Nowhere Reviews

Director and enfant terrible-wannabe Gregg Araki winds up his "Teen Apocalypse" trilogy (which includes trash epics TOTALLY F***ED UP and THE DOOM GENERATION) with this loud, ridiculous mess, and not a moment too soon. Omnisexual Dark (James Duval), an 18-year-old high schooler, sleepwalks his way through a particularly bad day in which he and his friends have sex, shoot up, play kick the can, die and get abducted by aliens, in various combinations. Araki desperately wants to be the hip auteur of choice for some lost generation (though not his own -- he's considerably older then his teen wanderers, and it's beginning to show), but he's got some competition. Jon Moritsugu (TERMINAL USA) and Bruce LaBruce (HUSTLER WHITE) mine very similar territory, each guided by something Araki lacks: Unique personal vision. Araki is a pop-culture bulimic, binging on junk culture and puking up a sloppy, kandy-kolored spew in which '70s sitcom has-beens rub shoulders (and much, much more) with porn stars and never-were teen idols. Araki then tries to make the ephemeral jumble significant by crudely tossing in scenes of brutal violence -- the one in which a dream date with a real-life Baywatch hunk turns into a date rape is particularly disturbing and, worse, pointless -- punctuated by such inane, portentously cliched pronouncements as, "Our generation is going to witness the end of everything." Sure. Whatever.