"Hell is a teenage girl..."
Jennifer's Body (2009), directed by Karyn Susama (Æon Flux,
Girlfight), written by Diablo Cody (Juno, The United States of Tara), and produced by Jason Reitman (In God We Trust, Thank You for Smoking, Juno) is a horror film/dark comedy, starring two fetching upcoming young actresses: Megan Fox (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Transformers 1 and 2) and Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Mamma Mia!). Although having different approaches toward their craft, Megan and Amanda share a very suggestive physical beauty and an increasingly large fan base.
Amanda Seyfried plays Anita/Needy Lesnicky, 17 years old, an attractive nerd, a National Merit scholar, and Megan Fox is her best friend Jennifer Check, a sexy Flag Team Quarterly cheerleader; the two have been practically sisters since they were pre-verbal. Needy watches Snow Flake Queen Jennifer with admiration during her cheerleader parades in Devil's Kettle ("Jennifer told me track was for lezzies"), a small town in rural Minessota. Diablo Cody called herself "middle class trash from the Midwest" in one of her MySpace blogs.
Cody also is a "horror junkie," telling the L.A. Times, "There's the idea of the adolescent feminine mystique being inherently creepy."
Most of the shooting was done in Canada, and the school scenes were shot at University Hill Secondary School in Vancouver. There is another Canada-USA film, Ginger Snaps (2000), directed by John Fawcett, which has many thematic points in common with Jennifers's Body. In Ginger Snaps two sisters are obsessed with death and gothic imagery. When one of the girls experiences her first menstruation, a metaphor for puberty/monstruosity is latent within the plot. Ginger (who is transformed into a serial boy dater/attacker) confides in her plain Jane sister Brigitte: "I get this ache, and I thought it was for sex; but it's to tear everything to fucking pieces!"
The motif of two best girl friends in the cinema, one being the dominant seductress (Nikki Reed in Thirteen, whose director Catherine Hardwicke talked about homoeroticism between Evie and Melanie, Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy, Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) and the other a shy duckling ("Ugly Ashley"/Little Needy in this story) forces the viewer to cull one of the two when the predatory girl reclaims the biggest part of their common Lebensraum.
Article comments
1 - NancyGail
From the promos, one of the guys looks like either TJ Knight from Gray's Anatomy or Eric Millegan for Bones. Which only goes to show actors can be carbon copies.
2 - Kendra
yes, Kyle Gallner (Colin Gray in "Jennifer's Body") resembles Eric Millegan quite a bit.
3 - Caroline Hagood
Thanks for the thoughtful review about a movie I was really hoping would be good.
4 - Five pages!?
So...um...is it good?
5 - kendra
you're very welcome, Caroline, thanks!
Five pages: as Roger Ebert said it's not Juno or Girlfight, but it's still a good, engaging dark horror comedy.