Kaboom didn't make me angry as bad films normally do but neither did it make me smile like a bizarre but good film should and Donnie Darko leads the way in that.
I think I'm just stunned by the ineffectual absurdity of it all. It starts out promisingly enough - albeit with a lot of gratuitous sex and nudity. Student Smith (Thomas Dekker) is bi-sexual, fancies his surf-dude room mate and has the same weird dream over and over. His best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is a lesbian who starts going out with a woman Smith has seen before but in his dream.
On the way home from a drug and sex-fuelled night out Smith stumbles upon another woman from his dream who is being chased by men in animal masks. He tries to help her but ends up witnessing her brutal murdered.
Up to this point it's a nice level of weirdness - is Smith delusional, still under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug-laced cookie he ate or is it real?
Kaboom is described as a mystery, comedy, thriller. It is funnier to laugh at rather than with, the 'mystery' has you rolling your eyes and the thriller element is short-lived. It's mildly titillating if that's your thing and there is plenty of eye-candy but that's about it. Either I missed something, and I'm not the only one to think that, or someone had an off day when they chose it for Sundance and several other film festivals. Donnie Darko it certainly ain't, regardless of what it says on the posters.
I'm giving it 40%, on IMDb it's got a surprising 6/10 it gets 58% from critics and 45% from cinema goers on Rotten Tomatoes
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