The one perfect aspect of "Jennifer's Body" is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain. In this dodgy hipster horror film from the pen of Diablo Cody ("Juno"), Megan Fox plays Jennifer, the hottest girl in Devil's Kettle High School, who smolders whenever she feasts on the innards of slathering teenage boys and turns gaunt when she grows hungry for testosterone-laden "Satan chow."
Amanda Seyfried plays her virtuous best friend, Needy, who would probably be considered even hotter than Jennifer if she took off her glasses and dressed for sexual success. Cody's script, directed by Karyn Kusama ("Girl Fight," "Aeon Flux"), hooks the pseudo-intellectual crowd with its opening scene. Jean-Paul Sartre in "No Exit" wrote "Hell is other people;" Cody in "Jennifer's Body" declares "Hell is a teenage girl."
You might eye the exit longingly as Cody and Kusama, right from the start, display little knack for mythmaking or storytelling. With a laborious flashback framing device, they lay out the incident that led to Jennifer's demonic possession, involving a devil-worshiping bar band called "Low Shoulder" whose members are willing to commit gory virgin sacrifice just to be as successful as Maroon 5. These guys should be called "Slow on the Uptake" - they actually believe that Jennifer is a virgin.
With the go-for-broke tastelessness of a female Tarantino, Cody riffs on the tragic Rhode Island nightclub fire of 2003 while depicting the power of adolescent female bonds. As Low Shoulder fans all around her break out in flames, Needy shakes off the horrible carnage and tries to save her friend. What little suspense the rest of the movie has comes from Needy's slow awakening that Jennifer is going on a cannibalistic killing spree - and that Needy's innocuous boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons), might be her next victim.
At their most daring, Cody and Kusama take the ambiguous intensity of teen same-sex friendships to extremes; they also dare to suggest that shared grief over mass disasters can numb hearts and minds instead of soothe them. (It's a good sick joke that Low Shoulder becomes the official Devil's Kettle grieving band.)
But the film lacks any driving force. By the end, Needy becomes a tragic horror figure, like Carrie, thrust by destiny and circumstance into a homicidal vortex. But Jennifer is the movie's fulcrum, and she is just the butt - well, maybe the butt and torso - of a bad cosmic joke. Fox brings some self-knowing humor to her teen-sexpot status, and Seyfried can be touchingly confused. (Maybe she's simply thinking, "I'm supposed to be the plain one?")
But Cody's writing still smacks of "Juno"-esque self-satisfaction. It's all up-to-the-minute slang or pop and commercial talk rejiggered to resemble slang. "You're jealous!" in Diablo-talk becomes "You're lime-green Jello!" Whatever happened to the search for the bon mot? Cody stuffs her scripts with sour bonbons. Someone isn't just a "zombie" but a "zombie mannequin robot statue." Emperor Joseph II reportedly complained of "The Marriage of Figaro," "Too many notes!" In "Jennifer's Body," there are too many words and not enough good ones.
MPAA Rating: R (for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use)
Running time 1:42
Starring Megan Fox (Jennifer), Amanda Seyfried (Needy) and Johnny Simmons (Chip).
Directed by Karyn Kusama. A Fox Atomic release.
