Main cast: Megan Fox (Jennifer Check), Amanda Seyfried (Anita “Needy” Lesnicki), Johnny Simmons (Chip), Adam Brody (Nikolai), Kyle Gallner (Colin Gray), Cynthia Stevenson (Mrs Dove), JK Simmons (Mr Wroblewski), and Amy Sedaris (Toni Lesnicki)
Director: Karyn Kusama
Jennifer’s Body is an uneven movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Is it a campy horror comedy or is it some pretentious teen soap opera masquerading as a cult classic?
In this one, we have two best friends, Jennifer Check and Needy Lesnicki. Jennifer is the popular cheerleader while Needy is the… well, not so pretty one. One thing you will notice in this movie is that while the guys are actually ordinary looking, even the Plain Jane character is played by an actress who is anything but plain looking. Even in a movie scripted by Diablo Cody, one which she yammered about as being more about “female empowerment” than your average horror movie, the typical standards in your average horror movie concerned female appearances still apply, heh.
One fine evening, a band called Low Shoulder decides to make an appearance in their sleepy town, and Jennifer is eager to meet and maybe get to know the lead singer Nikolai better backstage. Needy is dragged along, naturally. The evening ends in utter chaos as the club caught fire. In the chaos, Jennifer is taken by Nikolai into the band’s van. The next thing Needy knows, Jennifer shows up in her place, bleeding badly and vomiting gruesome-looking stuff all over the floor. When badly mauled bodies of guys in their high school start piling up in the coming months, Needy begins to suspect that there is something seriously wrong with Jennifer.
On the bright side, there are the occasional witty lines here and there in this movie. On the whole, however, there are far too few actual good horror scenes to make this one a watchable film of that nature. The pacing is sluggish and the movie lacks any compelling build-up to a dramatic moment. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried put in more spirited and entertaining performances into their respective roles than they have to, but their enthusiasm is not enough to make this movie worthwhile.
There is a pointless and far from sexy make-out scene here between the two actresses, which epitomizes everything that is wrong about this movie. Like that scene, this movie doesn’t know whether it wants to titillate me or hit me in the head with Diablo Cody’s idea of female empowerment. As a result, the whole thing ends up neither here nor there. Not to mention, I sincerely hope Miss Cody isn’t telling me that two girls making out to thrill the guys is not some kind of female empowerment.
Jennifer’s Body is not scary enough to be a horror movie, not funny enough to be a comedy, and not well-executed to be a compelling or suspenseful drama. Still, if you need an excuse to watch Megan Fox vamp it up on screen, you can always rent this movie and tell your mother that you are just doing some extracurricular assignment on modern-day female empowerment.
