The first installment of Araki's Teenage Apocalypse film trilogy, it is considered a seminal entry in the New Queer Cinema genre.

The film chronicles the dysfunctional lives of six gay adolescents who have formed a family unit and struggle to get along with each other and with life in the face of various major obstacles.

Araki classified it as "a rag-tag story of the fag-and-dyke teen underground....a kinda cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick."

The technique became popular throughout the 1990s, evident also in such later films as Reality Bites (1994), American Beauty (1999) and The Blair Witch Project (1999).

In 2024, The Criterion Collection announced that it would release the film as part of its Gregg Araki's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy set.