Jennifer's Body - Movie Review
Writer Diablo Cody's New Zombie Film.Scary? No. Funny? No. Bad? Yes.
Oct 5, 2009
The horror comedy genre is a road not taken very often. Evil Dead stumbled on it accidentally, and Evil Dead 2 perfected it. There are really not too many examples of well-executed horror comedies in today’s movies. Writer Diablo Cody (Juno) has decided to take on the hard task with Jenifer’s Body and returns with less than stellar results.
Jennifer’s Body is a story centered on two life-long friends, the nerdy Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried) and the popular high school cheerleader Jennifer Check (Megan Fox). Their relationship takes a turn for the worst when a local bar is burnt to the ground and Jennifer develops a sudden thirst for human blood.
While the entire city mourns the tragedy at the local bar, Jennifer begins to kills the students of the small-town high school. Needy begins to uncover the gruesome truth and realizes she must stop her best friend’s murdering rampage.
Although Megan Fox was the key character in the studio’s marketing for the film, the real main character of the film is Needy. She narrates the story and provides a solid performance. Fox’s performance seems to rely solely on sex appeal. Her dialogue is flat and lacks any sort of emotional impact. Jennifer’s supposed funny lines are never truly funny because it’s hard to tell if she is trying to be funny or is acting poorly. Another focus of the film is the deterioration of the relationship between Needy and Jenifer. Although it is obvious that their relationship is odd to begin with due to their different personalities, there is no chemistry between the characters.
It is obvious that Jenifer’s Body tries to be scary, gory and sexy. Sadly, the movie falls flat across the board. Jennifer never oozes with sex appeal through the entire movie. The audience is not asking her to drop naked, but simply looking for her to display a sort of sensuality that is usually created through a strong performance. The movie’s scary elements are only delivered through typical cheap scares. Although the movie is rated R, it is hardly a gory or gruesome movie. Surprisingly, the lack of gore hurts the film tremendously. When Jennifer attacks her prey, the movie never actually shows her killing her prey. The audience is only shown distance shots of the murders and the characters’ reactions of the killings rather than actually showing Jennifer’s horrendous actions. Less is sometimes more in films, but in this case, more would have been a lot better.
Jennifer’s Body lacks edginess and fails to take any risks. The movie definitely plays it safe, and the supposed dark horror comedy is instead an uninspiring teen comedy centered on a demonic cheerleader.
4/10
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