Gregg Araki
Doom Generation

THE REVIEW

If you want to spend an hour and a half laughing, maybe in the company of trusted friends, then watch this masterpiece of a mess, a generational pastiche deliberately excessive and unpleasant, but also fun because of how madness is shamelessly and unapologetically displayed. There's nothing like nonsense such as Scary Movie; Araki truly lays bare for everyone the emptiness of a generation doomed by mindless TV shows, AIDS, video game arcades, unemployment, and the loss of values. There's really no future anymore. With irreverent humor, Araki dishes out a mix of Tarantino, ultra-splatter effects, the David Lynch of Wild at Heart, erotic sequences on the verge of porn, and a pounding soundtrack in Lollapalooza generation style. Among the standout scenes is the killing of the Japanese clerk with his head ending up inside the ketchup container, still talking as he drowns in it, and the final sequence teetering on the edge of the bloodiest pulp, in a murderous clash between gays and Nazis in a suburban, hallucinatory Los Angeles, with psychedelic reflections: populated by "monsters" produced by a Z-series televised and cinematic imagination, aesthetically akin to Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," between MTV-style op art and vandalous flows of pop color. It's this encounter with a wild spectacle that is only seemingly detached and distant from the reality of those neglected and alienated youth raised in front of the flickers of the cathode-ray tube and MTV videos.

A necessary film to understand what the 90s were, and what would happen in the future. In 1990, David Lynch had managed to stir the critical swamp with a film "Wild at Heart," which was the Bonnie and Clyde of Arthur Penn in a pulp key. It won at Cannes thanks to the jury heads, including Bertolucci, who realized the futuristic potential of the film, and then we know how it went. Even today, these pulp-oriented films come out, three a week, and 70% of them are pure crap that, however, sells, like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.