Jennifer's Body

Hooking up Diablo Cody, sharp-tongued "Juno" scribe, and Karyn Kusama, once-promising "Girlfight" director, for a grrl-powered scary movie must have sounded like a match made in heaven, surefire box-office, what with "Transformers" hottie Megan Fox joining the three-way. Sadly, for those of us jonesin' for a full-on female horror-fest spiked with black humor and hair-raising heebie-jeebies, "Jennifer's Body" doesn't put out.

Even horror movie parodies are fueled by faith that the genre has teeth and can draw blood. Either Kusama doesn't get how the machinery of terror works or she is just not that into it. Dread of the kind that makes the short hairs rise and our lizard brains go on red alert is almost totally missing from "Jennifer's Body." And team Kusama-Cody can't seem to stir up hormonal humor and supernatural carnage to make a proper witches' brew.

Still, with all its flaws, "Jennifer's Body" isn't actively awful. As low-level entertainment, it aims to take female revenge on horror-sex fantasies like "Deadgirl," in which teenage horndogs turn a woman's body into meat. Trouble is, both movies are one-trick ponies, simply running their ambitious plotlines into the ground.

BFFs since sandbox days, Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Fox) are locked into typical teen-girl symbiosis: boy-magnet Naughty uses and feeds on plainer, smarter, forever-loyal Needy. So it's par for the course when Needy blows off an evening with cute-square boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) to keep Jennifer company while she ogles an indie-band front man (Adam Brody) at a local dive. After a mysterious fire breaks out, frying almost everyone in the bar, the grody musicians spirit shell-shocked Jennifer away in their van for some nasty satanic rites. Hours later, Needy's blood-covered pal turns up in her kitchen somewhat the worse for wear: sporting an idiotic grin; bellowing like a demon from hell; spewing black, needle-filled tar. But, hey, next morning in science class, Jennifer's all sex and snark, almost the same as she ever was.

Except that slutty Jennifer has turned succubus, an actual man-eater, addicted to a diet that does wonders for her hair and skin. Her first snack's a hulking footballer, whom she easily lures into the woods. While she's heating him up, an audience of big-eyed animals (deer, fox, raccoon, rabbits) encircles the couple. It's like some scene out of a Disney cartoon, with Bambi's mom stepping in afterward to lick up a soupcon of blood. The faux-sweetness of this woodland moment should ratchet up the horror of Jennifer's crazed cannibalism. But the scene's so badly paced and edited that the impact of both the Disney connection and the demon's exploitation of her victim's emotional vulnerability are blunted and lost.

Same problem arises when Kusama cuts between Chip and Needy bedding down for the first time, all golden-hued and innocent, and Jennifer's cold-blooded seduction and devouring of one of her longtime admirers, a cherub-faced Goth who looks like a distant relation of Edward Scissorhands. The back-and-forth between embracing "lovers," far from appalling, is just random, emphasizing how little the director's heart or head is in this exercise.

Spookiness is entirely generated by place in "Jennifer's Body." Especially memorable: A high shot of a long, nighttime street, flanked by identical row houses, evokes something like a dead zone in hell. And a long shot of Needy running uphill in her flounced red prom dress toward a ghostly building is dreamlike, surreal. Inside, the abandoned swimming pool, thick with debris and rot, stirs memories of a terrifying nighttime swim in "Cat People."

Though Jennifer plays on her teen victims' feelings of grief, inadequacy or break-up pain, her game's as perfunctory as her sexual come-on. Classic horror movies like "Carrie" or "Near Dark" sink their teeth deep into the dynamics of gender, adolescent lust and loneliness, the beating heart of authentic dread and terror. Kusama's direction never taps into it, Cody's pop-cult patter doesn't adequately articulate it, and the rockin' bod and lush lips of Fox can't disguise the fact that no one's at home under the skin. Hockey-masked Michael Myers is a more animated monster.

And what's with a scary movie about rabid flesh that modestly turns its gaze away almost every time sex or violence comes up?

Cheap laughs can be had at the expense of Low Shoulder, the dim-witted band that downloads a satanic ritual off the Internet, then sings "Jenny, I got your number" while "going all Benihana" on Jennifer's body. Following teen-slasher movie tradition, grown-ups are conspicuously absent from this House of Horrors, except for a useless mom and clueless teacher (the estimable J.K. Simmons). There's a fall-down funny "Town Hall moment" when an outraged classmate gets all up in Needy's face because the latter denies that the members of Low Shoulder played heroes in the bar fire. Fiction must trump fact. And what does Needy know? She was only there.

So the amateurishly directed "Jennifer's Body" is a bust as ha-ha horror movie. That said, a word of defense for Cody. Remember when Valley Girl talk was all the rage in teen movies? Some saw that mindless drool as Hollywood High's dumbed-down equivalent of Shakespeare. Now Cody helps herself to tasty similes and allusions from the pop-cult smorgasbord, giving her smart girls the chance to spice their every utterance with an extra fillip of significance ("Breasts are like smart bombs. Point them and stuff gets real"). No biggie, just having fun and being clever with language. But that, and Cody's attempts to encourage girls to be as potty-mouthed about sex ("You give me such a wettie") as boys have had the privilege of being since forever, seems to have rattled some reviewers. Could there be double standards abroad here?

Also: On the Set of "Jennifer's Body"

Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.