Gregg Araki, one of the creators of the self-styled New Queer Cinema, briefly turned away from his characteristic frivolous nihilism to enter the cinematic mainstream with Mysterious Skin (2004), a sensitive and moving study of two boys from a small midwest town whose lives are transformed by a seductive paedophile.
Araki is up to his old tricks but in lighter mood with Kaboom, an always intriguing, often very funny, apocalyptic tale of Smith, an 18-year-old gay freshman at a California university who becomes involved with a sinister millenarian sect while studying film and experimenting with sex and drugs. Smith's favourite movie is Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou, but he suspects that being a student of film is "like studying an animal that's on the verge of extinction".
This is a wild movie in a Lynch-lite mode. Haley Bennett as Smith's lesbian confidante and Juno Temple as his cool British girlfriend are both priceless, cracking wise like a pair of punk Dorothy Parkers.
