Jennifer's Body liveblog

In something of a departure from my usual way of doing this, i.e. pick the worst movie I can find and mock it mercilessly, this week I'm watching Jennifer's Body, which was basically a critical and commercial failure, but never stuck out to me as an obvious misfire based on the previews. Actually, it seemed like it had several pretty smart ideas. In a lot of ways, horror is one of the more prominent movie genres in terms of utilizing female protagonists, so the concept of introducing a female antagonist and possibly subverting the retrograde sexual politics that are a more regrettable horror touchstone is a promising one. The fact that it was written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame seemed like it could either be a big strength or a big weakness depending on the whether the dialogue stays on the right line of "clever" versus "too clever by half." I know most of the critics felt that it was the latter, but I'm not going to rule out the possibility that I might actually like this movie.

0:00: Then again, the only quote on the back of the DVD box is from horror.com, and it reads "Sexy... and chilling!" which gives me pause, because what the hell could they have left out of that sentence with the ellipses? I looked up the actual review out of curiosity (it's positive) and the full quote is "Some of the lines in the film are probably better-read than said, but if you pay close attention to what's being said, you'll be much enriched by this very sexy, over-the-top and sometimes even chilling horror comedy." Does the fact that they left out the "very" on the box make up for leaving out the "sometimes?"


0:00: An early point in this movie's favor: it's only 102 minutes long. My rule of thumb is that a horror movie ought to be 90 plus-or-minus 10 minutes.


1:00: We open on a Halloween ripoff POV shot outside of Megan Fox's house, and a voiceover line "Hell is a teenage girl." If you're going to steal from The Virgin Suicides, might as well not make it subtle.


2:15: We find out that the VO belongs to Amanda Seyfried, who always kind of looked like a space alien to me. She's in a mental institution acting like a badass. "I wasn't always this cracked." Unnecessary framing device alert!


5:34: We're gradually getting to the actual story. There's some silly tidbit about how the town's waterfall has some sort of extradimensional vortex. 


6:45: This movie doesn't waste any time making the lesbian undertones between the lead characters ragingly explicit. Now Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend is saying "You do everything Jennifer says." Also, Amanda Seyfried's character is named Needy. They're going to a rock show in the sticks so Megan Fox can try to fuck the lead singer.


12:00: Megan Fox to Amanda Seyfried, re: breasts: "These things are like smart bombs. Point them in the right direction and shit gets real." Score one point for too clever by half.


14:00: Amanda Seyfried is salty because she overheard the lead singer talking about how he wants to fuck Megan Fox and tells him off.


15:00: I don't agree with the decision to have the fake band, who combines the look of Interpol with the sound of generic early 2000s pop-punk, play a song. More lesbian undertones ensure. Then the bar lights on fire a la the infamous Deep Purple incident of 2002. Megan Fox is in some sort of trance and the band guys haul her off to their van while the bar explodes in the background.


21:00: This is actually kind of boring so far. Isn't the point of being thuddingly obvious with character development that it lets you bypass this sort of gradual story development.


22:05: Now Amanda Seyfried is back at home and walking around the house in generic slow-burn horror mode when Megan Fox sneaks up on her, all bloody and evil looking, which almost looks creepy. Then she pukes out a bunch of black oil, which is kind of ridiculous-looking. After that, Megan Fox throws Amanda Seyfried against a wall and feels her up, then leaves. 


26:00: Now it's the next day in school, and Megan Fox appears to be back to normal, but we can tell she's not because slightly more of a bitch than usual.


26:45: J.K. Simmons is in this as kind of a hippie-ish teacher who's missing a hand. He's wearing a comical looking curly wig.


30:15: Did Diablo Cody actually go to high school? Based on these scenes, which make The Faculty look like a Fredrick Wiseman documentary, I'd say no.


32:05: Now Megan Fox is luring a lunkhead football player, who's grieving the loss of his friend in the fire last night, into the woods to make out. CGI wildlife surrounds them, because otherwise this scene might acquire a bit of tension. Megan Fox takes off her shirt and gives the football player a handjob, then her mouth splits open to reveal fangs and she bites him to death.


35:45: The problem with this movie is that it wants to be a horror comedy, but the comedy aspects completely undermine the horror part because there's no effort made to make the characters coherent or realistic and the movie pretty openly mocks the gravity of the deaths.


41:35: This movie is supposed to be set in Minnesota? And no funny accents? That's a missed opportunity.


