Riley Jones is the self-proclaimed second biggest loser in the history of Grizzly Lake High School, pipped for the top spot only by the woman who sexually assaulted the school mascot twenty years earlier. She misses the bus to school and her dad's too much of a drunk to take her, so she has to limp her way there on her broken foot, where she will spend the day mooning over a boy who only has eyes for a ditzy cheerleader. Really, the last thing she needs in her life is some nutjob dressing up like a killer from some B-grade film and trying to murder her.
Detention is considerably more inventive than its pro-forma slasher stylings would suggest. It's a film packed with all kinds of oddness. I have to salute its willingness to mash together a whole bunch of genres and ideas and just go wild with them.
Unfortunately, as bold as all this might be, it's only 5% as clever and 1% as charming as the film-makers evidently thought it was. I can't blame the cast for this. Shanley Caswell does her best to make Riley winsome rather than crushingly annoying, but that task is, frankly, beyond human capability, while the rest of the cast don't really get enough time on screen to become much more than props for the increasingly anarchic plot (and it's probably best not to think too hard about said plot afterward, since it makes very little actual sense).
Some might find this an interesting failure of a film. I think those people would be half right.
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