THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
When it comes to maturity, life is gonna take a lot of drastic turns.
PLOT
Jennifer’s Body takes place in Minnesota and follows Anita ‘Needy’ Lesnicki who was once friends with Jennifer Check, a popular high school color guard flag spinner. Although they never had much in common and the latter would often mistreat her, the former was just too much in awe to stand up for herself. One night, they go out to a local dive bar to see indie band Low Shoulder, but it quickly goes awry when a fire starts that takes multiple lives. Jennifer would decide to leave with the band instead of Needy who insisted on her to not go with them. In the middle of the night, Jennifer enters her home covered in blood and tries to eat some rotisserie chicken before vomiting black fluid and retreating. By the next day, she appears fine in school and shows no apathy of the fire. Unseen to the public, she disembowels & cannibalizes the school’s football captain Jonas Kozelle (Josh Emerson). After his body is discovered, Low Shoulder is announced to make a charity appearance at the spring formal which became possible due to falsely rumored heroism. A month after this, Jennifer starts feeling sick until she asks out another student named Colin (Kyle Gallner), as an excuse to kill & devour him. That same night, Needy has a vision of her while having sex with her boyfriend Chip. In the middle of her drive back home, she finds Jennifer covered in blood again. But by the time she makes it home, Check returns in a revitalized state and tries seducing her until Needy demands to know what’s been going on. Check reveals that Low Shoulder took her to the woods after the fire, and tried to offering her to Satan as a Virgin sacrifice in exchange for fame and fortune. Although the sacrifice was proven to succeed due to the band planning to perform at the formal, Jennifer has been permanently possessed by a demon succubus due to not being a virgin in advance. When she feasts on flesh, she can withstand any injury without pain and heal instantly. She first killed an exchange student named Ahmet (Aman Johal), who everyone thought to have died in the fire. Jennifer also admits to Needy she almost killed her too, but couldn’t bring herself to it. The next day, Lesnicki goes to the occult section in the school library and does enough research to understand the succubus can only be killed when weak/hungry. She tries to explain her discovery to Chip but when he chooses to not believe her, he dumps him to protect him. That backfires because on the night of the formal, Jennifer intercepts Chip and makes up a lie that Needy was sleeping with Colin. She takes him to an abandoned pool where she can feed on him. Needy does find them and tries to kill who she thought was her friend, but she’s able to get away with a new batch of strength. Heartbroken of the loss of her boyfriend, she sneaks into Check’s home and is able to kill her by stabbing her with a box cutter once she sees her weak enough to capitalize. However, Jennifer’s mother walks in on the situation in shock of her daughter’s death (unaware of what she was doing). The incident results in Needy being sent to an asylum, but no one knows she has gained Jennifer’s powers as she bit her during their fight. The film ends with her escaping the facility and kill Low Shoulder for what they did to Check.
THOUGHTS
The coming of age narrative has been told an insanely amount of times where you can lose count. Diablo Cody had already done of her own through her Oscar winning script that is Juno and because of that, she needed to shake things up. With the assist of Karyn Kasuma, she introduced the ‘coming of rage’ narrative where anger answers all the answers. When you look back at this film, you're gonna be asking yourself how did the combo of Megan Fox's sex appeal and the shocking succubus violence create high demand on popularity. The more I think about it, my answer would be it's a creative spin on using your traits as an advantage which in this case is sexuality. Fox gives a fantastic performance of portraying Check as one who has all the confidence in the world to have things her way due to how being the most beautiful in town, but has visible narcissism in her as well. It's hard to like her due to how she inflicts the latter towards Needy who is basically her only friend, yet it doesn't change the fact she is in fact a victim of taking part in something against her will since she obviously never asked to be part of a ritual. You can't help rooting for her using her beauty as a weapon once you know what happened because she just wants to live at that point and a part of us would want to do the same in her shoes. There is no denying Adam Brody is the true villain when playing Low Shoulder's lead singer Nikolai for being so soulless in everything he did as he planned to. Seeing him un-phased about the fire implies he had something to do with it and seeing him parade about what he would do to Jennifer for his own gain is straight up upsetting to sit through which is the point. Once you see him and the band meet a comeuppance though, you can kinda say the journey was worth taking. Check still makes a mistake in continuing to act above Needy when killing Chip. It was indeed an act to get her off her trail since seducing her didn't work, but all of that is what riled her to put her out of misery. Amanda Seyfried is a scene stealer in her own right because Anita has her own journey where she matures from shy to fierce. She was in awe of all that Jennifer had which was the beauty and the bravery, but never really saw she had that along until she realized they were never meant to be friends. She stuck around because that said awe became a crush she never truly grasped. The love between her and Chip was still genuine because he was more a polar opposite where he was not hesitant in pointing out Jennifer was more of a bully than a friend. Johnny Simmons had us dig him because he was the most honest of guys in this whole movie. Losing him sucks for Needy because he made him happy more than Check ever bothered and she wasn't gonna let that slide. Even though it was the absolute to kill her, Needy knew she was still a victim on her case thus doing right by her avenging her when wiping out the band. Whatever came next for her, I hope it's more prosperous compared to what we had witnessed. A lot about this movie works overall, but there are still things that don’t make sense when you think about it. Like for instance, it’s smart foreshadowing when Needy overheard the band talk about Jennifer, but if the band really wanted to ensure no one hears what they were planning, they should’ve fucking whispered. They’re asking to get caught even if Needy didn’t know what they were talking about. And ain’t it nuts how not only the bar had a sign saying ‘No ID required’ but no one reacts to the fire until it falls onto them. Someone could’ve smelt that way before the burning flag. Also, why the fuck did Needy leave her phone at home? It’s the 21st century, no one does that shit at all. Honestly if multiple students died in a fire, school should’ve been cancelled for the day in memory of them. And why would Jennifer wait a month to tell her what happened to her? If she wants her trust, she should’ve told her within at least a week. The only illogical thing Needy says is calling prom an all you can buffet for Jennifer because she’s been discreet the whole time and would not risk taking down multiple people again like she did with Ahmet & Jonas. On top of that, why would Jennifer go back home if she knows Needy is after her? If she was still hungry, she should’ve just ate one more person and then kill Needy to cut off the last thread clinging onto her. Other than that, this movie is still a bloody good time. In short, Jennifer’s Body is a better horror film than remembered because it shows more than it tells. You want an alternative coming of age tale? See this now.
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