High school students (the jocks, the brains, the princesses, the criminals, the basket cases), long the favored prey of serial killers, somehow manage to fight back from the brink yet again in Detention, a bright, witty new genre mash-up.

Moves at an absurd pace and dares anyone above 25 to keep up, yet the stream of genre-hopping jokes and sight gags makes the movie an entertaining ride.

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

It's as if the TV character Dawson directed "Heathers," or another one, Parker Lewis, remade "Scream." Who'd have guessed that would be a can't-lose idea?

Detention is ballsy, audacious, and uncompromising, but the overall effect of Kahn's Hellzapoppin-meets-Twitter aesthetic is exhausting rather than energizing. It's an ice-cream headache of a movie-movie that's so relentlessly "fun," it's borderline obnoxious.