DETENTION

Preparations are in full swing at the school for the end-of-year dance, but a masked serial killer who calls himself Cinderfella, like the character from a popular horror film saga, is slaughtering students. Unlucky Riley, the school's most popular boy Clapton, cheerleader Ione, and nerd Hipster try to figure out who is hiding behind Cinderfella's mask. After a private party gone wrong, the four will be forced by the principal to detention on the very night of the dance, along with other students. Among the detained group, suspicion begins to arise that the killer is hiding among them... Riding the wave of the successful return of "Scream" to theaters with its fourth chapter, Stage 6 — a production company associated with Sony Pictures and specializing in straight-to-video releases — tries to ride the teen slasher wave with a light horror that heavily blends into comedy and doesn't spare us some metacinematographic stiletto jabs in full Craven style. The result proceeds with alternating current, between a few rare strokes of genius and several falls into the least sagacious youth comedy. From the very first minutes, it's clear that the goal of "Detention" is to make a "stylish" film, one that bears the mark of the director through a series of visually appealing ideas that are objectively engaging. Tight editing, ironic captions that denote the protagonists and characters themselves who directly address the audience. But also vibrant colors, pertinent music used correctly, and a certain camera virtuosity that hints at the director's past in music videos. And indeed, at the helm of the direction is Jospeh Kahn, who, with the exception of his previous foray into cinema with the motorbike action film "Torque — Circuiti di fuoco," has directed some of the most famous pop stars of recent years, from U2 to Britney Spears, through the Backstreet Boys, Eminem, and Blink 182. Kudos to Kahn, then, who puts his all into it and brings his visual style to a teen slasher that rarely would have had such a personal imprint. Then we see that Kahn also signs the screenplay, along with Mark Palermo, and here we realize that "Detention" is perhaps too ambitious a product when compared to its completed form. On paper, "Detention" is a sophisticated teen comedy that winks at John Hughes' cinema like the recent "Easy Girl" while also contaminating it with surreal elements and splatter twists. The mix frankly doesn't work entirely, and in the end, we have quite a mess before our eyes. The Hughes component is limited to the delineation of some characters that in certain cases — like the protagonist, played by the talented and faux-ugly Shanley Caswell — can be said to be successful, but for the most part, it abandons itself to stereotypes of stereotypes that we have seen rehashed in all variants over the last 25 years. The horror component, on the other hand, quickly becomes marginal and pretextual: it parodies "Saw" and cites (intentionally or not) "Prom Night II" and "Prom Night III" with a villain with a funny name — Cinderfella — but a striking look. Sometimes it aims for excessive splatter, but for the most part, all the horror is a pretext to wring out some laughs. Then there's the surreal component that, while appreciable because it denotes originality and is part of the parodic game (the school athlete whose origins are told by mixing the genesis of a superhero and the Seth Brundle from the film "The Fly"), on the other hand, heavily impacts the creation of incredible narrative confusion that at a certain point completely loses the reins of the story. When time travels and paradoxes with characters living both in the past and present start to appear, logic goes out the window, and the thread of events is truly lost. "Detention" is gaining visibility thanks to the presence of Josh Hutcherson, a young actor not too expressive among the protagonists of "Hunger Games" who here plays Clapton and also figures among the producers of the work. All in all, "Detention" is a film that is worth watching mainly for the care and directorial personality but loses itself in a pretentiously tangled screenplay. Perhaps it's all part of the game, or perhaps at a certain point, control of the "creature" was truly lost, but the fact is that "Detention" doesn't fully convince.