WEEK ONE - THE NEW BLOOD
October 4, part 2
The short review would be that this film is a koala bear that just crapped a rainbow in my head.
Imagine Donnie Darko by the way of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and you wouldn't be too far off from what kind of mindset to approach this film with, but nothing, and I mean
nothing, will ever prepare you for the roads this film goes down. I could literally write out, in detail, what happens in this movie, and I know it would be pointless since none of you, except those who have watched it, of course, would believe me because it's too fucking crazy.
Detention is the kind of film that makes you wonder if famed music video director/sometime theatrical film director/first time screenwriter Joseph Kahn may in fact have ADHD. It's almost as if Kahn decided he wanted to do with a slasher film, a 90s teen comedy, and a stylistic ripoff of Gregg Araki's earlier films, and no one was around to tell him why those things don't go together at all. Pop culture references fly by with a speed that would make the writers of The Venture Bros. look sluggish, the plot finds ways for its tangents to go off on tangents, and I would mention how often it breaks the fourth wall with its metafiction elements, but there is no goddamned fourth wall in this film to break, as it simply does not exist. How does one even begin to get a handle on whatever the hell is supposed to be going on, and what would be the point to it all, if there is one?
Insanity this, well, insane, isn't just taking a lazy shotgun approach to overwhelm the viewer with a surplus of ideas, though. The film's writing is too sharp and genuinely hilarious to ever think that, its direction too strong and consistent, as well, and its cast is too on point for there not to be a method to the madness, with high marks going to our female leads Shanley Caswell and Spencer Locke for having to juggle some of the film's most outrageous tasks. A genuine mess would never rise above the levels of a mere curiosity, and Detention is not a messy film at all. Overstuffed, yes, but it straddles the fine line between stupid and clever far too well to wind up all over the floor.
Some will call it a clever film that masquerades as a piece of crap, and some will call it a piece of crap masquerading as a clever film. For me, however, I feel like the only way to do the film any justice is that the director of Torque decided to do a horror film, and this time around, he got it pretty much right. I think.
October 5 preview: We close out the first week of this year's marathon by steering back into more serious territory. An epidemic that renders the population vampires has swept North America, leaving few humans left. For one teenage boy, his chance encounter with a vampire hunter leads him on a cross-country journey across the ever dangerous
Stake Land, in the hopes of finding a safe haven in a world that is no longer safe.
