Jennifer's Body (2009, Karyn Kusama) (Patreon)

41/100

Gonna have to go with the original consensus on this one. Sure, the marketing campaign inspired some dopey dismissals predicated on the wrong target audience—a decidedly femme-centric film shouldn't be faulted for insufficiently titillating teenage boys. And I can kinda sorta maybe almost dimly see what Cody and Kusama were up to here, and why Jennifer's Body has recently been championed as a feminist work that was badly misunderstood by blinkered male critics (like me! though I'm seeing it for the first time now, reclamation firmly in mind) upon release. Still...whaaa? Even after reading multiple passionate defenses/analyses, I can't reconcile anyone's preferred subtext with the painfully incoherent muddle that I just watched. The film feints toward rape-revenge righteousness, but it doesn't want to risk alienating a mainstream audience; consequently, Jennifer vacillates among victim, avenger and outright villain in a way that feels indecisive and hedge-betting rather than complex. Never having seen a Transformers film—my previous Megan Fox experience consists of This Is 40 plus her New Girl arc—I was by no means predisposed to judge her harshly, but the character as written amounts to Heather-as-a-vampire (or a demon, technically), with Seyfried as our Veronica, and Fox just leans into the haughty, entitled obnoxiousness. So much so, in fact, that her friendship with "Needy" (ugh) is never remotely credible, even allowing for its being rooted in early childhood. "Young woman becomes evil flesh-eating monster due to botched ritual murder by Satan-worshipping indie rockers" keeps clumsily stumbling into "insecure nerd struggles to escape the shadow/influence of her absurdly hot best friend," with no meaningful conjunction between the two. And then Cody throws in stuff that's at once weirdly irrelevant and completely insane, like having Jennifer's abduction occur in the immediate aftermath of what's essentially a fictionalized version of the 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire! Whatever we're supposed to take away from first Jennifer's and then Needy's (and even the Satanists', really) apparent indifference to having barely survived a national-news tragedy during which they witnessed classmates fucking burn alive—and the movie does know that this is weird, as Needy's boyfriend voices the sane reaction when he's told what happened—it failed to register for me, apart from serving as a huge distraction when e.g. I'm meant to be shaken by Jennifer's glassy, far-away look as she sits in the band's tour van. What's about to happen to her is horrific, but everyone's already behaving like ghouls.

Okay, I feel like I'm ranting a bit. Point is, Jennifer's Body is all over the place, allowing people to seize on the aspects they find interesting or appealing and just ignore all the stuff that undermines, contradicts or otherwise fails to support that interpretation. One reassessment I read summarized the film's message as "A popular mean girl in a backwater town, virginal or not, drunk or not, dressed suggestively or not, shouldn't be abducted and assaulted." Agreed, but it's not clear to me how turning the popular mean girl into a demon who murders totally innocent people and continues to torment her ostensible bestie serves that idea in any way. All that does is give the punters what they expect from a conventional horror movie while arguably discouraging empathy for the victim, displacing it toward Needy (who, in a final arbitrary flourish, becomes a semi-demon herself and kills the actual bad guys during the closing credits). Ultimately, I don't really know how Jennifer's Body feels about Jennifer, her body, or much of anything else—it's just a jumble of gory attitude peppered with make-it-stop Diablo-isms ("salty" for "hot," "Jell-O" for "jealous," etc.) and utterly meaningless oddities (J.K. Simmons in a bad wig and sporting a hook for his left hand). By the time a flashback reveals that the Satanists sang "Jenny (867-5309)" while they stabbed Jennifer to non-death, I was wondering why anyone would bother resurrecting this ambitious clunker when Ginger Snaps still exists and presumably remains every bit as terrific as it always was.