Jennifer's Body

JENNIFER'S BODY (2009) - Sept. 26, 2009
About a high school girl who starts eating her classmates after she's turned into a demon of some sort, this was a pretty mediocre film. Featuring ineffectual direction from Karyn Kusama, who does a pretty terrible job of generating any kind of suspense, and who seems to flinch away from any real violence -- I'm not sure why she even directed a horror film, since it seems like she's uncomfortable with the genre. Diablo Cody's quirky, super-stylized dialogue doesn't work nearly as well here as it did in Juno (it feels almost like Cody is parodying herself in parts, though I'm sure that wasn't the intention), though I did get used to it after a while. The film's main problem was that the horror stuff was pretty lame, it wasn't funny enough to work as a comedy, and the characters weren't really interesting enough to carry the film on their own (they were basically just variations on characters we've seen in a million other high school movies). **