Review: Jennifer's Body (2009)

Director: Karyn Kusama

Starring: Megan Fox's Body

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1131734/

"You're giving me such a wetty."

-Jennifer

This movie makes several things very clear to me. Karyn Kusama is indeed continuing her tirade against the progression of women in movies. Megan Fox’s acting is inversely proportional to the amount of times they show off her breasts and ass in any given film. And Diablo Cody should never be allowed to pick up a pen to write a screenplay ever again. Ever. Again. No, seriously. EVER. AGAIN. Just had to emphasize that. Yes, this is the writer from Juno, the director of Aeon Flux and the lead actress of Transformers, people; we are in for a hell of a shit-carnival in 2009’s Jennifer’s Body…man, am I ever scared.

This is just such a dirty, unpleasant and all around trashy film in every respect. It is a sad, depraved case that is completely removed from reality, without any trace of anything resembling normal human logic. There’s no shame or dignity to it at all; it’s like a festering wound. Odious, sloppy bile seeps from every pore. What am I supposed to learn from this? Never run in with a Satanic emo band? Never become friends with a girl who feasts on flesh? It’s just shit, people. It’s really, really shit.

Sigh. Let’s get started. We kick off the shitfest with a girl named Needy, who is in a mental hospital. Presumably after seeing this movie and realizing she would never work in film again, but I’m not going to judge. She gets pissed at an orderly who tells her to eat healthier and then fucking kicks her across the room somehow, even though she’s like a third of the orderly’s size. Then she gets locked up in solitary, where the idea for this movie should have stayed. But no, she has to tell us her story, because I guess she thinks we give a shit. “Hell is a teenage girl,” she narrates, and…I guess we’re supposed to sympathize with her or something? Who cares. Let’s just get this over with.

The flashback begins with a crappy zoom shot through a house with spooky noises all around it. Does the movie think it is a haunted house tour now? All that’s missing is an evil laugh done in a deep voice, and then the movie is set! But no, instead we have the destruction of women’s rights to be seen and documented…like here, with the first bit of dialogue between Needy – what kind of a name is that again? – and her baby-faced boyfriend Chip:

Chip: Those jeans are hella low. I can almost see your front butt.

Needy: It's a rock show. This is my rock look.

Chip: Well, I can see, like, your womb, so...

Huh. Maybe that’s not representative of all the dialog---

Jennifer: [Grabs Needy's breasts] These are like smart bombs, you point them in the right direction and shit gets real.

Erm…

Needy: The whole country got a tragedy-boner for Devil’s Creek.

…huh?

Jennifer: I'm not even a backdoor-virgin anymore, thanks to Roman. By the way, that hurts. I couldn't even go to flags the next day. I had to stay home and sit on a bag of frozen peas.

Okay, okay, make it stop!

Jennifer: You give me such a wetty.

A wetty? A tragedy-boner? WHAT THE HELL DOES ANY OF THIS MEAN? Talk like normal people, you wretched excuses for humans! Who lets Diablo Cody write this, anyway? Who the fuck is actually under the wishful thinking that Diablo Cody’s writing is in any way intriguing or intelligent? It’s totally ridiculous, every bit of it! “But ooh,” you’ll say. “She won an Oscar for Juno! She must be a good writer! It’s so quirky and original!” Fuck that noise. This is completely inexcusable. And the whole goddamned movie is full of this. Every scene is full of dialogue that makes me want to gouge out my eardrums with a chainsaw. It’s an hour and forty minutes of dialogue that would make Cashback blush. That is shit.

Fuck! Let’s just try and get through the actual plot. If there is one. So basically Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, is a snobby cheerleader who is so one-dimensional I’d be able to see through her if it wasn’t for the thick layer of stupid clouding her entire person. She basically pushes her best friend named Needy Lesnicky, played by Amanda Seyfried, around all the time just because she can. They go to a rock concert where there’s an emo band playing, called Low Shoulder - that's a stupid name for a band. And…okay, here’s the next big problem with this movie.

