Watch Katee Sackhoff's Brutal, Bloody Power Rangers "Deboot"

Joseph Kahn is one of the most accomplished and ambitious directors working in the music video and TV commercial industries. To date, he's also made two feature films, with extremely different results. The first of those pictures, Torque, is almost an art object, the result of a filmmaker who isn't interested in popcorn spectacle making the most ridiculous motorbike action movie you can imagine. It might well be to The Fast and the Furious what Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is to a urinal. And then there's Detention, a film Kahn made 'outside of the system.' It's a teen time travel horror movie - sort of. It's also a head-first dive into pop culture ephemera. I've seen Detention at least a half dozen times in the last three or four years, and now I'm writing about it, I'm tempted to go get the Blu-ray from the shelf and watch it again. The older it gets, the more it dates, and the more interesting it becomes. Kahn has now 'debooted' The Power Rangers for what he calls his 'take on the fan film.' In practice this means some repeated cliches; comically 'gritty' and 'dark' reimaginings of the original lore; extended sequences of people arguing in an 'interrogation room' - such a fan film cliche; and a fan-service twist. To take this thing on face value as a 'cool' test film or argument for what a Power Rangers movie could be is to miss the point entirely - not only of this film but also of The Power Rangers, and arguably of what makes a feature film worth making and watching in the first place. Katee Sackhoff and James van der Beek have joined in, and there's a couple of other famous faces too. This is what Sackhoff was shooting last year when everybody thought she was teasing her involvement in a Marvel movie, which only makes all of that fuss even funnier. https://vimeo.com/120401488 You can read some of Khan's thoughts on the film in a feature at Hit Fix. It also explains how perennial fan-fiim hawk Adi Shankar (often referred to online as "the producer of Dredd," which is pretty accurate but misleading) got involved. Now... where's my copy of Detention?