Charles Jensen | Writer

Much to, I’m sure, Collin Kelley’s chagrin, I paid money to see Jennifer’s Body.

And I don’t regret it.

That said, the trouble with Jennifer’s Body isn’t Megan Fox, believe it or not. It’s simply that, while trying to be both funny and unsettling, it succeeds at being neither. There’s no gore to speak of, which means this isn’t a horror movie. And there are laughs, yes, and there are some gross things that happen, but overall, it can’t decide if it wants to be a teen comedy or a teen slasher flick.

Megan Fox is actually excellent in this role, and it’s because of her that it’s as funny as it is. She dead pans all of her best lines, fully committing to the honesty of the situations as absurd as they might be. A favorite: after being impaled on a metal pole, she looks down at her bloody gut and asks her best friend, with surprised frustration, “Do you have a tampon?” When the girl says no, Fox replies sadly, “Oh…you looked like you might be plugging.”

Diablo Cody’s script here is good, almost better than Juno because she’s really tamed down her too-cute-for-school slang and focused more on character development and relationships. At it’s heart, Jennifer’s Body is a biting satire on girl-girl friendships–the BFFs who, despite all their affection for each other, can’t help but compete. Although the actual storytelling has a little hiccup in it that sort of wrecks the plot a bit, it’s done interestingly. Cody got demerits from me from letting good girl Needy figure out the situation too quickly and without a lot of plot clues.

Adrian Brody turns in a fantastic performance as the dickweed frontman of up-and-coming indie band Low Shoulder. If it weren’t for Megan Fox, he’d have walked away with this film in his back pocket. Mugging through his thick lines of guyliner, Brody gives an enthusiastic send-up of fame-hungry emo dbs, complete with Satanic ritual sacrifice of a virgin, and the repetitive playing of the band’s hit single. Amy Sedaris pops up for a minute, too, which was nice.

I think this is a movie with some cult potential. It has a fun Mean Girls vibe to it and was pretty quotable. I’ll have to watch it again to determine that. But Collin, it wasn’t a waste of my money.