The music sucks. I mean I am serious; could you possibly get any more bland and unremarkable music and call it rock? Every single fucking song; nothing but senseless guitar plucking and singing that could be done better by any given dead cat. It’s really hard to buy that anyone would actually find this appealing. Even the most brain-dead of indie rock blow-hards wouldn’t find this guttertrash in any way entertaining. It’s completely insipid and void of any kind of value. But then, that’s exactly what I would expect from two morons who are completely out of touch with reality, good taste and modern society alike. So I’m not too disappointed.

Luckily the bar burns down and kills everybody inside, except unfortunately Jennifer, Needy and the emo band survive. Fuck, I was really hoping the movie would end quick with that…you missed your opportunity, O God of Fire. I am disappointed. So the emo band takes Jennifer into their van, which isn’t suspicious at all, and then we fast forward to the night, when Needy is talking to her boyfriend on the phone and she hears a thump in the night. It turns out to be Jennifer, who does some creepy stuff, eats the food out of Needy’s fridge and then vomits up a black bile-like substance in a manner that I believe is akin to how this movie’s script was written.

The next day we see that their teacher is played by JK Simmons…okay, seriously, how did he even get in here? He’s a goofy high school teacher with a robotic hand for some reason…what, is this supposed to be funny or something? What the hell is the purpose of it? Oh well, we have a pointless kill scene to go through as Jennifer seduces the captain of the football team by telling him that his dead best friend in the fire wanted the two of them to be together. Why would he believe this silly, transparent lie? I think you know why.

What color are her eyes?

So she basically disembowels him and drinks his blood, all shown here in full, vivid color. Because this movie has no shame. She also kills an ‘emo’ guy played by Kyle Gallner, who I feel sorry for as he looks like he was gang-banged by a Hot Topic store. While this is going on, Needy and her dweeby boyfriend are having awkward high school sex with SuperTarget condoms (…yeah, they really do say that), and Needy starts having psychic visions of Jennifer killing the guy, leading her to get up and go find her. When she does that, she ends up at Jennifer’s house where they have a spontaneous lesbian make-out scene.

…what? I’m sorry, what? That’s…really weird. It just came out of nowhere! Yes, it was pretty hot but…why even put it in the movie? Right after it they just act like it never happened. Jennifer starts telling her what happened the night she got kidnapped. Apparently the rock band actually revealed to her that they were Satanists who couldn’t get famous any other way, so they had to start sacrificing virgins and bleeding them out in order to get fame and…do they really think any of this is funny? It’s not. Let’s skip it.

The movie plods along with Needy discovering that Jennifer has turned into a succubus by – get this – reading about it at the occult section in the school library. Wow. You’re not even trying, are you? It’s like they just said, fuck it, we don’t even care about trying to tell a story. WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL WOULD HAVE AN OCCULT SECTION IN THE LIBRARY? Fuck it, the movie’s almost over anyway. So Jennifer seduces Needy’s boyfriend and almost kills him before she shows up and they fight. Jennifer delivers lines like “Got a tampon?” when she gets stabbed…ugh…and then the boyfriend dies and Needy goes to kill Jennifer and does. But not before one of the greatest lines in movie history.

I am serious. It’s up there with “Rosebud,” “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” and “We have a failure to communicate.” This line is groundbreaking! Yes, in Megan Fox’s last breaths, as she is stabbed through the heart, she utters the beautiful and poetic words “My tit?” before she dies.

Swoon, audience! Swoon like you’ve never swooned before!

The people behind this movie seem to think Jennifer’s Body is on the same level as similar ‘female-themed’ horror movies like Carrie and Rosemary’s Baby. This is clearly wrong on every conceivable level, not to mention batshit insane. This is a movie that tries to be funny and meaningful at the same time and fails at both. The jokes are mired in wretched dialogue and the meaning is completely silly once you factor in the amount of pandering, slavishly unpleasant indecency on display – ooh, so it’s a metaphor; who gives a shit? It’s hamfisted, clumsy and very poorly written.

This movie is an ugly, wretched thing that makes me feel dirty even sitting through five minutes of it, let alone an hour and forty minutes. There’s just nothing at all likable about it. If you have any given chance to smash this movie with a sledgehammer, do so in the name of women in movies everywhere. Goddamn, what trash! What utter trash!