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Rating: 2.5 stars

All movies seen on 08/20/2007

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The Doom Generation (1995)

Directed by Gregg Araki

Drama

Most recently watched by noahphex

Overview

Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embarks on a sex- and violence-filled journey through a United States of psychos and quickie marts.

Rated R | Length 83 minutes

Actors

Rose McGowan | James Duval | Johnathon Schaech | Cress Williams | Dustin Nguyen | Margaret Cho | Lauren Tewes | Christopher Knight | Nicky Katt | Johanna Went | Perry Farrell | Amanda Bearse | Parker Posey | Salvator Xuereb | Heidi Fleiss | Don Galloway | Dewey Weber | Zak Spears | Rex Chandler

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

This review originally appeared as a DVD review on PopSyndicate.com in August 2007.

Look deeper. Much deeper. With a shovel.

It’s a dark night in Tarzana and teenage bags of wasted genetics Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) pick up Xavier Red (Jonathan Shaech), a psychotic bisexual drifter who involves himself in their lives after they pick him up and he subsequently blows the head off of a convenience store clerk. Forced on the run, they expound on their life and encounter increasing levels of hedonistic sexuality, mistaken identity, and extreme violence.

If you can’t tell by the characters’ last names in The Doom Generation, director Gregg Araki is fascinated by color. Red, white, and blue are painted across the film in large swathes, with red dominating, but they’re often juxtaposed from their normal meaning: orange and white for passion and violence instead of red, red for boredom instead of white, and shades of blue for much of everything else. Visually-speaking, Araki seems determined to impress some heavy meaning into the film with his daubs of pigment, extreme close-ups and lighting so dim that night goggles are called for, but most of it’s lost in a script that reads like a better version of something I wrote when I was fifteen.

That’s not to say the film is without merit aside from a naked Rose McGowan. I actually kinda sorta liked the film and would have liked it better if Araki hadn’t been punching me in the face with ““meaning.”” Shaech’s performance as Red is almost scary, while Duval is passable and McGowan is as stiff and dry as usual. The best performances come from the ancillary characters that are out to get the three; keep an eye out for Parker Posey with a samurai sword and Nicky Katt with a grill. And, while the script is juvenile, it’s injected with memorable lines and at times a deft exploration of a black heart; the darker side of your personality will revel in the murk. It’s like a better version of Natural Born Killers, but that’s not saying much.

Special features? There are none to speak of in this re-release.

The ultra-violence and endless profanity in The Doom Generation end up distracting from the film and render any message almost meaningless. On the contrary, maybe that’s Gregg Araki’s joke: that violence has become so meaningless in our society that we don’t notice it except when animals are killed. Or, maybe Araki just wasn’t very grown-up at the time. Were a joke implied, it quickly becomes a twisted, macabre, film version of Jewel Kilcher’s ironic 0304 album: ironically all ironic meaning is lost except to those willing to look deeper. Much deeper. With a shovel.

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