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Overall Rating : 2.5/10
Directed By : Mark McNabb
Steve McDougall
Lindsay Dell
Brian Austin Jr.
Shaylyn Doyle
Supplied By : MTI Home Video
Film Reviewed By : Rick L. Blalock
Date Reviewed : October. 10, 2007
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| PLOT When Don Keller, a retired Army Captain turned High School professor reaches his breaking point, the unimaginable happens as he transforms from a mild mannered teacher into a highly trained psycho killer. When the school becomes his jungle, it's up to the students in detention to take him down. The only question is – have they learned how to take him down? |
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| THE REVIEW In the Canadian slasher film STUDY HELL, it's "Degrassi goes to hell" as some students receive more than they bargained for when they are sentenced to Detention. Don Keller is a teacher, who has had some problems as of late, all of which as put him on the verge of losing his job. As a last chance at proving himself, the Principal appoints Keller to sit in as the Teaching monitor for after school Detention. When Keller arrives he is met with students that would like to be doing something else than having detention. The students soon begin to get under Keller's skin until old war memories and things of his past, that have been building up for quite sometime, start to come to a head. The Teacher snaps and begins to take his anger out on the students, using various techniques in which he learned in combat - and by they way he does it so emotionless the students and Janitor begin to wonder if Don Keller could be the man responsible for a slaying of Cheerleaders that happened at the school years prior - and incident that left Todd's(one of the students in Detention) Father wrongfully imprisoned for the crime. At first look at the trailer for STUDY HELL, you immediately get the impression of what type of film this is going to be - a low budget attempt at a slasher film. From the film's opening from, you can already sense, just how low the budget was as the overall look of the film is a bit grainy and albeit "cheap" looking. The title of the film would give the impression that most of this film would take place in a detention hall, but the truth is, is that this particular setting is only used for a brief amount of time, just to basically kick-start the rest of the film, which would your typical "stalk and slash" slasher film. With that said, it seems that STUDY HELL was made just for this sole purpose, to have a film in which a deranged killer stalks and kills the kids at a school, there is no real build-up to any of it. Yes we know that Don Keller is a traumatized war vet, and the kids' behavior towards him and the stress of the job causes him to have flashbacks and eventually to snap, but truly there is nothing really supporting the evil inside of him, as there was no attempt at building any suspense whatsoever here. The chase scenes in the film displays Keller wielding various weapons, while he believes he is once again, deep in the trenches of war, while hunting down the kids, killing them in the most highly trained ways. In a way, this element of STUDY HELL, reminded me a little of another release in which MTI had a few years ago called BLOOD RELIC, in which, yet again, a deranged war veteran killed innocent people(except, in BLOOD RELIC, if I remember correctly, the killer was dressed in all Army fatigues). So this scenario was quite familiar to me, making STUDY HELL, far less original, than I believe it wanted to be. You could tell that it wanted to different, by making some scenes appear to be mimicking teen flicks like THE BREAKFAST CLUB, adding things like a spit-ball gag, and wise cracking jokes, yet even there it failed to set itself apart, because if they didn't already know, the teen Horror-Comedy, has already been done, many times, and many times over - and it really is sad when a film's gore effects are even more funny than the film's intentional jokes that are "cleverly" placed within the dialogue. The acting here, I should say, is all well below average, not once can you relate to, or root for the victims in the film, nor are you even frightened by the film's villain(which you should at least have some tension towards in a slasher film). All of the performers here have performances that are wooden and very predictable, it's as if their lines are being fed to them off camera, or as if they were reading them from a piece of paper, the lines felt very uninspired to say the least. I believe STUDY HELL is a film that believes it has a better story to tell than it actually does, and in all fairness it could've been a better film with a little more development, and better performances to support it's cause. I've seen worse, but on the other hand, have definitely seen better, yet in my opinion, STUDY HELL still falls shy of reaching the level of being decent. |
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| GORE
METER 1.5/10 The gore effects are all done in a very budget limited way, which in the end looks very unrealistic, there are slashings, an arrow through ones head, while the rest is all done off camera(probably due to not having a big enough budget to create it) |
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| MUSICAL
SCORE 1.5/10 There are a couple of indie Rock tunes, but nothing special. |
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| OVERALL
IMPRESSION OF THE FILM STUDY HELL is definitely low budget, but not at it's best. It tries to be a suspenseful slasher film, yet fails to even attempt to build any of the suspense it needs to be one. Like I said, there are worse out there, but STUDY HELL has very little to remember - can't say that I recommend it. This DVD will released on October 30, 2007 |
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