Director: Joseph Kahn
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 3.0
A blitzkrieg of a movie from music video vet Kahn starts with the premise of a serial killer massacring high school students and then turns into, at any given moment, a comedy, a time-travel movie, a teens-in-love picture ... and sometimes all those things at once. Kahn and fellow screenwriter Mark Palermo are clearly knowledgeable about the '80s, '90s and current cultural trends, and quite freely toss in a good number of cleverly conceived barbs about the idiocy of teenagers, terrible music and actually lousy movies; the impressive hyper-stylishness on display can be read as a critique of dwindling of attention spans due to media saturation. Yes, it is self-conscious and hard to take after a while (by the time it got to a stuffed bear that doubles as a time capsule I basically stopped trying to follow its line of spur-of-the-moment logic), but I wouldn't be surprised if this became a widely-accepted cult classic in years to come, since it's sheer ecstasy for the eyes (with a bit of a brain to go with the chop-shop collage).
