Very low budget Canadian fare about a group of delinquents forced to stay after school in detention with a teacher so crazy that the principal tells him he could be fired any moment, but short of that she's putting him in charge of the entire building and this group of kids. Much of the writing follows the same nonsensical suit. It's also funny seeing people clearly ranging in ages from about 12 to 30 playing students, including one hairy, beer bellied, 30 year old, playing the jock.
So yeah, the teacher has some sort of back story with the janitor regarding Vietnam and a buddy of theirs who killed a bunch of cheerleaders and whose son is one of the kids in detention, I honestly couldn't follow it very well, but it doesn't take long for the teacher to start thinking that the school is the jungle, and holy shit it just goes from 0 to 60 in about a minute and makes very little sense.
The detention scenes try and play like The Breakfast Club with a low rent version of Judd Nelsons speech about his dad, and a girl pretty much doing an exact Ally Sheedy impersonation.
The fight scenes are remarkable in that I'm not sure they were choreographed much at all as it looks like the teacher is just flat out throwing one of the kids around at one point. On one hand it's funny in how bad it looks, on the other hand I was legit worried watching a dude fall and flail around a pile of desks, once hitting his leg on the corner of a desk and it looked pretty nasty.
LOL. Ok, so a girl and a guy sneak off to the teachers class room to share a drink and maybe do some in and out, but the crazy teacher finds them and the aforementioned fight scene occurs. Fight scene might be a bit of a stretch as it's just one dude throwing another around. Before crazy teacher finds them though, they open a hidden door in his class room that leads to a closet filled with weapons. The script and the editing get very bad here as they make no attempt convey what is going on. The teacher pulls the guy out of the closet, beats him up and slashes him with a giant knife, then he just lets him walk away. Ok. Now the girl is in the closet, but she's never acknowledged so I don't know if the teacher ever even saw her, she does react to the boy being slashed, even though the door is shut and she can't see him. God I love bad movies.
So the kid crawls down a pair of stairs and is found by the rest of the group. He proceeds to tell them that she's locked in the closet, even though we clearly saw that the teacher didn't do that. The next moment we see her walking through the halls, looking lost, even though it was clearly established the she was just a flight of stairs away from everyone else and, ya know, she's in her own school. This is magnificent. She's walking through the hall looking for a kid who was just knifed from side to side by a maniac as if she was lazily taking a Sunday stroll at a flea market. Fabulous.
So once the knifed kid gets found by the rest of the students, the jock, I think he's the jock, I dunno. Anyway, he sets out to find the girl and the crazy teacher and oh yeah, he looks like Chael Sonnen had a kid with Allanis Morrisette.
Sweet Jesus, the acting in this thing would make Anna Nicole Smith ashamed to call herself an actress.
Ok, so the rest of the kids are sitting on the steps all chill like Doug E. Doug, when the blonde returns. The other girl in the group looks up from reading a book and pronounces "thank god, we thought you were dead". I mean.....I just...I have no words. Oh, and the dude that got knifed? He's just chillaxin. Ok, so they want to plan an escape, but the blonde, who is delicious by the way, she says that the front doors are chained and locked, so the goth girl says that the keys are kept in the office, to which the nerd replies exasperatingly "HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW THAT?!" That's the thing I love about movies like this. They're so badly written that character motivations change from scene to scene, and lines are just handed out rather than roles being developed beyond a cursory outline.
Ok, now it's getting clearer. The teacher clearly thinks he's back in Vietnam and is having major shell shock, flashbacks or some shit. The humor comes from the fact that he looks like a Canadian version of Mark Lynn Baker but the acting is akin to Cousin Larry trying to win a role in The Deer Hunter. So on one hand you have a dude overacting to the upteenth degree, and that's juxtaposed by a group of kids, who are supposed to be fearful of their lives, just sort of blase in their attempts to escape. The two girls in particular are remarkable in their ability to look like they're in a different movie altogether.
So they can't unlock anything, or open a window, or use a phone or escape in any one of a hundred different ways, so they decide to make a bomb to blow the doors open. Lucky for them the goth girl carries around powdered chromium in her purse. Now normally I would take this is a moment of parody but I swear to fuck there isn't an ounce of sarcasm in this revelation.
JESUS CHRIST ON A CRACKER THIS BLONDE IS THE GREATEST ACTRESS I'VE EVER SEEN. I'm not sure this girl even knows what kind of movie she's in. She literally waits for her lines, says them while staring vacantly, regardless of what emotion she's supposed to be emoting, and then just moves on. I have no doubt she's in the this movie because someone wanted to bang her. Not that I can blame them.
So the nutso teacher lures the principal lady back to the school. The students see her from the chemistry room and the two girls go to find her. They run down stairs, they run up stairs, they run through catacombs, I have no fucking clue how getting down one floor can be so tumultuous. Meanwhile, back in the chem lab, an episode of Degrassi breaks out as the stoner and the geek have a bonding session in the middle of building a bomb to escape a psycho killer. It brought a tear to my eye and a nail to my brain. Of course they get attacked and the nerd is perilously trapped under a desk. Yeah, he gets trapped under a desk. Oh the perils of being trapped under 10 pounds of wood while the bff you just now made, who you previously hated before he got stabbed but then got better, gets beaten up by a crazy veteran. Luckily he musters up the strength to reach into his pocket protector and throw a pen at the teacher, knocking him silly. I'm not even exaggerating here or trying to make this sound dumber than it is.
We aren't even half way through yet and this is already a classic.
