Kaboom

I had a late night last night at the Cultural Centre watching a movie called by the comic-book like title "Kaboom". Watching the first half of the film feels literally like reading a comic book on a teenager's fantasy on what college sex might be like: you got almost continuous on-screen sex in all kinds of style: homosexual, lesbian and heterosexual or bisexual. There is even a Nordic who practises how to bend his body so that he can suck his own dick! But as we move into the the second half of the movie, we discover that there is a secret link to all the guys and gals met by the first year college student Smith (Thomas Dekker) and hero of the movie, behind what we originally thought are apparently unconnected or isolated episodes of his sexual adventures, something rather more sinister.

The movie starts with an undeclared gay Smith having certain repetitive dreams about going through a tunnel at the end of which is a door marked 19 in which he meets various people, including two girls and a guy whom he later actually meet and also some people wearing animal masks. As the movie develops, we see Smith meeting his roommate, Thor,( Chris Zyllka) an athletic type having a great body and an apparently insatiable drive for sex with both genders and even for the pinnacle of self-help: practising to suck his own dick by supporting his own back with both hands with his elbows resting on the mattress and his head bending over forward and downward towards that instrument of sexual pleasure. We see him getting mixed up with with all kinds of partners and taking an interest even in Smith.

Then Smith begins to get acquainted with Lorelei (Roxanne Mesquida), a lesbian partner of his best friend from Grade 9, Stella (Haley Bennett) now majoring in art, someone who appeared to have some kind of supernormal powers which Stella would somehow feel from time to time and hears about and sometimes sees the open display of their physical attraction and affection for one another. Whilst trying to clean up the puke on his shoes thrown up by Lorelei in a ladies toilet during a college party, he got to know and immediately thereafter have sex with an easy going blonde called London (Juno Temple) and begins to get mysterious email messages from strangers wanting to meet him and soon starts to have great sex with a guy on a nearby nude beach in California. In the meantime, he continues to have weird nightmares and hallucinations about various people he would meet, including a weird character predicting doomsday and people wearing animal masks pursuing him and also a figure dressed a bit like a washed down version of Roman emperor and a redhead who is murdered (Nicole LaLiberte) . 

As the movie goes forward, we learn that there is cult which has chosen him as the successor of a secret cult called the "New Order". The cult involves his father, the Roman emperor of his dream, who, according to his mother, had died a long time ago in a traffic accident, Lolorei, Thor and black man with whom he had sex at the nude beach. In fact his father is still living as the head of the cult and London is his half sister by one of his father's lovers and the reason why London tracks him down is that she wants to know the truth about her own father and she knows that Smith is the "chosen one" to succeed to his father's empire. The film ends literally in a kind of computerised virtual comic world's "Kaboom".

Despite all the inherent incredibility of the story, the film moves along at a racy pace, is full of surprises, gags, in jokes, moments of spooky tension, mock college jargons, which I am sure fresh college kids may find familiar and appealing. The visuals are good. The screen is contantly filled with rich colors and images. The plot of the film, written and directed by the veteran film maker exploring sexual themes, Gregg Araki, must have been carefully thought out. What Smith dreamt about at the start and a little into film makes it prima facie likely that he might be hallucinating about the various bizarre events that he later encountered at the college campus but when his high school best friend Stella also started to have strange experiences, it began to get rather more spooky. The film is good Hollywood entertainment. In Smith's initial dream, once the door was opened, all we find is a red box! That in a sense is exactly what the film is, a box of colorful images. I would give it a 2B.