Directed by Karyn Kusama
Written by Diablo Cody
Featuring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons
Review by Matthew Funk
Fans of Joss Whedon will delight—four years after FOX cancelled Firefly, they pay partial penance with this well-intentioned Buffy: The Vampire Slayer remake: Jennifer’s Body. Like Buffy, Jennifer’s Body uses wit and comic book violence to observe that high school social climbing is a close cousin to cannibalism. Unlike Buffy, it fails to deliver the dramatic goods or to show more sophistication than a bitchy teenager...
Jennifer’s Body is high school in every sense of the term. The plot could have come from any semi-literate with a Metallica tee-shirt: A stone fox is possessed by a randy demon with a hankering for boy flesh. In the end, good triumphs over evil. We learn this in the first five minutes, but it isn’t until the closing sequence that we get the full flavor of adolescent power trip. In scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s world, the pretty girl really is a monster, and we’re no more sorry to see her torn from her throne than we might be if we were a jealous fourteen year old. The monster, Jennifer’s only tragedy is that she has to suffer being such a superficial character. She is just as fake as high school seemed.
Director Karyn Kusama’s overdrawn affinity for the script’s sophomoric perspective is vivid. Stylized shots frame plot points as contrived as any 80s slasher flick. You can time your watch by the reveals, all the ham-fisted horror tropes: the monster showing itself to the hero alone; the girl running through the woods to save her doomed boyfriend only to find his discarded corsage; the pair that splits up despite it being obvious to anyone short of a severe head trauma victim that it’s certain disaster. And as the plot runs its predictable course to righteous teen Gotterdammerung, any seasoned horror fan will be looking at their watch.
Despite its see-through skeleton, the film delivers some skin-deep goods. Diablo Cody equips each of her characters with an arsenal of pithy Buffyisms. But with the story already leaping the rails of internal logic and making only idle stabs at drama, cracking wise amidst the carnage makes the characters seem more psychotic than sassy. These people are cleverer while ankle-deep in a loved one’s arteries than you would be among close friends with a comfortable coke buzz. Some say Megan Fox is revealed as a “real actress.” I did not see her reveal much. This is not her fault. It’s a role so flat it presses her into the paper doll her critics cast her as. She is squandered as the hollow Jennifer, is as much the vessel for FOX’s lust for the 18-34 male market as she is for any anthropophagic urges.
Amanda Seyfried, our bespectacled Buffy the Demon Slayer, opens a vein or two at dramatic attempt. But attempt is all she can attain in a story as dramatically dense as Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. Troma fans may eat Jennifer’s Body right up—it’s got cripple jokes and inappropriate comedy aplenty, and the only romantic love scene is a contrived lesbian sequence that’s as obvious a prosthetic as the science teacher’s hook hand. That’s assuming that they’re frustrated by the lack of nudity and production value envy.
The most frustrating thing about Jennifer’s Body is that it seems to miss many an easy mark. High school critique by way of horror is nothing new, no matter how much the film’s press kit might want to crow to the contrary. Films like writer Karen Walton’s Ginger Snaps seize on the same subject—the mighty and dangerous mystery of adolescent female sexuality—and actually deliver substance. The difference is that Ginger Snaps and Lucky McKee’s May make an effort to establish grounds for the audience to care about the monster, such that she seems as much a victim of environment and urges as those she kills. Beyond showing that Jennifer pricked her finger on a tack at age four, we get no dose of sympathy for our title character. She was vehicle for teen mean before and after Satan took up residence.
Any argument that Jennifer’s Body is groundbreaking, let alone feminist, is as simple-minded as its plot development. Jennifer is no more than a beautiful tool, hatefully empty of motivation or vulnerability. There is no ugliness to her, save that we’re supposed to despise her for her flesh-fueled beauty. As for Amanda Seyfried’s demon-busting role, the only girl power she flashes is her inexplicable superpowers. She is dork in name only, and sympathetic simply by sheer power of screen time. In sum, the formula of Jennifer’s Body adds up to a high school film that could have been plotted by a high school student.
I know I wrote something identical when dreaming a vehicle for fleshpot fantasy. A quarter of this articles’ male readership could probably say the same. It is as serious as a horror-inspired excuse to make knuckle-children gets. Cody’s flashy dialogue ends up seeming just as masturbatory. So for a million-buck flashback to when Buffy had to stop hyena-demon possessed students from devouring their Sunnydale High classmates, shell out for Jennifer’s Body. You won’t get to see pubes and you won’t get choked up like you did when they killed off Angel, but you will get to see Amanda jump through a window needlessly and there are a few funnies that stick with you. But for high-school translated into horror motif with more sophistication, coherence and depth than a coloring book, look to films like Ginger Snaps or the classic Carrie. They have the dignity to paint their world in gray. At the very least, people get naked and you might learn something. In Jennifer’s Body, like in high school, neither happens.
Matthew Funk is a professional writer in marketing for corporate America, a writing mentor and the author of several manuscripts that illuminate the beauty of human extremes. A graduate of the Professional Writing MFA at USC, his work is also featured on his Web site.