46:15: Now Amanda Seyfried and her boyfriend are going to fuck as part of a montage set to a pop-punk cover of Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now. " Movie soundtracks tend to date the films they're attached to, but rarely do they date them to several fucking years before the film was actually produced. Also, Megan Fox is luring in her next high school stereotype, a Goth kid, into a boarded-up house. This is intercut with a joke about Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend fumbling to put on a condom, again because this movie would hate to build or sustain any sort of tension.


52:14: I should point out that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried are actually nailing their roles here. It's the writing, directing, and editing that's sinking this movie.


53:22: Now Amanda Seyfried realizes, mid-coitus, that Megan Fox is the killer, through some sort of lesbian psychic hallucination link. She gets in her car to drive home and Megan Fox appears in the road and attacks her for some reason.


58:30: Amanda Seyfried gets home and walks around a little bit before going to bed. Megan Fox is waiting there! They make out, because Diablo Cody probably hasn't heard of Internet porn and thought that would be enough to get every horny man in America to see this underwhelming movie. 

1:00:32: Then Megan Fox reveals that the band from the burned down club were actually a Satanic cult of some sort, as if we hadn't figured that out 45 minutes ago. There's a lengthy cutaway dramatizing these events, which are apparently undertaken as a sacrifice to make the band famous "like Maroon 5." LOL! Megan Fox actually gives a really convincing portrayal of distress and violation. Unfortunately, everybody else in the scene is in a completely different movie, one where they're singing Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny." Yes, really.


1:08:23: Well, that was an unnecessary ten minutes that basically served to retroactively undo the lone element of subtlety contained in this movie to date!

1:09:15: Now Amanda Seyfried's doing paranormal research in the high-school library. I have a feeling that there's going to be a knowing ironic reference to this coming up.


1:12:35: Disco.


1:12:50: The climax is going to be at the school formal, because inviting comparison to Carrie is a great idea.


1:14:30: The woman who played Dylan Baker's wife in Happiness is in this shit!


1:17:43: Now Megan Fox is stalking Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend, who didn't believe her earlier when she warned him that Megan Fox was actually a demonic succubus. Also, the Satanic band is playing at the school formal. 

1:21:40: Amanda Seyfried realizes that Megan Fox is probably trying to kill her boyfriend. Instead, she's lured him into an indoor swimming pool that's overgrown with trees on the inside for some reason. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend decides he doesn't want to kiss Megan Fox because he's still in love with Amanda Seyfried, so she gets pissed and uses her succubus teeth to bite him just before Amanda Seyfried arrives.


1:25:09: Now Amanda Seyfried maces Megan Fox, who does the vomiting thing again and starts to levitate. Then the two of them get into some sort of dialogue about insecurity and female friendship, which I guess was inevitable. Then Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend impales Megan Fox with the back end of a pool skimmer, but instead of dying, she asks Amanda Seyfried for a tampon and then leaves. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend dies but tells her he loves her first, which I guess is going to restore her self-esteem to the superpower levels that she'll need to take on Megan Fox.


1:30:00: Now we're back to where we were at the beginning of the movie for the climactic showdown, which is sort of an quasi-Exorcist levitation deal over Megan Fox's bed, where Amanda Seyfried rips off Megan Fox's BFF necklace and stabs her in the heart with box cutters, which I guess she read about as being the way to kill a succubus in the school library.


1:33:25: Now we're back to the pointless framing device in the insane asylum, where we learn that Amanda Seyfried "absorbed some of the demon's abilities."  She levitates herself out of the insane asylum, in what would be a logical ending to the movie. It does not, in fact, end.


1:35:35: Now Amanda Seyfried's hitchhiking out to take her revenge on the Satanic rock band, the aftermath of which is shown in flashes over the closing credits, Dawn of the Dead remake style. Remarkably, this movie hadn't used a Hole song on the soundtrack until this point. 


Final thoughts: Jesus, what a misfire. The shame of this is that, like I said before, the basic idea of this movie is really strong. Also, the leads are just about perfect - I think that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried would absolutely still be the stars of this movie if it were done right. The problem is the writing, which never really seems to aspire to be creepy or scary and instead goes for wall to wall exaggerated quipping. If you rolled your eyes at the "Honest to blog" line in Juno, you'll probably want to throw your DVD player out of the window by the time you get to the point in Jennifer's Body where Megan Fox tells Amanda Seyfried to "move on dot org." Compounding the problem is the direction, which borrows camera moves and staging from other and better horror movies but never really tries to wrestle the script into anything resembling a tone. I could always be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised if this movie finds the cult audience that it's so obviously going for (speaking of which, do these prefab cult movies ever actually wind up working out in that way?)