I'd Rather be in Real Detention

This past Friday night I had the opportunity to go with a friend of mine to see a movie called Detention. The movie had little to know publicity and the only reason I knew about it was because Josh Hutcherson was one of the actors in it. I happened to see a trailer of it on YouTube and it looked...interesting enough, so I  decided to give it a chance.

According to IMDB the plot of Detention is

As a killer named Cinderhella stalks the student body at the high school in Grizzly Lake, a group of co-eds band together to survive while they're all serving detention.

And if this were the case, I'd probably have enjoyed the film a bit more than I did. It starts off as a horror film, but then from there it just becomes completely random, so much that  I'm not sure the writer's knew where they were going with this movie. It's like they were attempting to make a parody of every teen film that's ever come out, while throwing in some random science fiction, time travel, and horror. Yes, all of that in one film. Because of this I'm not exactly sure what genre this movie falls under, perhaps I should just invent the WTF genre.

The deal with parodies are that they are supposed to make you laugh, even if it's just stupid comedy, such as Scary Movie/Not Another Teen Movie/etc...franchise, or even ones like the Scream movies that are actual slasher films, but still poke fun at the genre. With Detention though, the jokes never really landed, at least not with me. If anything it was like someone found a 14 year old's Tumblr or Facebook page and started going through their posts and comments. Every other line was about how 'awesome' the 90s was or some reference to the entertainment during the decade. This reminded me of seeing posts from the Tumblr of someone born between 1997 and 1999, claiming to be a 90s kid. (No, you were barely a live in the decade, you might have been born in the 90s, but you're not a 90s kid.) If this had only been here and there it would have been fine, but like I said it was just about every other line. There was also an obsession with Patrick Swayze by Josh Hutcherson's character, Clapton Davis.

Detention stars Josh Hutcherson and Dane Cook

Josh's character actually had one of the only jokes that made me laugh a little. It had to do with his looking to Swayze and Roadhouse for help in fighting another character. One of the things he writes down is a red shirt. Later on there's a scene at a party where the other guy is wanting to fight, and Clapton doesn't want to. However he looks down and low and behold he's wearing a red shirt, this moment gets a quiet "Damn red shirt" from Clapton, talking to himself.

Another came when they are put in detention, which for a movie called Detention only about 10 minutes are spent in detention. They are going around saying why the others couldn't have been the killer at the party, when they get to this one guy, who happens to be black. They tell him to just fess up because none of them really know him. He responds with "I'm not a killer, I'm just boring." The character was really only in this scene and barely had any lines, but he was my favorite in the entire movie.

Is the movie the greatest thing ever made? Obviously not. Is going to see it better than sitting home alone on a Friday night? Maybe

In all I'd give this movie a 2 out of 5 stars