Jennifer's Body (2009)

There's an intriguing gulf between those critics that liked Jennifer's Body, and those who hated it.  Generally, those who loved it tend to harp upon the film's philosophical intentions and subtext as the reason for the film's season.  Negative critic's reviews were essentially "this movie dumb and not scary fart."

Guess which side I'm on!  Jennifer's Body does contain a number of quasi-interesting ideas and subversions of the horror genre, but as a horror-comedy film, it is complete shit.  It's sort of a cautionary morality tale about what happens when you watch stuff like Suspiria and The Lost Boys and take a ton of notes about the symbolism in the sets and the roles that characters play, but completely neglect what made those films such good entertainment in addition to their cultural viability.  Cody and her director, Karyn Kusama, created a horror film with a mediocre amount of brains, but literally no heart.

The plot essentially revolves around three dull high school characters: Whiny nerdgirl Needy (Amanda Seyfried, continuing the tradition of casting attractive women as lame girls because GLASSES), her long-time bff, super popular cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox), and Needy's quasi-nerdy boyfriend Young Neil Chip (Johnny Simmons).  Things quickly go to shit when Needy and Jennifer go to a concert of evil satanic independent rock people (alot of reviews cast them as indie, but it's unclear how Cody intends to portray their genre since they sure as hell don't sound indie, and they make reference to Maroon 5 as their artistic and financial goal), who kidnap Jennifer as a sacrifice to Satan for stardom.  The process then makes Jennifer into an evil demon who has to feast upon the blood of a dude every month or otherwise her otherworldly makeup disappears or something.

Hey, did you catch that?   Has to eat dude's blood EVERY MONTH?  Quite the hilarious tweezt, eh?  If you disagree, well strap in, because  the entire film is full of those cute little surface twists and symbols with no real meaningful message.  I'm assuming that alot of critics thought the intellectual exercises were totally clever and brilliant because they think the horror genre is an endless wasteland of girls getting raped with knives or ghost knives.  Jennifer's Body really does feel like critic food, designed to appeal to some mythical subsection of people that never watch horror movies and think they're intellectuals because they read three articles by Pauline Kael.  The one thing Jennifer's Body does do competently is making you think that the messages aren't really subtle, but you're just really smart for figuring them out, like we're 5 years old and at our church's Easter Egg hunt.  Oh, everyone's just sort of a victim in a different way!  My god, it's like Diablo Cody wrote a love letter to me and I have the secret decoder ring!  Jesus Christ.

I'd probably be more hospitable to the film if there was more to it than "Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine and High School is Really Confusing to Girls," but holy shit there isn't.  As horror, it completely fails.  Again, for all the horror that Diablo Cody has purportedly ingested, she apparently missed the twin concepts of terror or suspense.  You know what is going to happen at any given point in the film, and when it does happen it's just some cgi teeth or shadows that shows just enough that you know what is happening (bye implied horror) but not nearly enough that a brownshirt gorehound is going to be impressed (bye overt horror).  As far as I can tell she's going for some sort of exploitation vibe, but there's nothing really violent enough or sleazy sexy enough (unless you count seeing the top half of megan fox's body double's butt as sleazy sexy enough) to count as even a clever inversion of exploitation cinema.

Some people would probably characterize this complaint as saying that I'm just some gross male that can't handle my horror films straying from conventions.  But there's a difference between doing something genuinely creative and different in horror (for example, Dead Ringers or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and just having a movie where a demon girl kills some guys and that's about it.  Removing familiar conventions and replacing it with dead static doesn't mean that the director is challenging the system, it means you just directed Aeon Flux and have no idea how to direct horror effectively.

And guess what it also completely fails in comedy too.  Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, regardless of their acting talents, are completely ill-suited for Cody's style of dialogue.  While I disliked Juno, Ellen Paige and Michael Cera at least seemed to adapt to the sub-mental rhythm of Cody's wacky word phrases and turn it into something of their own.  Here, the two women just sort of splurt out stuff like "oh that lead singer is SALTY," always emphasizing the wacky words because that's the joke right????  I get a sinister feeling that Cody probably preferred the actresses becoming dialogue tubes to what happened with Juno, because holy shit there are so many scenes of them talking and talking and talking and it's never funny or clever just some goddamned future spaceman language you'd hear in a five dollar tor book.  It also doesn't help that literally no one is going to believe that Seyfried or Fox are in high school, so now we just have people my age talking like Microsoft Mary ate a bucket of Mad Libs.  Johnny Simmons fares a little better since he talks like a normal human being and you can pretend he's in college.  The only actually funny people in the movie, Amy Sedaris and JK Motherfucking Simmons, get like two scenes each where they just sort of move the plot along.  Are you fucking kidding me?

I guess what ultimately galls me about this film is how it's somehow treated as something greater as a horror genre film by some people simply because it refuses to be entertaining and instead spin its english grad thesis wheels.  For example, look at this fucking paragraph by some dildo on Movieline:

Horror and teen comedy are two genres proven time and again to be invulnerable to reviewers (when they’re even screened for reviewers). Put them together, though — especially in a semi-satirical fashion that turns the first genre’s sex-and-death conventions on their heads — and you get a whole lot of dickheads sniping that Body didn’t do enough to adhere to convention. “Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr. Sigh. 

Could it use a more knockout horror blow by the end? Sure it could. Could it be funnier? I guess so. But: That’s not the movie Cody and Kusama wanted to make. It’s ultimately a movie about two teenage girls’ misadventures in victimization — literally (Jennifer's attack by the rock band), thematically (theLast Girl trope of horror movies), and culturally (the media's exploitation of survivors). The jokes are virtually incidental to the friction imposed on women who happen to be two sides of the same coin. Who’s the monster, and who made the monster? Sorry if you wanted Heathers with demons, fellas. Equipment’s cheap these days; perhaps make your own?

SEE IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT THIS MOVIE IS A WARM TURD BECAUSE DIABLO CODY HAS A MESSAGE.  Here's a hint, clownshoes: a horror film can be entertaining and scary and have some clever ideas at the same time!  A friend reminded me of Teeth, which holy shit inverts horror genres and also manages to have some pleasing gore and grossly funny scenes.  Of course, every critic referred to that film as "genre" (and therefore not worthy of serious discussion) because it dared to be entertaining. Two years later, the same people totally nodded at Kusama's pronouncement that Jennifer's Body is totally post-modern horror because nothing surprising or scary or funny happens.

Is it possible to be anti-intellectual when your targets have no actual intellect?