Jennifer's Body

Megan Fox’s rumored nude scene is nowhere to be found in Jennifer’s Body—and how do you think the people who funded the movie feel about that? Specifically, is there another reason to see a demonic-possession flick (in some ways more like a vampire flick) in which every character talks like Juno? When Fox asks Seyfried, “Where’s it at, Monistat?,” you realize you’ve witnessed something extraordinary: In just two produced features, stripper-turned-scripter Diablo Cody has become as tone-deaf and embarrassing a writer as Woody Allen foisting his lines on Jason Biggs.

Even the Codyisms could probably be hand-waved, in this context, if the scribe and her director (Girlfight) didn’t have pretensions of making Heathers for a new generation. As the freshly feral Jennifer (Fox) leaves assorted jock and goth corpses in her wake, her classmates become, like, numb to grief. (September 11 and “Operation Enduring Freedom” get namechecked.) The movie’s focus is on Jennifer’s changing relationship with a mousy childhood friend, actually named Needy (Seyfried), but there’s nothing new about using occult transformation as a metaphor for adolescence. To make this movie, you need something original (or at least coherent) to say. At the bare minimum, you need the courage to be legitimately trashy, rather than tastefully, marketably “subversive.”

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