Apocalypse now, with randy teenagers

In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, horny college students experiment sexually, lust hangs in the air, evil witches and secret cults wreak havoc, and the end of the world looms. So what else is new? With Kaboom, Araki takes a huge step backward from the maturity and restraint he demonstrated in 2004’s Mysterious Skin, his best and most-assured film to date (and, tellingly, his only adaptation of someone else’s material). His new movie marks a self-conscious return to the freewheeling, sexually explicit turf he previously explored in his defiant “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy of Totally F****d Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.

This story was originally published March 23, 2011 at 5:03 AM.