I’ve heard a lot of people say that they loved Detention, and it’s even gotten a few ballots in the Horror Society Awards. While browsing On Demand tonight I saw it and bought it. Let me just ask, for those of you who enjoyed it… What the fuck were you watching?!
Detention is a horror comedy written and directed by Joseph Kahn with Mark Palermo. It boasts a fantastic cast including Shanley Caswell (Snow White: Deadly Summer), Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games), Parker Bagley (“Pretty Little Liars”), Spencer Locke (Resident Evil: Extinction), Jonathan Park, and comedian Dane Cook. In Detention, “A killer named Cinderhella stalks the student body at the high school in Grizzly Lake and a group of co-eds band together to survive while they’re all serving detention.”
Ok, let me be blunt. That synopsis is absolute bullshit. Detention has no plot. It’s pretty much a worse version of a Scary Movie with half the humor. Nothing makes any sense and the Cinderhella murders are just a teeny tiny subplot that makes up maybe fifteen minutes of the entire film. Let me give you just a little dose of the absolute visual diarrhea that you will see in Detention. At one point, a bear on an alien planet is abducted by a UFO and taken to Earth so that it can become a time machine. No, I am not stoned. This really happened in the movie.
Another downfall – G0d, there were so many – is the fact that Detention tried to cram so many movie references and pop culture pieces into the plot that it almost came up as trying to be a “hipster” movie. I hate “hipsters” and I feel that this is the trite movie material they would watch and call it outstanding. For a horror movie, there were more 80s and 90s pop culture references than actual homages to, ya know, horror films. A poorly written horror comedy with no horror and no comedy, packed with “hipster” pop culture references and no plot. IMDB says Detention has an estimated budget of $10,000,000. Seriously?! Good to know that I can write absolute garbage and major distribution company will pick it up.
Let me end this review simply. And this is just my opinion. But avoid! Avoid!! Avoid!!! Detention is thee worst horror film I’ve seen from 2012.
