A SWAT team barges into a school library to find a student holding an axe and surrounded by savaged bodies.
The film then jumps back to eight hours, where we see the axe-wielder, Matt Clark, arrive at the school for weekend detention with five other students. Matt's actually technically been expelled from the school, but he's somehow talked the principal into allowing him to just serve an eight hour Saturday detention, instead.
In what quickly proves to be a recurring theme of Matt's life, however, he has picked the wrong day and the wrong detention. After the school counsellor locks them all in the school library, without their phones or other devices, the six kids decide to have an impromptu séance. Just for giggles, right? But it seems to summon something, and suddenly people are turning up dead ...
The pitch for Bad Kids Go To Hell is pretty clearly "the Breakfast Club reimagined as a horror comedy". Matt's five detention-mates are all on the surface pretty much one for one analogues for the characters from the earlier film. Plus, just in case you didn't spot the parallel, this film gives a small role to Judd Nelson, one of the stars of The Breakfast Club.
It's a decent concept, but alas the execution goes wildly astray, almost from the very start. Matt's introduction of main character is very poorly conceived. While it does manage to establish his habit of having colossally bad luck, it also makes him look like a smug grifter as he fast talks his employer into telling his parole officer that he's at work, rather than detention. The scene could have worked if his tone and delivery were much more desperate and pleading, rather than confident and almost authoritative. I can only assume the flaw here lies with the direction, as the actor's performance seems otherwise solid.
Speaking of Matt's calamitous bad, some of it is pretty funny - one of the few examples of the film's efforts at humour actually landing. Unfortunately, he's also colossally foolish in his behaviour at many points, often compounding, if not directly causing, his own misfortune. This makes it hard to sympathise with him, at least for me.
More broadly, a lack of sympathy for the characters is a calamitous problem for the whole film. I don't like any of these people and I therefore didn't care about them or their fates.
Finally, the true nature of the threat that looms over these students is ... well, it's absurd, and not in a "ha, that's really funny!" kind of way. My reaction was very much "Really, this is what you're going with?".
Watching this felt like being in detention.
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