A film by Gregg Araki
USA 1997, 82 min
On the day the end of the world is prophesied, a group of insatiably horny, disillusioned, drugged-up teenagers in Los Angeles see their lives explode in a glitter bomb of drugs, sex, death and alien abduction. Bisexual lust, pot-smoking valley girls, sinister televangelists, nipple-ring SM, murder with a Campbell’s soup can – Araki weaves all this into an anarchic orgy that brings his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy to an explosively biting conclusion. With a 90s all-star cast from Christina Applegate to Ryan Phillippe and Heather Graham to Shannen Doherty.
Director, screenplay & editor: Gregg Araki – Director of photography: Arturo Smith – With songs by: Radiohead, Hole, Massive Attack, The Chemical Brothers, Sonic Youth, Blur, Portishead and others – With James Duval, Rachel True, Chiara Mastroianni, Debi Mazar, Christina Applegate, Ryan Phillippe, Heather Graham, Scott Caan, Mena Suvari, Denise Richards, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan and others. – German distribution: Camera Obscura Filmdistribution, cameraobscurafilms.de
Gregg Araki
Gregg Araki was born in Los Angeles in 1959 to Japanese-American parents. In the early 1980s, Araki enrolled at USC Film School, where his student projects were inspired by new wave music, DIY underground art culture, and filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters. Since his cinematic breakthrough with The Living End at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, Araki has been at the forefront of the New Queer Cinema movement alongside Isaac Julien and Todd Haynes. Araki’s three subsequent feature films, which form his highly influential Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, inspired an entire generation of outcasts and queer people to accept themselves and give the middle finger to anyone who dared to judge them.
