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Detention
- Rated R (MPAA) - Comedy, Horror

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We get Detention

Speedy genre splicing with added blood and bears

by Carsten Knox

click to enlarge

A rampant, post-post-modern look at modern life through the lens of the high school slasher film/teen comedy, Detention is relentless in its determination to squeeze laughs (and shocks) from the pulpy guts of our self-aware culture. What does this mean for the average filmgoer? Well, it will help if you have a familiarity with the past 30 years of drugs, fashion, popular music, social media, science fiction, horror and the oeuvre of John Hughes---and have gone to high school. It's a movie about movies, mostly, and director Joseph Kahn and former Coast film critic Mark Palermo throw everything they have at this thing. Though not all of it sticks---later bizarro plot developments including time travel, alien bears and going to the prom can’t quite sustain the amphetamine frenzy of the first act and I wish I cared more about the characters---the film has enough ideas to fill a dozen of your average multiplex entertainments.