Ok ok ok ok ok. This is awesome. The 3 remaining kids decide to get a sledgehammer from shop class, to try and smash the locks. Of course in a room filled with potential weapons they ignore them all. They find the janitor hiding here and now we get a full explanation of the back story. Seems the nerd kids father used to be a janitor at the school and went to prison for killing a bunch of cheerleaders. BUT it wasn't him at all, but rather the crazy teacher. Seems the two of them were in Nam together and were friends, but the kids dad knew the teacher was unbalanced so he got a job as a janitor to keep an eye on him and ended up going to jail for the crimes that the teacher committed. When the kids ask the janitor why he didn't tell the cops he replies "who'd believe a janitor?" You cannot argue with that logic.
This is like one of those childrens learning shows where there's an adult teaching a group of kids about something. How do we know what Ducks like to eat? Well let's go down to the pond and find out! How do we know the backdoor isn't chained? Well let's go and find out. Yay! They're more excited to find out something new than they are scared of being MURDERED!
So the nerd and the goth girl find a hiding spot and an afterschool special about bravery and courage in the face of danger breaks out. They fall madly in love over the course of 45 seconds and then.......well I think we're supposed to think that they fucked because when the blonde girl finds them they're sound asleep, laying on top of each other. But they're fully clothed. It makes zero sense, but in the pantheon of things in this movie that make no sense this barely ranks.
With no way to escape and likely minutes away from being discovered by a psycho killer, the girls luckily remember that there are caves beneath the school. For the love of Dean Cameron, this movie is just levels of retarded piled upon levels of retarded. Oh yeah, forgot to mention that the blonde hid from the killer in the school pool, so she'll be running around the rest of the movie in wet, clingy, clothes. That's one on the plus side.
So in order to get to the caves below the school, they of course have to go UP to the rafters in the gym and crawl into the air ducts. I don't want this movie to ever end.
I should also mention that from time to time, psycho teacher will take to the PA and channel Robin Williams from Good Morning Vietnam. If you give the film makers credit you may think that these scenes are parody but I'm positive they think it comes across as chilling, which makes it so much more hilarious.
Down now to only two students and one psycho teacher, we're treated to a rather lengthy scene of them walking and him shaving his head. You haven't lived till you've watched a man shave his head......psychotically.
Now I have no idea what's going on. Despite crawling into the rafters and into an air duct and back down into the school and into a secret room and through a tunnel that leads into a cave, the teacher is there waiting for them. Mapquest really could have helped these kids out.
This leads to an amazingly bad fight scene in which for the 3rd time in the film the teacher headbutts his victim and doesn't jostle his glasses even slightly. Despite putting up a valiant effort against the man who framed his dad for murder, the nerd is no match for an insane Vietnam Vet, but this does give the girl enough time to escape. Escape where you might ask? Well through a door, up half a flight of stairs and back into the school. They went through an awful lot of trouble to get.....nevermind. It's like shooting dumb fish in a dumb barrel at this point.
Oh fuck me in the ass. At the start of the film, when detention first started, the teacher told the kids to write an essay on why they're in detention, ya know, just like in The Breakfast Club. Well now, instead of continuing to run, the girl just sits down on the floor and pulls out a piece of paper and begins to read it. It's the nerds essay, and we're treated to a knockoff of the end of The Breakfast Club where the principal reads Judd Nelsons essay. Again, it seems like this may be parody, but I swear it's not. Not only do we get a voice over but we're treated to a montage of the tender moments goth girl and nerd boy spent throughout the film, both of them. It's amazing how someone can be so inspired by such great films and yet have zero grasp of what those films were doing. It's fucking grand.
Ahaha. So the girl, inspired by reading nerd boys essay, decides to get on the PA and challenge the teacher to meet her on the roof. Here we get a glimpse of what a Jackie Chan movie would look like if Jackie Chan were a 16 year old girl and his nemesis was a middle aged white man. In this harrowing, edge of your seat fight scene, he has flashbacks of Nam, if Nam were the woods behind Shop N Bag. Realizing what he's done, the teacher decides to kill himself, which gives our heroin time to sit on a grate and cry as we now get to hear her essay, which sounds just like the boys essay. God, I love that whoever wrote this movie thinks he's saying something profound, I fucking love that he thinks this is deep, and I'm NOT being sarcastic. It's the only reason this piece of shit is as great as it is.
I can't even begin to explain the final scene of the movie. We flash forward two years. The girl returns to the school with her boyfriend and standing on the front step they tell jokes and laugh and then break down and cry in as inorganic a manner as possible. Again, it's just moving between emotions with no particular reason. It turns out her boyfriend is the brother of nerd boy because why not be as absurdly convoluted as possible. They go home and she strips down and gets in the bath while his phone rings. I really have no idea what is supposed to have happened here. He picks up the phone, then reaches into her coat for the gun she carries, then he walks into the bathroom, hands her the phone and slumps over dead from........something? Never minding that her boyfriend is laying there dead, she takes the phone and starts asking who it is, the voice on the other end of the phone menacingly says "find me", and we roll credits. You could threaten to cut my balls off and I still wouldn't be able to tell you what the fuck I just saw.
Sometimes a movie is good because of how bad it is, but then there are movies like this one, that aren't just good because of how bad they are, but because of how bad they are at trying to be good. This thing wants to be clever, it wants to be scary, it wants to tell a story, it's so engorged with story and ideas that it's overflowing, and it's all stammeringly awful. It's not quite The Room, but I'll be damned if it isn't close.
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