Undoubtedly the idea was to bring out the long-delayed horror-comedy Detention, starring Josh Hutcherson, after the profile-raising release of The Hunger Games last month, but there almost certainly was also a significant amount of email back-and-forth from Hutcherson’s management team with other studio folk about how to downplay its theatrical unspooling, and kind of dump the body from a slowly moving van, without hoping too many people notice. A film of boundless energy and if not empty voice then at least wholly scattershot imagination, the over-the-top Detention debuted last year at SXSW, which seems a perfect home for its robust, scrupulously manufactured eccentricities.



Detention‘s story centers around someone re-enacting the slasher killings of a popular horror movie villain against a couple unsuspecting high schoolers. Lest one think this is another twist or update on The Faculty or Cherry Falls, however, the film also nips liberally from canted high school dark comedies like Pretty Persuasion, Brick and Assassination of a High School President. It’s basically sort of like what would happen if Scream and Donnie Darko spawned a love child in a threeway with Inception, and then that baby married the loquacious Juno, dosed up on some ecstasy, fired up The Breakfast Club‘s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” on their iPod, and went ironically to a Napoleon Dynamite fan convention. But in the way that sounds more like a car crash than awesome and intriguing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 93 minutes)

For most sane and normal folks, the events of September 11 sparked not only shock and grief, but also an instinct of outreach — a desire to help, somehow, not only tangibly or materially, but also emotionally. The stories told by some of the survivors in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers were so heartrending that an impulse to share or ease their burden was a fairly natural reaction. Tania Head, however, took that feeling to an extrapolated extreme that’s still rather hard to grasp.

Head (above right) told a devastating story of narrowly escaping death from the 78th floor of the South Tower, blown back against a marble wall by the impact of the airplane, badly burned and suffering from a deep gash that almost took off her entire right arm. She was saved by Welles Crowther, a young man wearing a red bandanna whose heroic actions on that day were widely reported. Her common-law husband, Dave, however, was not so lucky — he perished in the North Tower. She spent two months in the hospital, and later co-founded the influential World Trade Center Survivors Network advocacy group. The only problem? Her entire story was a fabrication. On September 11, Head, actually born Alicia Esteve, was in post-graduate classes in Barcelona.

The documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There, from executive producer Meredith Vieira, chronicles this bizarre, stranger-than-fiction story, interviewing around a half dozen of the chief subject’s former friends and peers in the aforementioned group. It’s even more peculiar when one considers that the director, Angelo Guglielmo, Jr., was actually pressed into making a nonfiction movie about 9/11 survivors by Head herself, before the truth about her deceit came out in a series of investigative articles published in the New York Times in the fall of 2007. That means Head is very much featured in the unintended resultant product that is The Woman Who Wasn’t There, narrating her (false) story while others recount their deep connection to her, creeping suspicion about her story, and eventual betrayal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ID Films, unrated, 65 minutes)

A meandering but still punkish documentary overview of the Vans Warped Tour, director Parris Patton’s No Room For Rockstars, shot over the 2010 iteration of the event, offers up a slice-of-life look at the punk rock juggernaut, a rain-or-shine misfit circus that crisscrosses North America every summer as a rollicking outdoor minstrel show aimed at kids hungry for live music mainly outside of the glossy pop mainstream. If it’s mostly an amorphous fan’s document that doesn’t locate much in the way of a dramatic throughline, the backstage and behind-the-scenes access will at least still prove engaging enough to its core demographic even if few others. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Vans Off the Wall/Agi Orsi Productions, unrated, 97 minutes)