#42 -- Detention (2010)

Director: James D.R. Hickox

Rating: 2 / 5

Really I would like to give this one 2.5 stars, because I almost liked it. The problem with this movie was that it was confusing. It may be just me, or maybe I wasn't paying it as much attention as I should have - but I was confused throughout a majority of it. I got the gist of it, but some parts, for me, needed further explanation that was not given.

Sometime in the 1970s, a high school prank went terribly wrong and a boy ended up dying. He was locked into a furnace in some underground tunnels of the school, and when lightning hit the school, it somehow caused the flames to erupt and the boy was burned to death.

Seeing that this movie was released in 2010, the rest of the movie must have been around forty years later. A group of kids are sent to detention. When their teachers leaves, locking them in before he goes, to meet with the pretty new history teacher, things start to get weird. They start seeing ghosts. I probably don't have to tell you that it is the ghost of the young boy who died. He takes the form of a floating black cloud, and...really is not scary at all. I think the scariest part of the movie is the white boy who thinks he's a Jamaican ninja. 

The teacher is killed in the men's room, and the kids are left to find their own way out of the classroom. They do this via the underground tunnels. It appears that the ghost of the dead boy can also possess people, and it seems that he has possessed the history teacher, as well as one of the kids (a boy we like to call Nerdboy). So, there's that for the kids to worry about too. Nerdboy seems to embrace his new life as a possessed agent of the vengeful spirit. He goes bonkers. After killing one of the kids, he tries to kill two more. And he tells them that he likes killing people because it's fun. 

Turns out, the ghost isn't so vengeful, though. Ms. History teacher is actually his mother. This would be one of the confusing things. The kids in question are children of the people who killed Ghostboy back in the '70s. So this woman would have had a child in high school during that time. And now, forty years later...She should be dead by now, right? No, she looks like she is about thirty-five. So apparently she had a child before even she was born. Of course, she might be back from the grave to avenge her son. This is hinted at (I think) when the kids push her face into the fiery furnace. It burns, then instantly heals. That is the only evidence I have that she was not entirely human. But when another lightning bolt hits the school, she is set ablaze and killed. So I'm really not sure. And another question arises: why wait so long to avenge your son? We know her intentions were to punish the parents the way they'd punished her - by taking their children away from them. But did she want to wait until they were the same age? I mean, it probably would have been just as effective when they were children. Just sayin'. 

This really wasn't all that bad. The acting was decent (and included David Carradine as the principal), the effects were okay, and the story...Well, it's not something we haven't seen a billion times already. I didn't like it mainly because I didn't know what the fuck was going on half the time. But again, maybe it was just me. I'd say, once again, my favorite part was the white boy/Jamaican/ninja guy, who we know had to have been trippin' some major balls. Not like, GIANT balls, but...You get it. Ahem...