Dead and Breakfast Club: Detention Horror!

It’s really amazing what an impact 1985’s The Breakfast Club had on pop culture. The poster is mocked on the poster for Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Molly Ringwald had a very important cameo in Not Another Teen Movie. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” plays an important role in movies like Easy A and Pitch Perfect. And then we have the horror movies….

Bad Kids Go To Hell (2012)

This is pretty much a horror reimagining of The Breakfast Club. A handful of kids gets locked in a library for detention. They sit at tables with steps running up either side and a big sculpture in the center of the room. There’s a weird janitor. There’s a gun. There’s a bag-emptying scene. There’s a crawl through a ventilation system. There’s a bitch, a redhead, a bad boy, a jock, a geek. You get the picture.

One chick immediately gives a monologue about this not being a feel-good 80s movie where they all end up becoming friends. In one of numerous campy flashbacks, someone is humming “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”

Oh—and Judd Nelson plays the headmaster.

However, this breakfast club holds a séance! Before long, they start dying off. They try to unravel the mystery of what happened on the land on which the property was built. Conveniently, they’re in a library, so they can look up stuff beyond elephantitis of the nuts. The fun of the homage starts to get lost in the attempt to make a real whodunit ghost story.

As Bad Kids Go to Hell comes to its twist conclusion, it feels more like Scream.

Detention of the Dead (2012)

A group of students gets stuck in detention—a popular bitch, a geek, a goth chick, a jock, a burnout. You get the picture. Within a matter of about 10 minutes the zombie outbreak begins. Whereas Bad Kids Go to Hell is a bit more serious, Detention of the Dead is total fun and humor—with tons of gore!

Amazingly, these kids aren’t serving detention in the library…but they end up there once the outbreak begins. And there they remain for the rest of the movie. There’s a ventilation crawl scene. There’s a gun. There’s a bag-rummaging scene. There’s a pot-smoking scene. There’s deep discussion about being popular. And jumping from one 80s movie to another…there’s an homage to the penis pulling scene from Porky’s.

There are also some familiar faces: the chick from Revenge, the gay closeted jock from Glee, and a kid from the Twilight series. The teacher virtually steals the show—or at least, part of her does. And there’s also what I believe is the first little person zombie I’ve ever seen in a horror film.

2012 was the year of the dead and breakfast club horror movies. Personally, as much as Bad Kids Go to Hell exploits its nod to The Breakfast Club, Detention of the Dead has a more genuine horror comedy vibe to it while still capturing the fun side of 80s teen films.