Something of an unholy mess, Jennifer’s Body doesn’t have enough comedy to be funny and doesn’t have enough scares to be frightening. And yet the movie might have worked (heavy emphasis on the “might”) had someone completely rewritten the dialogue. Diablo Cody’s hallmark hyper-verbal, hipster dialogue runs at odds with the horror elements, undermining the finished product. Curses like “cheese and crackers” and calling each other names like “Monostat” and “Vagisil” are actually the high-point. This is just a big, swinging whiff for Cody’s wordsmith abilities. There are just some painful, wince-inducing lines that land with a thud. The film follows a strange story structure, placing the reveal of how Jennifer became what she is in the middle of the movie. By this point, we’ve seen her devour too many boys to see her as anything other than a monster. If the scene played out in a linear fashion, we may have actually felt sympathy for her as a scared, relatable girl, and her appetites might come across as some kind of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t work that way thanks to the scene order. Somewhere inside the body of this movie is a quasi-feminist reworking of the horror genre, but really the movie just seems like another genre fantasy byproduct that treats the ladies as walking meat. What does two girls kissing for an extended period of time have to do with female empowerment? The biggest surprise is that Megan Fox is actually kind of good as the demonic object of desire. Who would have thought that Fox would be the best thing in a movie written by an Oscar winner and directed by a Sundance Award winner?

Nate’s Grade: C