Cannes 2010: 'Kaboom'

Some may react violently against Gregg Araki's (Mysterious Skin) latest film, but even in its worst moments it's a brilliant kind of bad. The tale spins around bisexual college student Smith (Thomas Dekker) as he gets it on with several boys and girls (both in his mind and in reality), witnesses the murder of a red-headed girl, is attacked by men in animal masks and finds himself drawn into a sinister underground cult that could cause the end of the world. A sentence hardly does justice to Kaboom's insanity, mind - it has to be seen to be believed.

A bonkers mash-up of style and genre, it's an audacious supernatural-sci-fi that appears to blast the entire contents of Araki's brain up onto the screen with the force of an atomic bomb. This is a messy clusterf**k of excessive surrealism, low production values and characters speaking in that mannered way that only exists in the movies. In spite of that, it's deliriously silly and a brisk 86 minutes of pure fun. Put Buffy, Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko in a blender and you're on the way to Kaboom.

The cast prove to be pretty fearless - shedding clothes and inhibitions without hesitation - and Dekker, Haley Bennett (as the snarky Stella), Juno Temple (party-loving London) and Chris Zylka (sex-obsessed Thor) all seem perfectly in sync with Araki's whacked-up vision. Kaboom's student setting, dizzy excess and easy-on-the-eye stars are likely to make it a four-in-the-morning-and-drunk-with-your-campus-pals favourite. One character describes the apocalyptic events unfolding as "nuttier than squirrel s**t". They're not far wrong. File this one under soon-to-be cult classic.



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