Bad Kids of Crestview Academy (2017)

I kept waiting for this to turn into a groan-er, but ended up very surprised. There's some very dark twisted humor woven throughout, and a good choice of newbie casting gives it a solid base to build on. After all the garbage horror I'm finding on Amazon Prime, this was a delight. I had an expectation of some degree of quality when I saw Gershon, Astin and Browder (who also directed!), and was waiting to be let down by the 'teens' but they held their own which saves the movie. Funny without being silly or campy, gory but not ridiculously so, and a solid script that stayed on point. The blending of the graphic novel scenes was a cherry on top to be sure. I usually prefer my horror to lean more supernatural , but this was a solid choice, and THANK HEAVENS none of that found footage garbage.

Based on a graphic novel and uses bits of it for effect. Souxsie (Sammi Hanratty) is investigating the death of her sister, ruled a suicide. She believes it was murder. She manages to get herself in rich kid detention on Saturday so she can find out what happened...a party that she was at. The film opens with a SWAT team chasing her down and she has a welder flame thrower. It then goes back a day to take us up to that point. The ending, I didn't see coming...you won't either, unless you read the book.This is a quirky clever cult film that was filled with smiles, but not hard laughter. The twists are more clever than funny. The movie has some good characters that I wish we could have gotten to know better, a group that makes the "Breakfast Club" look like the weenies they really were.Guide: F-word. Brief sex. Brief nudity

I really enjoyed the first movie "Bad Kids Go To Hell". Pretty good acting and a good plot and everything. But this one, "Bad Kids of Crestview Academy", just really disappointed me. A lot of the acting wasn't good. It seemed forced, over dramatic, and at times didn't make sense. But I think, at times, that had more to do with direction and the script than the actors themselves. The dialogue is the same. It was annoying and at times didn't make sense or unnecessary. I really about stopped watching a few times but I already invested the time and I just wanted to know how it ended, in case there is a third. But I literally suffered through the last half. The story line just sucked. I feel like there could have been more thought put into it and the dialogue or something.

I enjoyed the film, but didn't love it like I do the the first movie. While they managed to capture the essence of the original film - telling the story in bits and pieces, out of order, any with layers within layers - but whereas they reached a point where that formula again worked, the film then went way too over-the-top in an attempt to really out crazy its predecessor. It was also disappointing that, while the first movie had reasonably well-developed, multi-layered characters, with the exception of the main character Siouxsie, all the others were ridiculously shallow one-note caricatures in this one. If you really loved Bad Kids Go to Hell, you're more likely to get some enjoyment out of this one, but don't expect it to be as good.