Cody’s latest film undermines her ‘Body’ of work

Nearly two years ago, a screenplay appeared on the Internet that had every screenwriting nerd blogging with fervor.

The script followed two teenage girls as their friendship unraveled when one is turned into a maneating demon by a devil-worshipping indie rock band. If that wasn’t enough ammunition for gossip and backlash, the script also featured nonsensical dialogue like “Hey, Vagisil,” and “You’re lime green Jell-O and you don’t even know it.”

It was not so much these outrageous plot points and one-liners that made the screenplay a buzz topic on numerous movie message boards, but the name of writer who apparently penned it all: Diablo Cody.

Cody was just then surfacing in Hollywood with her debut screenplay Juno, the quirky little indie film that was an instant hit at film festivals and an even bigger hit at the box office. As we all know, Cody would later win an Academy Award for Juno and become one of the most recognizable screenwriters in contemporary cinema.

But while Juno was busy making its theatrical rounds and winning over thousands of hearts, obsessive web users were posing one simple question in regards to this poorly written, pop culture reference-laden horror-comedy titled Jennifer’s Body written by the so-called brilliant Cody: “WTF?”

Two years later, it appears that Jennifer’s Body was no joke.

Directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Aeon Flux), Jennifer’s Body is a well-made, highly stylized B-movie that is garnering more attention and rave reviews than it should.

Megan Fox, the current “It Girl” among adolescent males, stars as Jennifer, who, not so coincidentally, is the It Girl in Devil’s Kettle, a small, dead-end town located in the wooded depths of Minnesota. Though Jennifer is easily the most popular and lusted-after girl at school, she remains best friends with Needy (Amanda Seyfried), a nerdy Plain Jane who seems content with her incredibly dorky yet adorable boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons).

But staying true to her namesake, Needy does whatever Jennifer wants. And so, when Jennifer asks Needy to accompany her to the town’s seedy dive bar to see an indie rock band, led by an eyeliner-clad Nikolai (Adam Brody), Needy faithfully answers Jennifer’s beck and call.

At first a carefree adventure, the night takes a sudden tragic turn when the bar catches on fire during the band’s set. Jennifer and Needy safely escape the blaze, as do Nikolai and his band members. Once outside, Nikolai drags Jennifer into the band’s shady van and drives away into the night; that’s the last time Needy sees her childhood best friend free of demons.

But, of course, that’s when the blood, gore, cheesy special effects and painful overacting begin.

Kusama’s return to the director’s chair is bittersweet. While she could benefit from a lesson or two from Alfred Hitchcock on building suspense, Kusama displays a strong vision with her vibrant visual design and crisp cinematography. But the script’s constant flip-flopping from horror to comedy leaves Kusama tonally confused. As a result, the comedy arises from the film’s awkward dialogue and character interactions, and the actual horror is sparse throughout.

While Fox’s acting is a hopeless case, Kusama is actually able to pull several powerful moments from Seyfried before the scenes turn melodramatic. With these glimpses of Kusama’s directing ability scattered throughout the film, it is truly a shame that she chose to waste her talent on a mediocre script.

That’s not to say that Cody does not possess any talent of her own. Cody has a knack for creating unusual-yet-intoxicating worlds where girls describe guys as “salty” and adults are hardly authority figures.

Athough Jennifer’s Body might read as the direct opposite of feminist ideals as it reverts to over-the-top man-hating, there is something refreshing about watching a female take charge on screen, even if it is by feeding off the corpses of her male classmates. By turning the conventions of the horror genre inside out with a hot female playing the diabolical antagonist, Cody delivers a cheesy-yet-relatively fresh perspective of the genre. But combined with the underdeveloped lesbian undertones, expositional voice-overs and plot holes looser than the limbs on Jennifer’s victims, it is clear Jennifer’s Body was written by an amateur.

It’s no secret that the film industry is built on brand recognition, which makes it even more troublesome to both tasteful cinephiles and aspiring filmmakers that Cody can pass off her overly quirky, unforgivably shallow characters and mindless dialogue as a unique style simply because of Juno’s unforeseen triumph at the box office and Academy Awards. Many have claimed that an Oscar win for your first screenplay is a curse in disguise, for audiences and critics alike will forever set the bar for the rest of your work at the quality of your first script.

When it comes to Cody and her writing, it seems that audiences need to lower their expectations from now on.