Jennifer’s Body (2009): B

Snarky teen banter, ‘80s-era spring formal attire, overly clever and self-conscious pop culture-inflected quips and bon mots –Jennifer’s Body has screenwriter Diablo Cody’s fingerprints all over it. And yet while those signature elements are what largely made Juno an insufferable too-cute-for-school hair-puller, here, in the service of a campy horror-comedy about a sexpot possessed by a demon, they feel far more at home. Directed with an uneven tone but witty flair by Karyn Kusama (who repeatedly indulges in, and screws around with, classic genre clichés), the film casts high school sexscapades as a deadly contact sport via Jennifer (Megan Fox, far funnier than expected). Decked out in cleavage-baring hoodies and miniscule short shorts, she’s a borderline-nuclear hottie, and after an indie rock show that literally goes up in flames, she ditches her nerdy best friend, the embarrassingly named Needy (Amanda Seyfried), to join the band on their bus, where she winds up becoming the eyelinered rockers’ human sacrifice (for stardom, naturally) and emerges later with a flesh-eating spirit inside her svelte frame. Cody’s look-at-me dialogue (“Nice hardware, Ace”) can still grate on the ears, but its smarty-pantsness fits Jennifer, the type of adolescent bombshell who knows she has it and likes to flaunt it – a quality that serves her well, given her need to lure men into isolated areas for consumption. Cody’s plotting is rough and, at about the midway point, loses its satiric sharpness, with Jennifer – at her most magnificent when strutting down the school hallways, her hair lustrous after a hearty meal – never positioned quite consistently enough as a Carrie-esque figure whose superhumanity is an outgrowth of ascendant female puberty. And Needy, right up to and through a third-act showdown with her BFF over bland boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons), gets too short shrift as a stand-alone character. But in its playful, salacious inversion of horror cinema’s typical attitude toward female sexuality (replete with in-your-face titillating lesbian undertones), in its mockery of emo rock as a destructive byproduct of the devil, and in Fox’s ravenous embodiment of T&A as an annihilating carnal weapon – when she swims nude in a lake to the thunderous guitars of The Sword, she’s hilariously elevated to the status of mythic sex titan – Jennifer’s Body has substantial bite.