Needy and Jennifer have been best friends since they were children. The former is shy, awkward, and plain, while the latter is popular, outgoing, and beautiful. The two girls live in Devil’s Kettle, a peaceful small town in the countryside surrounded by forests in North America, and attend high school. One night, Jennifer drags Needy to the only tavern in the town to go listen to an emerging rock band that is on tour, but during the performance, a fire breaks out. Many die, the two girls manage to escape and are reached by the band’s leader who offers them a ride; Jennifer accepts, Needy does not, suspicious of some dialogues the musicians were having among themselves regarding the girls' virginity. A few hours later, Needy is reached by Jennifer, all dirty with mud and blood; the girl behaves strangely and vomits a viscous substance. From that night, Jennifer is no longer the same and begins to kill her male classmates to feed on their flesh.
There are films destined to become cults even before anyone has had the chance to see them, films that are talked and written about a lot, linked to famous names that inevitably attract the attention of the media. These are films that necessarily manage to create expectations in the public, whether positive or negative, but that definitely do not go unnoticed.
« Jennifer’s Body » belongs to this category. The film has been talked about everywhere, from print media to the internet, with attention almost exclusively focused on Megan Fox, the femme fatale protagonist of the story, and a bit on Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and former stripper who signed the script.
It seemed like an announced success, a film launched by advertising and distributed by Fox with an exaggerated number of copies… and yet the film was a resounding flop, managing to go unnoticed at the box office and collecting a considerable series of negative reviews. From an announced cult to an effective cult.
Evidently, if the criticism is harsh and the public is snobbish, there must be something in « Jennifer’s Body » that really didn’t work. And indeed, the film with Megan Fox does not work seriously, mainly due to a basic amorphousness that makes it a product difficult to enjoy for the audience it is aimed at. « Jennifer’s Body » is a strange film, almost indefinable, as banal as it is sought after, too tied to the name of the lead actress and so little honest with the public. A film that promises a female body but then, in fact, denies it; a film that would like to be « fun » but ends up being even heavy; a film as cunning in its intentions as it is modest in its facts. « Jennifer’s Body » is a bit of all this, a continuous throwing stones and hiding the hand.
The premises are really mouth-watering, since the story offers some elements of originality and sure points of reflection that could easily emerge from the metaphorical power of the story. And indeed, the beginning is not bad at all, the story of the girl possessed by a cannibal demon is intriguing and the desire to put at the center of attention the world – hypocritical – of music sometimes gives rise to clever jabs against the teen rock business. There is even an intelligent use of cinematic quotation (« The Rocky Horror Picture Show » becomes a boxing film!) and musical (the title of the film itself derives from the title of a Hole song, here hummed during a satanic ritual) that seasons a film that is anyway well studied; and yet the story is conducted in too weak a manner and is predictable in every single scene.
It is also noticed that there is a certain development of the characters, not thrown into the scene as cannon fodder as often happens in teen horror, but capable of creating a certain chemistry with the spectators, although it is a film built exclusively on stereotypes, on the characters that almost obligatorily appear in every teen horror, like a strange unwritten law. It will be useless to list them, since we all know them perfectly, but they are them: the beautiful and airheaded cheerleader, the ugly and insecure nerd who turns into Rambo, the dark, sensitive, and creative boy, the two-door wardrobe who is the football promise, the « normal » boy with his feet on the ground destined to have a crucial role in the story. Do you have them all present, don’t you? I understand the desire to play with the genre by repeating the stereotypes of always, but this time it seems almost more of an excuse to use creative shortcuts rather than a real meta-film/citation action.
Despite a script that anyway uses above-average dialogues for the genre, Diablo Cody has taken several steps back compared to her previous excellent work in « Juno ». Here there is professionalism but lacks intelligence, there are explicit feminist subtexts already present in the subject (the woman who deploys her superiority over the male sex by literally devouring it!) but it seems almost that one does not want to make them emerge to give space to the relationship that exists between the two protagonists and on their competition, first hidden and then manifest.
In short, « Jennifer’s Body » is not exactly what one might expect and consequently ends up disappointing a bit everyone. Teenagers passionate about bloody horror, to whom the product would seem destined, are excluded first of all by the censorship boards, since the film is strictly – and inexplicably – banned to those under 18, and secondly by the real nature of the project, too little oriented towards popcorn entertainment. There remains this strange hybrid that has the packaging of the late 90s teen horror but « high » content intentions, surely not achieved.
One of the most resounding missed opportunities of 2009.
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