Critics reviews

The tone and production values suggest a mixture of daytime soap, gay porn and Twilight slash-fiction, but the film’s greatest asset, as ever with Araki, is sincerity.

This is a wild movie in a Lynch-lite mode. Haley Bennett as Smith's lesbian confidante and Juno Temple as his cool British girlfriend are both priceless, cracking wise like a pair of punk Dorothy Parkers.

Araki excels at a sardonic kind of cool and writes some scabrously funny dialogue, but his grasp of narrative is woeful – the story here proceeds as though it's literally being made up, moment by moment.

It's a quirky, freaky comedy, designed to be shown at cult "midnight movie" slots. Araki has a light touch; not all directors have.

Araki uses smart photography and location work to build a darkly dreamlike sense of uncanny peril. If there’s an undercurrent of impending cataclysm in today’s culture, ‘Kaboom’ senses that feeling, seizes it in a surreal clinch and hurtles with it off a cliff.

Kaboom, though, is a return to the erotically charged delirium of his earlier “queer John Hughes” movies; inspired by a conversation with John Waters, it’s a light but fun teen comedy...

Rendered in bright primary colors and stuffed with music from a dozen contemporary alt-rock and electro-pop bands, “Kaboom” is far from dour. In fact, much of the movie is good (if highly specialized) fun.

"Kaboom” is as indulgent as a film school exercise. I thought Gregg Araki had outgrown messing about like this. His "Mysterious Skin” (2004) was lovingly controlled and mysteriously spellbinding. Now he engages his shallow and narcissistic characters on their level, not his.

Like many college comedies, “Kaboom” serves up plenty of sex and graphic language played for erotic thrills and laughs. Araki lets his absurdist imagination run wild, and “Kaboom” takes the time-honored gambit of gradually revealing that nothing is as it seems to delightfully cockamamie extremes

Any effort to dig out some vague sense of millennial dread in Kaboom would be thematic dumpster-diving at best. The creation of genuine anxiety requires some tangible link to the outside world, but Araki seems content to cocoon himself in an echo chamber of zanily inconsequential shenanigans that both highlight and declaw his indie-edge.

The new queer Cinema would be way less fun without Gregg Araki. This tale of polysexual college life threatened by cults and world annihilation falls into the category of old-school Araki (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation) rather than the maturity of Mysterious Skin. Kaboom is an erotic blast of sinful flesh, fun and fantasy that you don’t want to stop.

Kaboom might be borderline camp, but there’s no spillover. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps Araki’s vision of human sexuality is so fluid that the borders are always expanding.