Ken Park (2002)

2002

Drama

IMDb Rating 5/10

Plot summary

In the opening scene, teenager Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck) is seen skateboarding across Visalia. He arrives at a skate park, where he casually sits in the middle of it, sets up a camcorder, and shoots himself in the head with a handgun. His death is used to set up the rest of the film, which follows the lives of four other teens he used to hang out with, shortly after the suicide.Shawn (James Bullard) is the most stable of the four main characters. He has an ongoing sexual relationship with his girlfriend (Zara Mcdowell)'s mother, Rhonda (Maeve Quinlan), throughout the story. He casually socializes with their family, who (including his girlfriend) are completely unaware of the situation and they never find out about him and Rhonda.Claude (Stephen Jasso) is a troubled teen who fends off physical and emotional abuse from his alcoholic father while trying to take care of his very pregnant mother, who never does anything to defend him (mostly because she is used to the abuse that Claude's father inflicts upon her and Claude). Claude's father detests him for being insufficiently manly, but after coming home drunk one night, he attempts to perform oral sex on him, causing Claude to run away from home.Peaches (Tiffany Limos) is a girl living alone with her extremely religious father (Julio Oscar Mechoso), who fixates on her as the embodiment of her deceased mother. When her father catches her and her boyfriend, Curtis, (Mike Apaletegui) on her bed about to have sex, he beats the boy and savagely disciplines her, including forcing her to participate in a quasi-incestuous wedding ritual with him.Tate (James Ransone) is an unstable and sadistic adolescent living with his grandparents, whom he resents and frequently verbally abuses. He is shown engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation during masturbation. He eventually murders his grandparents in their bed, in retaliation for his grandfather (Harrison Young) "cheating" at Scrabble and his grandmother (Patricia Place) for "invading his privacy"; the act arouses him sexually.The film cuts frequently between subplots, with no overlap of characters or events until the end. As Tate is being arrested, Shawn, Claude, and Peaches meet and have sex as a threesome. The ending finally reveals the motive behind Ken Park's suicide: he had impregnated his girlfriend (Loranne Maze), who responded to his suggestion of abortion by asking if he regretted his mother for not aborting him. Concluding that he did, he skates off to kill himself.