Jennifers Body - 2 Stars

[Grinch11]

Backlash, A word synonymous with multiple aspects of this rocky horror of a picture show. It’s a return to screen for the written word of Oscar winning Juno scribbler Diablo Cody, and its headlined by red top favourite, controversial vox-pop spouting, sexiest woman of all time™, Megan Fox, in her first lead outing. All of this would have been forgotten had Jennifer’s Body not been a stale, dated offering that’s little more than a monster-of-the-week movie, or at best an average episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Jennifer (Fox) and Needy (Seyfried) are childhood friends, each taking their own very different paths through your typical American high school set-up. Needy is that unique breed of cinematic geek that’s bookmarked “plain” simply because she wears glasses and easily blends into the background of assorted lockers and noticeboards. On the other hand, Jennifer is the cheerleader extraordinaire with the pneumatic lips and the jock soliciting gaze that gives man-eating a whole different meaning when a night with a satanic worshipping emo-band goes horribly wrong.

Jennifer’s Body tries so hard to be something progressive within a genre that’s struggled to move on since Scream. In fact it resembles Wes Cravens post-modern masterpiece but without any of the knowing irony.

Its attempts to be subversive with the genre dynamics only works on a very simple, base level by having the traditionally male killer instead embodied by the heightened femininity of the stunning Fox.

Sexuality has always been a prevalent subtext within horror, usually as a warning to the frivolous adolescents that frolics beneath the sheets will lead to an eternity beneath the ground, or with the Freudian imagery of the assorted weaponry wielded by Michael Myers et al. Here it’s simply that Jennifer is smoking hot and she kills in order to survive.

What it so obviously is is a metaphor for growing up, with newly discovered hungers and biological changes, and this is something that was carried off with much more aplomb with Ginger Snaps and before that Carrie, and both of those were actually scary to boot.

So what of the people of interest? Cody’s script is much more accessible (read “dumbed down”) than her Oscar winner. There are flashes of the signature youth speech in snippets such as “move on dot org”, as well as some wonderfully inventive lines “sandbox dreams never die”, but they only bring to attention the lacklustre nature of the rest of the script.

Fox is fine as the succubus femme fatale, sending her lads mag image up and appearing to have a riot whilst doing so, her next challenge should rely more on acting chops than lifting her leg over a motorcycle and then we can truly judge whether there is more than meets the eye. The true star is the unsung Seyfried. Neatly crafting out a career that her Mean Girls co-star LiLo would swap a session in the tanning salon for.

It could have been the new Heathers; instead it’s a fumbled, derivative, unfunny comedy that’s also an even worse scary movie.