Jennifer's Body: Critic Reviews

Takes up a common theme of slasher films - that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know - and turns it inside out.

A genre high-school horror flick with a satirical edge.

Jennifer's Body tries hard to be cool, gross and nasty but feels forced and misses the mark.

Jennifer's Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

Jennifer's Body seems designed more to be quoted than watched.

As screenwriter Diablo Cody might say in her irritatingly pop-cult way, this zombie-chick horror-satire is more dead-eyed than Blake Lively.

It's a fun premise -- a twist on the usual girl-in-distress scenario of the standard-issue horror film -- enlivened by Codyspeak.

Director Karyn Kusama finds resonant terror in details: the look Anita and Jennifer exchange before Jen's fateful ride, or a victim's last-minute ah-hah.

The amateurishly directed 'Jennifer's Body' is a bust as ha-ha horror movie.

There is within Diablo Cody the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that's uncompromising. This isn't your assembly-line teen horror thriller.

The tone wavers, the direction's slackly indecisive and visually drab, and in the middle of it is a thinly conceived antagonist played by Megan Fox. Honestly, she's a pretty bad actress. She doesn't seem to get Cody's sense of humor. At all.

The flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing.

As a horror movie, Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic.

It's a serviceable premise, but the execution fails on almost every level.

There are probably worse ways to go out than being devoured by Fox... but the film squanders all the fun from what could have been a hilarious, gore-filled romp.

While Fox's performance as a high-school girl possessed by a demon would seem key to the fortunes of the film, Amanda Seyfried, as her unlikely best friend, Needy, makes it more interesting than it would be.

While not exactly lifeless, Jennifer's Body sure could be fresher.

Clever one-liners don't cover the cruelty here. Jennifer is shallow. The movie about her is, too.

Jennifer's Body comes across as Diablo Cody lite, something she seems to have dashed off in-between talk show appearances and updating her MySpace page with her latest caustic witticisms.

'Jennifer's Body': Kusama-Cody's Post-"Carrie" Horror Feminism Is Inept

Apparently, there's nothing like lean and hungry times to awaken the undead.

The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

Kusama and Cody's collaboration is a wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.