The Doom Generation (1995)

They haven't a thought in their heads, but the rootless teens who idle through road-movie territory in The Doom Generation always have an elaborately obscene remark at the ready. ''You are so full of sheep excrement,'' sneers Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), a bored club kid whose black bob you've seen in Something Wild and Pulp Fiction, among other places. ''Don't get yer uterus all tied in a knot,'' sneers back Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), an insolent drifter who beds Amy but saves his keenest come-hither glances for her sweet, dim boyfriend, Jordan White (James Duval).

By the time these three get around to sharing a mattress — they're energized by the trail of dead clerks and cashiers they leave in their vacuous wake — it's clear there's actually one person talking, and that's openly gay writer-director-editor Gregg Araki. It's his little joke to subtitle Doom ''A Heterosexual Movie,'' then pour on the homoerotic subtexts. In the process, he makes Amy such a sullen slattern she gives heterosexuality a bad name. And what are we to make of the queer-bashing neo-Nazis who perform a repulsive, strobe-lit castration finale? Is this an anti-straight diatribe? A gay vision of holocaust? For those who haven't walked out before the closing credits, good luck searching for meaning — you'll find mostly blood and epithets. D

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