Smith’s everyday life in the dorms - hanging out with his arty, sarcastic best friend Stella, hooking up with a beautiful free spirit named London, lusting for his gorgeous but dim surfer roommate Thor - all gets turned upside-down after one fateful, terrifying night. Tripping on some hallucinogenic cookies he ate at a party, Smith is convinced he’s witnessed the gruesome murder of an enigmatic Red Haired Girl who has been haunting his dreams. What he discovers as he tries to find out the truth leads him deeper and deeper into a mystery that will forever change not only the course of his young life but the destiny of the entire world.
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Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
"Like many college comedies, Kaboom serves up plenty of sex and graphic language played for erotic thrills and laughs. Araki lets his absurdist imagination run wild, and "Kaboom" takes the time-honored gambit of gradually revealing that nothing is as it seems to delightfully cockamamie extremes."
04/02/2011
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Time Out
Ben Walters
"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 ..."
09/06/2011
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Total Film
Neil Smith
"At a mere 86 minutes, Kaboom is best regarded as a playful time-out. Just think of it as ‘Twin Peaks, 90210’."
31/05/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonanthan Romney
"Kaboom was allegedly made after John Waters suggested that he'd love to see "an old-style Gregg Araki movie" again. That's more or less what Kaboom is, a quasi-mainstream greatest hits package, an auto-pastiche in the form of a polysexual sci-fi indie rock comic strip."
12/06/2011
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The Observer
Philip French
"an always intriguing, often very funny, apocalyptic tale"
12/06/2011
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"Kaboom works best as a funny and erotic sex comedy with hip characters and great dialogue (“It’s a vagina — not a bowl of spaghetti,” a girl tells one young man eager to please). Araki also wants to make it a latter-day Twin Peaks epic, but it never has the mystery or magic to hook us into caring about what’s really going on. "
12/06/2011
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Variety
Leslie Felperin
"... revisits the nihilistic hedonism of Araki's mid-'90s films, but this time around with a welcome dose of stylistic restraint, drier wit and -- dare it be said of material featuring auto-fellatio and someone being stabbed in the head -- maturity. "
16/05/2011
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The Times
Wendy Ide
"If you dismantle Kaboom into its constituent elements, it soon becomes clear that the film is a Frankenstein’s monster of pop-cultural and anti-cultural influences. The lurid, exuberant bad taste of John Waters provides some genetic material, together with the defiant weirdness of David Lynch and the Technicolor high camp of Pedro Almodóvar."
10/06/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"David Lynch is clearly an influence: and yet somehow, with its creepy people in masks, its unsolved mysteries and the preponderance of vans, Kaboom also resembles nothing so much as an episode of Scooby Doo without the dog, and with an awful lot of penetrative sex. It has an insistent silliness, an inconsequential quality and a likable, playful humour. The movie canters cheerfully along, and you have to take some time to acclimatise to its deadpan, jokey quality."
09/06/2011
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The New York Times
A. O. Scott
"Kaboom is both crazily disjunctive and smooth, jumping from polymorphous sex comedy to murder mystery to paranoid apocalyptic science-fiction freakout, with nimble nonchalance and up-to-the-minute pop music cues ... But there is something forced and inauthentic about the way the film throws itself at its characters, a bunch of smart, randy, uninhibited kids who frolic like rabbits and talk like junior semioticians."
27/01/2011
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Empire Magazine
David Hughes
"With 2005's Mysterious Skin, indie gay cinema pioneer Gregg Araki hinted he might have the chops to follow Gus Van Sant into mainstream melodrama, while 2007’s Smiley Face showed he could easily do a David Gordon Green and make stoner comedies for studios. Kaboom, though, is a return to the erotically charged delirium of his earlier “queer John Hughes” movies ... Slight but fun."
11/06/2011
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"Two very different films have been mashed up in Kaboom: one a feckless campus sex comedy; the other an attempt to recapture the atmosphere of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, all woozy paranoia and half-glimpsed occult horrors that turn out to be even worse than imagined. But all the time the real suspense is about sexuality: gays having straight sex, straights going gay."
10/06/2011
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"With its errant structure and bottom-dollar special effects (animal masks that make Donnie Darko seem like Star Wars) it could have been made on World AmCam Day. “The people are beautiful,” Andy Warhol would say. Yes they are, but the story is a naff tale of sci-fi events impacting on a sexually AC/DC college"
08/06/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
"It’s hard not to warm to Araki for his fervid commitment to tracking the passions and habits of this twentysomething not-quite demi-monde ... But watching films whose characters spend much of their time staring at computer screens or waking up from dreams is a bit of a drag. Kaboom, more often that not, comes on like a DayGlo, hyper-sexualised Twilight."
09/06/2011
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The New Yorker
Bruce Diones
"The film is so disjointed and chaotic that the usual pleasures of Araki’s films—which arise from the freedom that his lost boys enjoy—never take hold."
11/06/2011
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