Thursday, December 24, 2009

Jennifer's Body DVD




DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: Megan Fox’s Tasteless Zombie Flick Out on DVD

This relentlessly-offensive horror film is based on a screenplay by Diablo Cody (Juno) who unfortunately, Ms. Cody succumbs here to the proverbial sophomore jinx, despite an obvious attempt to imbue her latest title character with the identical, above-it-all attitude of her previous one. The story is set in the tiny town of Devil’s Kettle where terminally-flip Jennifer (Megan Fox) and nerdy Needy (Amanda Seyfried) have been best friends since childhood.
Both girls are a little boy crazy, but while the former is gorgeous and tends to sleep around, the latter is homely and grateful just to have a steady boyfriend (Johnny Simmons). Jennifer loves to leverage her looks at the high school by making boys salivate over her and by making mean-spirited comments about her less-comely competitors, calling them crude nicknames like “Vagisil” and “Monistat.”
The atmosphere abruptly shifts from shallow teensploit to eerily ominous the fateful evening a fire accidentally burns the crowded Melody Lane Tavern to the ground while a heavy metal rock group is playing on stage. Although eight of her classmates and a teacher are among the dead, instead of showing any sympathy, Jennifer callously refers to the incident as a “white trash pig roast.”
The plot thickens when she is escorted away from the scene by the equally-blasé band members of Low Shoulders on the pretense of their wanting to comfort her. Truth be told, they are secretly devil worshippers and in search of a virgin to butcher as a sacrifice to Satan. However, since she isn’t exactly chaste, an unforeseen “demonic transference” occurs. In other words, Jennifer doesn’t die, but rather morphs into a man-eating monster.
Then, reincarnated as a cute cannibal, she proceeds to spend the balance of this gratuitous splatter flick making major mayhem, projectile-vomiting black bile when not luring unsuspecting males into the woods in order to eat them alive. The film’s fatal flaw is that there’s not much of an arc to Jennifer’s character, for she remains as unlikable after becoming a zombie as she already was before.
Megan Fox needs to set her sights a little higher now that she has some clout in Hollywood.

Poor (0 stars)
Rated R for profanity, sexuality gory violence and brief drug use.
Running time: 101 minutes
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
DVD Extras: Director’s and screenwriter’s commentary and Fox trailers.

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