiculous that I couldn't help liking it. It's not quite bad enough to be funny, but it's more than silly enough to be watchable. And when nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake, the least we can do is pay attention. Akari made what he calls his "teen apocalyptic trilogy" - Totally F..ked Up, Doom Generation and Nowhere - in the 90s and followed it with Mysterious Skin, a 2004 film about pedophilia. Smiley Face (2007) gave us the pot-fuelled misadventures of another guy who eats spiked cookies. Nothing in an Akari film would surprise me. Kaboom has a likable cast and some smart camerawork. And since Smith is majoring in cinema studies, it includes a clip from Bunuel's Le Chien Andalou. So we're in serious art-house territory. Smith's friends seem to be majoring in sex studies. There's mention of the Kinsey scale, a measure of sexual performance from one to six. The cast of Kaboom should graduate with ease. On my Kinsey scale, I give them three stars for effort.

Kaboom (MA15+)
3 stars
Selected cinemas nationally