According to Jennifer's Body, high school isn't the best time of one's life. It's actually hell on earth, awash with teenaged angst, hormones and fountains of blood. Penned by Juno scribe Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama (responsible for the acclaimed Girlfight), Jennifer's Body is the shocking flipside to Cody's slacker teen romance.
BFFs since the sandbox but complete opposites, Jennifer (Megan Fox) is a scorching-hot, boy-crazy cheerleader, while Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is a shy nerd content with her first love, the cute and sensitive geek Chip (Johnny Simmons). Needy tags along to the local roadhouse bar, where Jennifer plans to score with a touring indie group's lead singer (Adam Brody). The plan literally goes up in flames as a deadly fire rips through the watering hole. Among the survivors are a dazed Jennifer, who is “rescued” by the band and pulled into the tour van, and Needy. As the small town copes with the tragedy, Jennifer reappears with an insatiable hunger for the succulent flesh of her male admirers. Discovering her friend's diabolical transformation, Needy sets out to rescue the town and save the prom from becoming a demon's bloody buffet.
This hotly anticipated film recently secured an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, breaking the trend of tame PG-13 teen horror. A devilishly delicate balance of teenaged outsider humour and chilling shocks, Jennifer's Body evokes other great high-school horror films like Ginger Snaps (also written by a furious femme, Karen Walton), fused with the darkly funny tone of Heathers. Teaming Kusama and Cody is an overdue and welcome change in the male-dominated world of horror cinema, and sure to please the many avid fright fans out there.
While Megan Fox's sexy she-devil will stoke teenaged fantasies, it's Amanda Seyfried who shines as the film's suckerpunching nerd-turned-heroine, with support from the hilarious J. K. Simmons as a hook-handed teacher and Amy Sedaris as Needy's mom. And Adam Brody's pop rocker proves what we've always suspected: emo music is positively “d-emo-nic.”
Pin on your blood-soaked corsage and prepare to be seduced – and consumed.
Colin Geddes
Karyn Kusama was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and studied film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She wrote and directed the feature Girlfight (00), which won the Director's Prize and shared the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Her other films include Æon Flux (05) and Jennifer's Body (09).