Coy Stewart | Through the Shattered Lens

If you’re in high school and you have to do Saturday detention in an abandoned, but perhaps haunted, prison, there’s a good chance that you’re gong to die.

That’s the main lesson that can picked up from the 2017 film Deadly Detention, which I watched via Netflix a few nights ago. Old prison. Sex. Detention. It all leads to death. Of course, you really shouldn’t need a movie to teach you that lesson. I mean, it’s just common sense. STAY OUT OF THE OLD PRISONS, PEOPLE! Especially if it’s got a death row because you just know there’s going to be a lot of pissed off ghosts floating around there….

The good thing about Deadly Detention is that it realizes that abandoned prison=death should be common sense as well. It’s an extremely self-aware movie, fully indulging in all of the slasher movie cliches while, at the same time, poking cheerful fun at them. Deadly Detention may start out as a horror film but, after about 15 minutes or so, it turns into a full-blown comedy and it’s actually pretty fun to watch.

Why are our students attending detention? Well, it turns out that the majority of them have been framed, which explains why even the popular school athlete is being punished. Why are they attending detention in a prison? Well, it seems that a pack of rabid possums were somehow released into the school. Now, of course, being the former country girl that I am, I immediately knew something strange was happening because possums are actually immune to rabies. So, seriously, if you see a possum in your back yard, don’t panic! They’re harmless.

Among those spending their Saturday in detention:

Officer Pete (Kevin Blake), the quiet hall cop,

Miss Presley (Gillian Vigman), the principal who brings her very big and very pointed principal-of-the-year trophy with her,

Lexie (Alex Frnka), the rebellious school tramp who turns out to be a lot more smarter than anyone gave her credit for,

Jessica (Sarah Davenport), the school athlete who has always been driven to be the best,

Barrett (Henry Zaga), the hilariously vain and shallow rich kid whose main hope is that, if he dies, he’ll still look good,

Kevin (Coy Stewart), the gay religious kid who turns out to actually have a lot more depth than anyone originally suspected,

and Taylor (Jennifer Robyn Jacobs), the cheerfully strange girl who knows all the stories about all the ghosts.

Now, you may be thinking that this cast of characters sounds familiar and it’s true that they’re all deliberately meant to invoke various slasher movie tropes. At the same time, I suspect that they’re also meant to remind us of the members of The Breakfast Club as well. However, each character is so well-cast and each actor seems to be having so much fun that they all soon develop their own individual identities. In fact, this cast is so fun to watch that it’s kind of sad once the blood starts to spill.

But spill, it does. Soon, the detainees find themselves having to figure out how to escape the prison while an unseen stalker taunts them over the intercom. What sets this film apart from many other Netflix slasher films is that the students all seem to know that they’re in a horror film and they tend to comment on the action accordingly. When it comes to a horror-comedy, a film always has to decide if it’s going to be more of a horror or a comedy and, early on, Deadly Detention embraces the comedy label and it turns out that the film made the right choice. Thanks to a likable cast and some clever dialogue, Deadly Detention is an entertaining 90 minutes.

As I said, the entire cast is good but Alex Frnka, Coy Stewart, and Jennifer Robyn Jacobs especially deserve a lot of credit for taking characters who could have been cliches and instead turning them into fairly compelling human beings. Alex Frnka not only gets all the best lines but she makes them even better with a delivery that’s perfectly perched between sincerity and snarkiness. The same can be said of the film as a whole.

(Hi there! So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR. Seriously, I currently have 178 things recorded! I’ve decided that, on February 1st, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not. So, that means that I’ve now have only have a month to clean out the DVR! Will I make it? Keep checking this site to find out! I recorded House of the Witch, off of SyFy on October 7th, 2017!)

Let’s say that you’re a teenager and you’re living in a small, rural town. There’s not really much to do, other than making out in pickup trucks and hanging out at the local diner.

However, there is a haunted house.

Of course, the official story is that the house isn’t haunted because everyone knows that there’s no such thing as ghosts. That said, the house does have a long and somewhat infamous history. And everyone knows that going anywhere near the house would probably be considered to be trespassing. In fact, one of your classmates is currently missing. He was last seen talking to two girls who dared him to pry the address off of the house’s front door.

So, it’s Halloween night. And you’re living in a small town and there’s not a whole lot to do.

So, the question is: would you break into the haunted house?

Now, I know a lot of you are probably saying that there’s no way you would break into that house. You’re too smart for that! No way would you break the law and risk your lives just so you could go inside a condemned house! You’re just going to go home early, do your homework, and get some sleep so you can wake up rested and ready for school on November 1st!

That’s what people say but we all know that’s not true. If I found myself in that situation, I would totally break into that house and so would you. Let’s just be honest here. It’s fun to take chances. It’s fun to get scared on Halloween, especially when your best friends are the ones who are scaring you. Even more importantly, it’s fun to think about how, for years afterward, you can brag about how you spent the night in a haunted house and you survived!

It’s human nature. We all want to touch the freshly painted wall. We all want to see the movies that were not supposed to watch. And we all want to break into the haunted house on Halloween.

House of the Witch is wonderfully creepy little movie about a group of teenagers who give into their natural instincts and break into a house on Halloween. Needless to say, the house turns out to be even more haunted than they were led to believe. In fact, the house is home to an ancient witch. Soon, everyone is trapped in the house and being hunted down one-by-one. Blood is spilled. Fingers are lost. Faces are infected with … something.

The storyline may sound simple but it’s also wonderfully effective and atmospheric. The dilapidated house is a truly frightening location and it just gets more frightening as the film progresses. By the end of the movie, I was looking over my shoulder to make sure that there weren’t any witches creeping around my living room. (Fortunately, there weren’t.) The film does a great job of keeping the viewer off-balance. Even though you know that damn witch is going to be behind every corner, you still jump when she suddenly pops up.

I liked the whole look of the film. Early on in the film, there’s a wonderful overhead shot of a pickup truck heading towards the house and the scene perfectly captures not only the creepiness of Halloween but also the emptiness of life in the nearby small town. Seeing the truck driving past empty and endless fields, it was easy to understand why the film’s characters were drawn to that cursed house. In a landscape defined by nothing, that house and its infamous reputation was at least something.

All in all, this was a great film for Halloween.