A Year of Bad Movies # 18 — “Jennifer’s Body”
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
IMDB Score: 5.7 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 42 out of 100
Metacritic Score: 47 out of 100
I liked it. What can I say? I guess I’m a sucker for teen horror movies.
Megan Fox plays a teenage girl who is sacrificed to a demon in an indie band's scheme to become famous.
“Jennifer’s Body,” the new horror film staring Megan Fox as a demonic high school cheerleader, is not a great film. The tone is somewhat inconsistent, the dialog’s overdosing on precocious slang can be a bit grating at time and a lackluster ending that sort of fizzles out leaves a blemish on the final movie.
That being said, I had a lot of fun watching “Jennifer’s Body” — which is more then can be said about most of the bad movies I’ve seen so far this month.
A horror/comedy, “Jennifer’s Body” has all the right ingredients for a fun teen horror film. There is near-nudity, plenty of blood and gore, a trendy soundtrack and even a lesbian kiss between the film’s stars Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.
Watching the film, I was taken back to my own days in high school when my sister and I would devour every slasher flick and gorefest that was released. Without discretion, we watched them all: the good, the bad and the ugly.
Compared to some of the teen-centric horror flicks that came out in the late ‘90s, “Jennifer’s Body” is practically a “Citizen Kane” of its genre.
Teenage horror films are a shallow breed. While there is more often then not an underlying metaphor for some high school emotional problem like drugs, sex or rock and roll, these allegories are mostly glossed over in favor of stupid kids doing stupid things that will eventually lead them towards getting killed in highly violent, highly creative ways.
In “Jennifer’s Body,” the kills come fast and they come bloody. Megan Fox walks through the movie in a near constant state of sex-dripped gore — like some kind of cannibal Lolita.
Diablo Cody’s script keeps things light — utilizing her knack for creating quasi-annoying trendy teenage slang to provide a wit to the proceedings. As I’ve talked about before in this blog, without a sense of humor horror films can be almost unwatchable exercises in human depravity.
As long as characters can occasionally crack a joke, though, even the goriest of death scenes can be enjoyed by audience members who aren’t basement-dwelling serial killers in training.
While Megan Fox may be the public face of the movie thanks to her good looks and flavor-of-the-month appeal, the real star of the film is Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried’s performance in the film is more proof of her emerging talent and skill as an actor. In fact, all of the film’s other actors are overshadowed by Seyfried’s talent— though I’ll admit that Megan Fox’s acting was actually bearable in the film, which is more then I could say about her after watching “Transformers 2” this summer.
While I’ll admit to being a little biased due to my unabashed love of teenage horror movies, I walked out of “Jennifer’s Body” with a smile on my face — and it wasn’t just from having seen several shots of Fox in near nudity. The film had a real charm to it — something that helps elevate it from the heap of refuge most films in its genre tend to end up residing. It was a lot of fun — and in a year of bad movies, that’s all I can really ask for.
