Tweets ahead: Detention (2011).

Before we proceed, it should also be noted that Detention is a movie that, on paper, I thought I would absolutely hate. Everything I read described it as a fast-paced, disorienting paean to the mash-up age, a kind of Scream for the Twitter era. And while this description is apt, it also fails to do justice to what makes this movie so special: namely, its middle-finger intelligence (pictured), kinetic visual style, and a boundless enthusiasm that manages to break through its own Kevlar vest of referential irony to deliver something surprisingly thoughtful, and even touching.

But Detention is very much a love-it-or-hate-it movie. The algorithmic magic of Rotten Tomatoes suggests that coin-flip figure should be revised upward: I was honestly a little surprised to find that the film has a lowly 31% rating. But the user reviews tell a different story, with Detention earning a solid 66%.

Is this evidence of the yawning generation gap between a stodgy cadre of baby boomer film critics and a younger viewership of smartphone-wielding teenage hooligans? Or is it the same old critical snobbery towards anything even resembling horror that we've seen hundreds of times before?

Sony Pictures gamely attempts to summarize Detention as an "apocalyptic fantasy, horror, science fiction, action-thriller, body swapping, time-traveling teen romantic comedy", but even this mouthful falls short of capturing the film's dizzying sweep. Put simply, Detention is the teen movie to end all teen movies.

It's a 500 MPH live-action comic book gene-splice, with dominant and recessive traits from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Skins, John Hughes, Shaun of the Dead, Degrassi (if upgraded to a hard R), Heathers, Mark Millar, Buckaroo Banzai, Clueless, and about a thousand other reference points that whiz by like bullets fired from a pop culture AK-47.

In the growing pantheon of self-aware horror films, Detention occupies a unique niche: it may not be quite as charming as Shaun of the Dead or as artfully composed as Behind the Mask, but it has so much youthful zeal and raw energy that it nonetheless shoots straight to the head of the pack. And compared to, say, Shaun of the Dead's expert mix of horror and humor—a balance which could probably be confirmed by an electron microscope—Detention leans much further towards comedy, with the horror usually arriving as a welcome, bloody surprise.

I really think the closest point of comparison for Detention's singular style is Dan Harmon's brilliant and beloved sitcom Community, which seems to win critical esteem in direct proportion to how fast Detention loses it. Grizzly Lake and Greendale CC feel like they come from the same universe: the "schmitty"-spouting teen twerps that torment Jeff and Britta in one episode could have escaped from Riley's science class, and a slightly younger Abed would blend seamlessly into the film's cast (where he would instantly recognize Riley's Angela Chase costume at Sander's party).

Yet Community earns endless (and well-deserved!) critical accolades while Detention languishes, far from earning even a "Fresh" rating. Why? Again, blame the generation gap: while Community often culls material from fare like My Dinner With Andre or John Woo's The Killer, Detention's more masscult sensibility alludes to decidedly gauche sources like Steven Seagal or Saw.

But one piece of Detention's technicolor pop mosaic stands out to me as evidence of the subtle taste and sophistication that makes it so special: despite very ample opportunity, filmmaker Joseph Kahn resists the impulse to make his Breakfast Club references anything but oblique. Like fireworks prior to child safety regulations, postmodernism is a dangerous toy: witness the cloying, candy-binge preciousness of Juno, or the painfully try-hard pyrotechnics of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. But Detention is the movie that these and many other entries of the past few years were supposed to be.

Sometimes Detention admittedly feels more like a series of vignettes than a movie, and towards the end the quantum whipcracks of the plot do become a little vertigo-inducing. But that's all part of the fun, and also part of the point in a movie which features at least half a dozen kitchen sinks. 

Plus, it's hard to complain when there are so many loopy highlights: a hilariously left-field, Spider-Man style digression regarding the origins of "TV Hand"; a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie; a deadpan tour through 19 years of pop fashion courtesty of "the silent enigma" Elliot Fink (Detention's equivalent of Pulp Fiction's dance contest); and the alien abduction of an extraterrestrial, time-traveling bear. (Yes, really.)

So, watch Detention. Realize that there's a good chance you'll hate it—but if you do, you can at least take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. 

Then again, maybe you're just old.