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Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried as high-school friends in Jennifer's Body

Sep 18, 2009 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

While it's debatable how much merit an Academy Award carries, screenwriter Diablo Cody's Oscar for Juno was one of the great follies in the award show's recent history. Littered with snide quips from its title character and pop-culture references aimed at Gen X, most of the film ignored the complications and gravity of being a pregnant 16-year-old. Cody parlayed her success into the Spielberg-backed Showtime series The United States of Tara, but her anticipated follow-up feature Jennifer's Body brings her back to high school, where she gets it all wrong, again.

Things start out promisingly enough, with Amanda Seyfried's character Needy stating: "Hell is a teenage girl." The next 15 minutes pop with irreverent dialogue, but instead of a Facebook-era update on Heathers, the film quickly devolves into the kind of B-movie rubbish that became outdated decades ago. Megan Fox, whose offscreen allure has never translated to her films, plays Jennifer, a high-school bombshell intent upon keeping her best friend Needy in her shadow. When Jennifer is abducted by an indie-rock band for a satanic sacrifice gone awry, she turns into a vampire-like monster and begins to feed off her male classmates for sustenance. As Jennifer rampages the town, lame digs at pop culture targets such as Miley Cyrus and Aquamarine ensue, leaving us to wonder how much time Cody spent on her script once she came up with its first line.

www.jennifersbody.com       

Author rating: 2/10