Cinema 2011 #58: Kaboom

Her choice of costume as Aladdin's monkey Apu raised a few eyebrows  

The sexiest episode of Round the Twist ever. That’s exactly how Kaboom, Gregg Araki’s homage (or should that be homomage?) to the counter-culture classics of John Waters’ queer cinema, plays out. A shamelessly camp B-movie, where the lead character is a bisexual college student (Thomas Dekker) aiming to solve the trippy mystery of a missing redhead, Araki here ditches the credible chops earned off the back of his 2004 drama Mysterious Skin and tries to recapture his late-90s cult appeal with edgy dialogue and a series of wickedly rumpy-pumpy bumps in the night. It’s bright and pacey, with Haley Bennett’s sidekick Stella, with the best of the bitchy bons mots, the breakout star, but Kaboom seems almost to be trying so hard to be effortlessly cool and kitsch, that it gets trapped up in its own endless succession of nonchalant nooky. If a bit more attention had been paid to the plotting than the bonking, there would have been a lot more spark to this Kaboom.

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