Jennifer’s Body written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama is exactly what I expected. It’s a campy, women centric look at the atrocities of being a teenage girl. For some of us who have been there, the first line of the film “Hell is a teenage girl” seems just right. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried play two best friends who have grown apart. Jennifer (Fox) is the nasty sex pot and Seyfriend plays Anita (Needy) the nerdy girl with the cute boyfriend who has become Jennifer’s lapdog.
Much has been made about how Diablo Cody wanted to put a feminist bent on the horror genre which she loves. I’m not a big horror fan and this was way more campy than scary. It’s about revenge on all the people who do you wrong. Jennifer becomes evil “not high school evil” as Needy says but evil evil when an idiot band of indie rockers decide that the best way for them to become famous is to sacrifice a virgin to the devil. (Go with it.) Since they are in a small town, they think all the girls are virgins and so we know there will be trouble when Jennifer gets into their van looking for fun pretending she is a virgin. Clearly, she doesn’t know what they have in mind and quickly believes she is about to be gang raped. The ritual goes awry when the idiots sacrifice a non-virgin and so Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon. (Go with it.) And the demon wants revenge. She wants revenge on all the guys who treat high school girls like crap.
Cody said in an interview with Reuters: “(Director) Karyn Kusama and I are both outspoken feminists. We wanted to subvert the classic horror model of women being terrorized.”
So now the terrorized is the terrorizer. I want to make it clear that this film is by no means a work of art. Megan Fox is beyond plastic looking and her acting is atrocious and on the whole the film is not particularly scary. But as a fan of Cody’s work I love how she takes expectations and messes with them. I also love the pop culture laden language and while Cody has talked about the feminism as being subversive, I found it to be very present and overt.
Here’s my favorite line: “PMS isn’t real. It was created by the boy run media to make us seem crazy.”
Any movie that has the guts to say a line like that gets points in my book.
Film opens wide tomorrow.
I am very pleased you enjoyed the film, Melissa. I LOVE that PMS line! I read that in the script.
I’m seeing it on Saturday. w00t w00t
oooh i woudl love to check this movie out!