Dante’s Weekend Double: ‘The Doom Generation’ & ‘Kids’ In Week Two Of “July’s Youth In Revolt”
This week’s double shot of adolescence run amok is a bitter batch from our old friends in the nihilistic nineties. So…let’s put on the extra baggy JNCO jeans and our favorite rave hat. Because things are about to get hella cray, home skillet.
The Doom Generation (UGC/The Teen Angst Movie Company)
Director Gregg Araki takes us on a darkly romantic road trip in the second entry of his “Teenage Apocalypse” trilogy from 1995.
It’s about a toxic teen couple, Amy and Jordan (Rose McGowan, and James Duval), who pick up a highly sexual drifter named Xavier (Johnathon Schaech) before embarking through the wretched wastelands of Los Angeles on an odyssey of blood, fornication, death, and convenience stores.
From the moment Xavier (nicknamed “X”) enters the life of the young couple, bad karma follows. It starts with a badly written, acted, and filmed convenience store scene that quickly turns into a robbery/murder.
It is one, however, that involves a talking severed head which is an obvious nod to a certain over-the-top ghost of B-flicks past.
The threesome [Phrasing!] goes from one disaster to the next on their LA cruise with Amy being the inadvertent catalyst. She is mistaken as a former lover by someone at every stop they make, and violence quickly follows…along with $6.66 being spent at each stop.
There are several words to describe this movie. “Distanced” is a good one, “Disaffected” is another, and so is “Deadpan,” but the best has to be “Deranged.” It’s almost like Lloyd Kaufman and John Waters had a baby that they dressed in a big flannel shirt with a nose ring, and gave it a pack of cigarettes.
Edgy, weird, and hip – The Doom Generation follows the tradition of other crazy 90s road-mance romps such as Natural Born Killers and Kalifornia, but only edgier, and not as good as either of those two movies.
This was McGowan’s first leading role as a hot 90s girl who thinks it’s cool to complain about everything, and she would go on to play that exact same character several more times throughout her career.
There may be some out there who feel a twitch of shame for looking past her one-dimensional acting and paying more attention to her very pleasing aesthetic, but do not dwell – me too, friend, “MeToo”…
The Doom Generation is available on Prime.
Kids (Independent Pictures/The Guys Upstairs/Killer Films/Shining Excalibur Films/Kids NY Limited)
The ending of that last movie is never easy to watch. Right, guys? Well, don’t worry. Not only is this next feature from the same year, but the ending is even more disturbing. Right, ladies?
From controversial director, Larry Clark (Another Day in Paradise, last week’s aforementioned Bully, and the completely effed up Ken Park) comes his notorious debut film, Kids. It follows a group of teenagers in New York City through a single day, and night, of their bleak lives.
They wander Manhattan on their skateboards, smoke blunts in Washington Square Park, chatter about sexual conquests, beat the living crap out of other kids in broad friggin’ daylight, drink, party, talk together in a drunken stupor, pass out, and repeat the next day.
The central character is a lanky young scrub named Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) who talks like he has a mouth full of cotton swabs and looks like he’s not on speaking terms with a shower.
Telly likes to go around pressuring young virgins into sex, and then brag about it to his friend Casper who himself likes to shoplift bottles of malt liquor from convenience stores. Little does Telly know that he’s HIV positive.
One of his previous “accomplishments,” Jennie (a role crushed by Chloë Sevigny), gets the worst results possible from an STD test, and she tries to find Telly before he can infect others. This plot thread casts a shadow over the film from the beginning all the way to its jarring end. It’s an uncomfortable watch for any age, but even more for adults.
In fact…if a viewer finds that they’re making “Mr. Chippy” jokes towards themselves while continuing to watch the graphic depictions, don’t worry. That just means they’re normal. Keep a lookout for a young Rosario Dawson in her first role (just don’t stare too long, creep).
Some have called this film a documentary about societal disintegration, and the self-absorbed detachment of late 20th century urban adolescence. Others see it as a chilling reminder to do their jobs as parents, and not depend on corroding systems to do it for them, but that’s another subject for another article.
This intense, but incredible landmark of independent cinema can be found on Prime.
NEXT: Dante’s Weekend Double: “July’s Youth In Revolt” Kicks Off With ‘Eden Lake’ And ‘The Toxic Avenger’
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