alven75

Diablo Cody is about my age and just as I'm probably not the best person to accurately depict todays teenager, neither is she. When we were teenagers, in the mid 1990's, we used expressions and cool words that make teenagers roll their eyes today, just like we rolled our eyes at our parents. Jennifer's Body tries so hard to capture the fleeting taste of teenage life and angst in the "now", that it comes off feeling fake and contrived. For instance: We have to be made to see how sexually liberated the main characters are. Because these days teens have sex, a lot of sex! Even the classic rampantly insecure "ugly" girl with glasses, convincingly portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, has regular sexual encounters with her boyfriend.

What teens don't have these days, according to Cody, are parents. They mostly just turn up at their kids funeral or to distractedly snap a picture before the big dance. Does your kid have to walk to the dance through a large wooded park in the middle of the night, with a serial killer on the lose? No problem, just borrow them your can of pepper spray! But then what self-respecting teenager needs parents when they've got friends?

Friendship is, again according to Cody, a cynical affair based around either someone's sadistic urge to inflict emotional pain or a masochistic urge for personal validation from people you irrationally idolize. If you're Amanda Seyfried's character you also, probably, want to have sex with your best friend, or at least make out. I mean, even if she is a demonic cannibal, she's still a smoking hot cheerleader for God's sake! Did I mention that teenagers have a lot of sex?

Sure, innocent people get killed and the movie tries really hard to care and stuff, but it's just such a drag, you know... If some inconsequential high school boys have to suffer a horrific death so that Megan Fox can walk down school corridors looking radiant and majestic like a $20 dollar hooker, isn't that just a price we'd all be willing to pay? That's right, Diablo Cody really nailed that moral ambiguity correspondence course she took!

All in all this movie goes from kicking in open doors to running face first into the wall. It tells us obvious things like they are great discoveries and depicts teenagers as only a person on the wrong side of 30 would. Some people try to make the case that this movie is filled with metaphors and clever symbolism but Diablo Cody is not a new Ingmar Bergman, she's the screen writer that thought it would be cool to have a character who's just been impaled on a broken pool skimmer, say; "you got a tampon?". The movie gets one star and Amanda Seyfried gets her own, for keeping a straight face and trying to deliver a performance despite the mediocre script. Megan Fox, on the other hand, is very much like the script; overrated and bereft of substance.

In a strip club somewhere there's a pole missing Diablo Cody. After seeing this movie I really hope they can be reunited!

This movie is, above all else, confused. It tries to talk you into believing that it's a tribute to classic campy slasher films, it dazzles you with good production design, cinematography and some fairly decent actors, but ultimately it turns to tired slapstick and surrealism without purpose, all courtesy of the only horrifying aspect of this movie; the script! Maybe it isn't a tribute, maybe it's meant as satire or some kind of black comedy? I can't tell! Even if that's the case, it's not funny because the jokes are mostly based around how unfunny horror movies are, and this is clearly one of those unfunny horror movies. Violence is plentiful and graphic, like the genre prescribes, but it is only there as a reference to other films or for purely gratuitous purposes, so in effect it's either unoriginal or holding up the story. The characters are consistently written in a way that at best, makes you not care about them at all and at worst, quietly hoping that they are next in line for swift death. If a bunch of college kids had made this movie and put it on the Internet, it would have been sort of an impressive effort. As a "real" Hollywood movie, it's depressing and begs the question; Who the hell would green-light a script like this? My advice: pick any one of the 20+ classic horror movies that this movie references and watch that again, odds are good that you'll have a better time!

Eliza Dushku is the one who delivers in this fairly predictable serial killer story, reminiscent of such films as "Gothika" and "Jennifer Eight". There are also a lot of serial killer movie alumni populating the lesser roles of this film, like Bill Moseley, Timothy Hutton, Tom Noonan and Cary Elwes. They don't really matter though, because it's all about Dushku's character Megan Paige and her late onset schizophrenia which makes it very difficult for her to crack the case of the Alphabet killer, as well as keep the confidence of her fellow police officers.

Movies that focus on characters with mental disorders are often interesting and unpredictable, like Polanski's "Repulsion" or Fincher's "Fight Club" because they makes the audience question what's reality in the movie and what's just playing out inside the mind of the main character. Unfortunately this isn't one of those movies. Instead of trying to make the audience share in Megan's delusions, they are clearly separated and labeled to avoid any confusion, or excitement for that matter. Instead we are made to watch her from the outside and see her struggling to connect with her colleagues and convince them that she's completely sane despite her textbook "crazy person" behavior. Like I said, Dushku delivers a solid performance as a distraught, emotionally unstable and sometimes delusional police woman. It's just hard to get invested in her character because of the boring predictable story she slowly fights her way through.

There is not a single supporting character that comes off as more than some kind of one-dimensional stereotype. There's the honest cop, the crooked cop, the former lover, the one true friend, the calm doctor, the obvious suspect, the creepy priest and eventually, for a brief time at the end, the killer... non of them with any significant character development or depth. This movie isn't painful to watch and it's not poorly made, it just suffers from lack of imagination on the directors part and some sloppy writing. See it, don't see it... doesn't really matter.