All Rise...

When Judge David Johnson was in high school detention, he ordered pizzas from his giant cellular phone.

The Charge

Oh David Carradine—not the most sterling engraving in your legacy here.

The Case

A group of high school students (including Robin Williams' daughter Zelda) who look more like enrollees in a Masters of Arts program find themselves trapped in detention. Worse, they're serving their sentences on the worst possible night, a stormy, dark and scary night that also happens to coincide with the appearance of malevolent ghosts. There's a homicidal maniac running around the school halls, too.

All these shenanigans are rooted in something that happened years ago, when some kids played a prank on a hapless nerd and one thing led to another and the poor sap ended up dead. Now, with decades past, a supernatural entity has returned to exact vengeance for that past sin, and somehow David Carradine is involved…God rest his soul.

I'll keep this brief: Detention isn't great. There's nothing going on here that will surprise you as it essentially follows the playbook of Every Other Slasher Ever Made. You have an eclectic group of "teenaged" kids, a systematic execution of each kid, a killer's motivation tied into a past injustice, and some awkward, inopportune intercourse that gets cut short by yet another homicide.

Some visual effects-powered ghost mechanics have been included to juice up the flow and there's a small twist at the end over the killer's reveal; still, it's not enough to elevate Detention from the recesses of slasher also-rans. The kids are cannon fodder, the kills themselves leave little to get gorehounds jazzed about and Carradine is largely wasted, stumbling through a few scenes in the beginning as the irksome principal, then showing up at the end in time to…well, you can discover the majesty yourself!

The screener DVD I viewed is a total disaster: an embarrassing, out-of-whack full frame transfer, low-quality, ear-shredding 2.0 stereo audio, and no extras.

The Verdict

Opt for the suspension.

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