Jennifer's Body

“Jennifer’s Body” is the story of two teenage girls who are best friends in a small town. One is the town slut while the other is a nerdy (you can tell because she wears glasses…) normal girl, who may or may not have unrequited lesbian love for the other. After a disturbing night out at a concert all hell breaks loose and everything changes. The slut is now a man eating demon, and the friend just tries to cope with the usual and unusual high school problems that persist.

Going into this movie I expected it to be awful, and I mean truly awful. So with expectations like that there’s no way it could really live up to them. This movie isn’t good, but it isn’t bad, which is as high praise as it can possibly get. The directing was a lot better than I thought it would be. Megan Fox is pretty terrible, and all the other talented actors try their best with the terrible dialogue. Is this movie full of sex and sexy looking girls: yup. Is it gratuitously violent and gory: yup. Is it pointless: I don’t know, someone might think this is funny or entertaining or something. So what are the lessons of this film? Don’t be a virgin because you might get sacrificed to the devil, don’t be a friends with slutty girls because everyone you know will be eaten, and don’t trust anyone ever even people you know. Even as a joke, or a parody, or just the absurdity of it all, this movie doesn’t really work the way it should, but it isn’t a total disaster. When will America’s boner for Megan Fox become flaccid? Not soon enough to save this movie.

- Features -

There really isn’t anything interesting about the features on the DVD that I had. There is an extended version of the film which I guess makes “deleted scenes” unnecessary. There is no “making of” documentary and no bonus featurettes or anything. And there is audio commentary but it’s the worst kind of audio commentary. Audio commentary should be about production, it should be about the realities of film making. How they decided that any given scene would look the way it did and then how they achieved it. Audio commentary is really only made for cine-philes. Nobody will sit and listen to 2 hours of audio commentary unless they are really interested in how movies are made and want the filmmakers to tell them. This audio commentary has nothing to do with that, it’s a lot of “isn’t that cool?’ and “wasn’t that guy nice?” or “doesn’t she look pretty?” and a bunch of bullshit like that. I really don’t need to hear people congratulate themselves on their own movie. There really needs to be enforceable standards for audio commentary, because sadly most of them are like this. But occasional there is audio commentary that actually teaches you something about movies or enhances the film in other ways like the “Spinal Tap” commentary does. And because the commentary on this film is not enlightening in any way there is absolutely no reason to listen to it (and no reason for them to have made it).