Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

‘… I won’t harm you, or touch your defenses, vanity… insecurity…’ That my friends is a line from the group Simple Minds and their song ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. That song is from a movie way back in my high school days that called itself ‘The Breakfast Club’. A film about various delinquents representing different high school social strata and getting to know each other during detention while trying to deal with an asshole detention monitor. Imagine those same kids in detention, but instead of an asshole detention monitor these kids are dealing with a vengeful spirit with a taste for blood! Just imagine… because these kids will be harmed and their defenses will be violated.

Back in ’76 some krazy high school kids thought it would be funny to put this geek inside a furnace. HAR HAR HAR!!!! This was the geeks punishment for talking to the chief assholes girlfriend. They thought this furnace was out of order. The mystical electrical storm proved otherwise and the poor kid met a horrific fiery end.

Some thirty plus years later this school is lorded over by principle Hoskins as played by David Carradine who continues his role of the Tupac Shakur of movies considering this is like the fifth movie I’ve seen from Mr. Carradine since he died two years ago. Hoskins is here to greet the new History teacher Mrs. Cipher (Alexa Jago) who seems very interested in the newspaper article in the school’s trophy cabinet about the death of that kid some thirty years ago. Hoskins advises Mrs. Cipher not to worry about this as the good people of this town do not like to be reminded of bad things, which would normally force us to ask why the newspaper article of this bad thing is displayed prominently in the trophy case… but we’re not going to ask about this because that would be silly.

Anyway it’s detention time. I’m not quite sure of the actor’s names that play these kids but they are the usual suspects in a movie like this. There’s Hero Boy who digs Final Girl, there’s Hero Boy’s best friend Drugged out Boy, there’s Rich Bitch who is dating

Geek Boy, and rounding things out we have Goth Girl and The Obnoxious Negro. There is no Jock Boy in this movie for whatever reason, but then ‘The Breakfast Club’, like most John Hughes movies, had no Black people in it so I guess that’s the trade off.

It’s not long before the weird stuff starts happening. First, Coach the Detention Monitor, goes missing but not before he locked these kids in the classroom. Then the kids start seeing apparitions in the middle of the detention floor which obviously freaks them all out. Eventually they break out of the room and separate which makes it easier for our angry ghost to start picking them off. Worst still in that our angry ghost has possessed Geek Boy and Mrs. Cipher. This is like some Super Ghost type stuff possessing two people at the same time.

One by one our kids get taken out, be it by ghostly apparition or by possessed geek or by their own hands and there is no solution is sight. Why is he killing these kids in particular? I don’t know if this is a spoiler or not, but it has something to do with their parents back in ’76 which we kind of figured out right off the bat. You see back in ’76 when the prank went wrong we saw six white kids and one lone Obnoxious Negro. Knowing a little bit about genetics the Obnoxious Negro trait is very rare, usually only possessed by Black characters in horror movies, and it is a recessive gene passed down generationally thus the Obnoxious Negro in 2010, whose vocabulary consisted mainly of the word ‘bitch’ had to be a direct descendent of the ’76 Obnoxious Negro whose vocabulary mainly consisted of, oddly enough, the word ‘bitch’. That’s called deduction right there. But if that was a spoiler, don’t you worry because we have another twisty effect for you that you will not see coming.

As a horror movie or a suspense thriller we have to say that ‘Detention’ was not very effective since I can’t recall be scared during this film a single time, despite all the slamming doors and ghostly smoke effects. ‘The Breakfast Club’ was scarier by comparison, but as a comedy, unintended or otherwise, ‘Detention’ was killing me. The special FX were some of the worst I’ve seen in a movie, kind of on the level that ‘Lawnmower Man’ movie from twenty years ago which added to the comedy, but most of the comedy came from the stock characters cast in this thing. It helped that the majority of the ancient high school kids cast in this movie could actually act which had me thinking that they were actually in on the joke, but by the time Geek Boy went ape shit, the comedy was on in full force. We would be remiss not telling you about the love game that Obnoxious Negro was playing with Rich Bitch which had them running through the auditorium slapping each other upside the head with sharpened scabbards… dumbest love game ever… but it was damned funny. Particularly when you consider this high school has razor sharp swords lying around as props for their school plays. Most irresponsible high school ever.

It stopped being funny about the time they turned the movie over to Hero Boy and Final Girl because then it became a run of the mill run and hide slasher flick and it wasn’t all that good at that, but by the time we get to the twist, it got funny again. This is A MAJOR SPOILER but Mrs. Cipher is the burnt up kids dead mom, if I read that right, and now she’s a ghost. My question is how in the hell did she get a W-2 to apply for that vacant history teacher gig? I gotta know!

True enough ‘Detention’ is a bad movie movie on almost every level but it did make me happy after I saw it and that’s gotta be worth something.