A handful of high-school students struggle to make it through senior year without dying with this manic satire of teen-themed slasher films and youth comedies. Riley (Shanley Caswell) is often a clever but cynical social outcast at Grizzly Lake Senior high school, and shes the unrequited appreciate object of Sander (Aaron Mark Johnson), who is even less popular and much more sexually frustrated than she actually is. Meanwhile, ironically named hipster Clapton (Josh Hutcherson) is actually head over heels intended for Ione (Spencer Locke), a beautiful but self-obsessed cheerleader. All four are hanging around out their final year of school, but its anyones suppose if theyll see university, as a serial killer called CinderHella is on your loose and preying with Grizzly Lakes student body. The principal (Dane Cook) is definite CinderHella is an unimpressed student and figures hell keep the prom from growing to be a bloodbath by positioning the likely suspects in all-day detention for the day of the big dance, but obviously that will not go as he prepared. Meanwhile, various students struggle along with shape-shifting, contract flesh-eating diseases, discover time travel, and fall victim into a gang making porn video clips on school grounds.
Joseph Kahns Detention moves at an absurd velocity and dares anyone above 25 to maintain. Despite box-office obstacles like a rating that technically prohibits much of its target demo by seeing it, the picture feels commercial enough to get a cult audience.
Announcing its excess of formal cleverness in the first place, the movie introduces a new hyperbolically bitchy student amid a flurry of on-screen textual content and direct address, only to have the written text continue, and provide snarky commentary as she is comically murdered by a slasher dressed being a mutilated prom queen. (Her name, we later learn, is CinderHella.)
We shift quickly to Grizzly Lake High, a bustling school populated using a familiar ensemble: smart-but-clumsy Riley (Shanley Caswell), skateboarding hipster Clapton (Josh Hutcherson), blonde alpha-girl Ione (Spencer Locke), and loser Sander (Aaron Mark Johnson), who pines for Riley.
The densely woven, pop-culture-stuffed script is impossible to summarize tidily, but operates largely with tropes winkingly borrowed by other movies: The 90s-obsessed Ione experiences a Freaky Friday-like switch with her mother, sending her back to 1992; the school responds to be able to CinderHellas murders, crazily, by forcing students believed to have information into the Saturday detention straight out from the Breakfast Club; eventually, catastrophe must be averted having a nerd-built time machine housed not in a very Back to the Future Delorean but in the schools mascot, a stuffed bear.
Director Kahn, a music-video vet, doesnt only use this hubbub for occasion for fast reducing, glossy production values as well as out-of-nowhere visual elements (like a sequence when a bullying jock turns out to suffer a Barry Goldblum-ish fly disease). He and co-screenwriter Tag Palermo also cram a lot more smart-ass dialogue and meta-movie banter in than actors should be expected to deliver or viewers to digest.
It all comes off of though. Detention also offers some gags so strange (a new funny movie-within-movie-within-et-cetera bit including pirated slasher-porn flicks) they look like the filmmakers bid to be seen as the next Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Lest that sounds far too high-brow, theres more vomit within this movie than at some sort of frat party catered together with week-old sushi.