Considering that he’s been directing movies for nearly two decades, you’d think Gregg Araki would have learned how to make one by now. But Kaboom is less a movie than a masturbatory doodle, a sloppy, shoddy regurgitation of Araki’s pet trope that tries to pass off its slipshod structure as a free-wheeling lark.
As always, there’s plenty of young, nubile flesh on display, belonging this time around to Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Juno Temple and Roxane Mesquida, enmeshed in a fitful plot involving the possible presence of a murderous cult of men in animal masks on a college campus. (It’s possible Mesquida’s clingy lesbian may be a voodoo priestess, as well — don’t ask.)
The fact that the characters spout snappy, profane dialogue while all this is, or isn’t, going on around them is more “fun” than fun; Araki’s like the too-drunk guy who won’t go home when the party’s over.
