From The Breakfast Club to Deadly Detention

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Have you ever wondered which of deviants and losers of The Breakfast Club (1985) would survive if a brutal killer were out to slay them?

Director Blair Hayes

Thanks to the horror-comedy mix presented in Deadly Detention (2017), we know director Blair Hayes's answer to the question.

In The Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald plays pretty, but pampered, Claire Standish; her counterpart in Deadly Detention is Lexie (Alex Frnka), who's so sexy she doesn't even need a last name.

The Club's athlete, Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), undergoes a sex change, as it were, appearing as Jessica (Sarah Davenport) in Detention. 

Club's white dude Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) is replaced by Detentions's black, nerdy, Bible-toting Kevin (Coy Stewart). 

Club's space case Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) is transformed into Detention's "freak show" Taylor Hunt (Jennifer Robyn Jacobs).

Juvenile delinquent John Bender (Judd Nelson), of Club, is retooled as Detention's Barrett Newman (Henry Zaga). 

Club's Assistant Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason) and janitor Carl Reed (John Kapelos) are combined into Detention's Principal Presley (Gillian Vigman).

Detention occurs in an allegedly haunted, abandoned prison. Soon after their arrival, things get bloody, as Ms. Presley succumbs to an attack by an unseen killer. Next, one by one, the detainees are picked off at the murderer's leisure, until only one chick, the proverbial "final girl" of slasher films, remains—wait for it!—the sassy, brassy beauty of the bunch, Lexie!

The others have been picked off in horrific ways by the murderer, a father who blames his victims for his daughter's suicide.

So, against a relentless serial killer, The Breakfast Club's Claire (and her Detention counterpart Lexie), it seems, would be the sole survivors of their respective films—except that Hayes is only playing with us; in the end, all the losers win; they all survive—thanks to Ms. Presley, who seems to have been really most sincerely dead, but was maybe just comatose for a while or resurrected somehow (?) and saved all the deviants' lives (we aren't shown how).

Deadly Detention is a fun, tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy flick, but the movie doesn't take itself seriously enough to be a really, most sincerely good movie. Somewhere between the losers' arrival at the prison and their mysterious—indeed, miraculous—survival, the screenwriters, Alison Spuck McNeeley and Casey Tabanou, become too lazy to connect the dots, and Hayes films the result, disconnects and all.