Jennifer’s Body: reviewed

Jennifer’s Body has been taking a pounding from critics. Poor Jennifer. Maybe I’m a lone voice in the wilderness on this one, but I really enjoyed it. Diablo Cody’s latest is one of those smart but trashy future cult hit films. It’s not an Oscar winning biopic (thank god). It’s not jam-packed with explosions and state of the art CGI (thank god). Nor yet is it yet another identikit Sundance indie flick commissioned by execs hungry for a piece of the Little Miss Sunshine pie (god again working overtime here, cheers). It’s a lot of fun, if cheesy in places. Review below the trailer.

This review first appeared on channel4.com/film.

Jennifer (Megan Fox) is evil. Not just high-school evil, but evil-evil. Can her BFF stop her before she chows down on half the school’s population?

As the poster proclaims: hell yes. For fans of Heathers, Mean Girls and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, here’s a tasty morsel of a high school comedy horror that puts girls in the driving seat and boys on the menu. If this doesn’t appeal to you as a concept, stop reading now. There are dozens of reviews of Jennifer’s Body already out there that have failed to see the delicious appeal of such a film. Go read them, and revel in the Diablo Cody backlash (a backlash against a funny, successful woman? Surely not…). Alternatively, if you’re of the opinion than Megan Fox as demonic man-eater and the ever-awesome Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Veronica Mars, Chloe) nerding up as The One Person In This Crazy Town Who Knows The Truth, plus Adam Brody (The OC) as a complete penis of an emo band frontman, sounds completely fabulous, read on.

It can surely only be the genre that has American critics twice the age of the film’s protagonists wearily dismissing Cody’s “slanguage-laden”, “glib teen-hip dialogue” as “self-conscious splatter over a sorely lacklustre scare flick” where they loftily praised Juno as having “introduced a writer with a fresh point of view about young people in today’s world.” You see, Miss Cody, it’s okay to mash language into grammarian-baiting new slang in the context of a wiseass Sundance smash teen pregnancy indie flick, but if you do it in a comedy horror, you’re just running after the self-referential horror bandwagon long after it’s been carted off to the junkyard and melted down for parts.

To borrow a Diablo Cody phrase, this is “freaktarded” – the considerably less twee Jennifer’s Body has easily as many angles on teen living as Juno, and it is pure genre-prejudice to believe that a film featuring demonic rites, sacrifice and supernatural terror is inherently inferior to a more “real” treatment of adolescence. So, what’s the appeal of Jennifer’s Body?

Jennifer’s Body joins a very small number of horror movies where hero and villain are both female and both proper, believable characters. We’ve all met Jennifer: the girl who zeroes in on her selected male target, blasts him into submission and devours his soul. In Jennifer’s case this is literally so, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Fox, beautifully sending up her own ‘FHM’ image, cannibalise a gamut of high school stereotypes: nervous Asian guy, football jock, and the fey emo kid – in Jennifer’s words, “He’s into maggot rock. He wears nail polish. My dick is bigger than his.”

Probably because the studio was after a 15 certificate, we don’t actually see too much blood, this being more high-school comedy than gorefest, but the inventive descriptions make up for it: apparently one of Jennifer’s victims looked like “lasagne with teeth” when he was found. The most monstrous thing in the film is in fact Adam Brody’s indie frontman, leader of dire band Low Shoulder who are to blame for Jennifer’s demonic state. Intent on sacrificing a virgin, they make just one crucial error – she’s no virgin, which has unfortunate occult consequences. Why would an MOR emo act want to sacrifice a virgin, traditionally the province of death metal? Why, to further their careers of course – as Brody puts it to a reluctant bandmate: “Do you want to be rich and awesome, like that guy from Maroon 5?” Killing virgins in order to emulate Maroon 5 surely ranks higher in the catalogue of evil than practically any other act.

None of this, fun as it is, would be worth much without such a winning heroine, but Amanda Seyfried is simply yummy as Anita “Needy” Lesnicki, the put-upon geek and unlikely best friend to Jennifer’s cheerleader queen. The relationship is not an equal one. Although Needy tries to convince herself that “sandbox love never dies”, these days she’s more likely to find herself on the end of a stream of invective from her BFF: “Please don’t talk to yourself; it’s one of your more freakish needy behaviours and it makes us both look like total gaylords.” And that’s pre-demon Jennifer talking.

Jennifer’s Body has more to say about the dynamics of teenaged female friendship, sexual power games and the trials of adolescence than many a more self-consciously worthy film, but even without this uplifting backbone it would still be an above averagely entertaining night at the cinema. Unleash your inner teen queen bitch and enjoy a dose of pure fun: the cult following starts here.

Verdict:
At last, a film for girls (and right-minded boys) that cuts out Bridget Jones-style whinging about wobbly thighs, dispenses with obsessive Jane Austen husband-seeking and completely ignores the naff materialism of ‘Sex And The City’ in favour of a funny fable about high-school friendship and sexual awakening.