In the Flesh: Jennifer's Body (Patreon)

A stylized, vision-driven mess is always preferable to competently made factory shlock, and no matter the failings of its hokey CGI and Diablo Cody’s limp and convoluted screenplay, Jennifer’s Body still has something genuine flickering at its core. Its story about the thoughtlessly exploitative relationships young women form with one another and the role of boys as psychosexual proxies for those connections is occasionally compelling; the flash of raw emotion when Jennifer (Megan Fox) tries to lure Needy (Amanda Seyfried) back to bed with the promise that they can “play boyfriend and girlfriend, like we used to” is maybe the film’s most heartfelt and evocative moment. 

There is, in Jennifer's Body's lesbian-tinged demonic teen girl slasher premise, a kernel of thoughtful critique of the narrow gender roles into which teenagers are thrust by society. Desires young people don’t yet understand or even feel consciously are channeled forcibly into predetermined patterns. The film’s aggressive use of square, cheesy language and the absurdist simplicity of its teen relationships hammer home the constructed nature of life in the backwoods Pacific Northwestern town of Devil’s Kettle, while the bleak end result of those same social forces peer through in the guise of Needy’s burnt-out and over-medicated single mother (every parent in the film appears to be a single mom). Jennifer embodies the classic slasher scenario of oversexed teens paying for their libidos with their lives, folding the act of killing into the sex itself and dabbling in the idea of a metaphor for young women being forced to find their identity and sense of self-worth in male attention.

Both Fox and Seyfried are well-cast for the film’s heightened reality, their clean-cut Hollywood beauty absurd in the context of their surroundings, but there’s little acting to be done through the sludge of Cody’s script, which spends all its time effacing the personalities of its characters with quips and sloppy, stretched-out pacing. Director Karyn Kusama — whose much more confident The Invitation shows what a force to be reckoned with she is when allowed to move at her own pace — tries to invest things with a manic, see-sawing energy reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s iconic work on Evil Dead, but for the most part it’s little more than lipstick on the proverbial pig. There’s an interesting heart somewhere inside the mess of Jennifer’s Body, it’s just that its knife keeps missing the mark.