Jennifer’s Body suffers mightily by comparison to its thematic/genre contemporaries: it’s not as smart or sophisticatedly feminist as Ginger Snaps; it’s not as sure-footed in its satire as Heathers; it’s not as exhilarating of a revenge fantasy as Teeth; it’s not as campy-fun as The Faculty; it’s not nearly scary enough to overcome its pomo like the Scream series; and on and on… There are better horror films and genre-benders out there, for sure, but despite the panning it’s getting from critics, it’s not total crap. It’s a decent little B-movie with a few surprisingly chillingly moments, a couple of big laughs, a bunch of near misses, and a wildly uneven tone and pacing. In other words: it ends up being about as good as most of the above-average horror films being made today.

Warning: Very mild spoilers ahead.

The problem with Jennifer’s Body is that it declares a far more ambitious agenda than your average horror movie, and then falls short. The film opens with Anita “Needy” Lesnicki observing, “Hell is a teenage girl,” which becomes shorthand for the work the film is clearly trying to do: exploring the problems of female adolescence and friendship, and subverting horror film cliches about sexuality and, especially, relations between women and men. Unfortunately, it’s just not successful at creating coherent stories around these issues, and the film ends up being a series of disappointments – albeit, really interesting disappointments.

Jennifer’s story is particularly interesting: there are brief moments where the film develops real sympathy for her and others where it generates all sorts of fascinating questions about sexuality, but doesn’t gel into either a compelling narrative or a compelling critique. She is a distressingly ambiguous monster — at once all body, at once powerful but totally hollow and hungry, sorta post-feminist, maybe?, perhaps conscious/regretful of her transformation, but we don’t really know, and maybe feeling too much social and body-related pressure, but we the film saves that for two lines of dialogue at its end, etc. You can tell that writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama have clearly grappled with her implications, but never quite decided what they were or how to articulate them. So it goes for most of the characters and ideas.

Not surprisingly, Cody’s writing has divided most folks into love it/hate it camps. I have mixed feelings. At times, the dialogue is sharp and crackling. I think that it’s Cody’s insistence on using her patented dialogue all the darn time that’s the real problem. Amanda Seyfriend and Megan Fox get weighed down by the effort of trying to speak through that dialogue at many points in the film. (It makes you realize what a really good actress Ellen Page is that she could pull off Juno so successfully.) If Seyfried and Fox had been able to just talk even a little bit more normally sometimes, they might have been able to cut through all the Wit and express emotions/thoughts/feelings more authentically. I think this is one of the reasons why the male actors in the film come off quite a bit better. Free from the burden of having to do so much emotional heavy lifting through Cody’s dialogue, they can relax and have fun with it. (Adam Brody* pretty much runs away with the movie as a Brandon Flowers-esque indie rocker.) A much graver problem than even the dialogue is the choice to tell the story of the film in flashback with voiceover – it robs the film of so much tension/suspense and undermines the power of Needy’s story at the end.

Megan Fox is totally  fine! I actually wanted to see her get more to do in the film. (I haven’t decided yet if I think that Jennifer’s Body either underestimated her abilities or simply reached their limits – Fox is a most curious Hollywood mystery.) And I’ve really started to adore Amanda Seyfried – it was interesting to see Seyfriend essentially play Veronica Mars to Megan Fox’s Lilly Kane.  Jennifer’s Body also has some interesting cameos: J.K. Simmons continues to make the case that he can make anything funny, Amy Sedaris has a mostly disposable appearance as Needy’s mom (weird to put Sedaris in a movie and not do anything with her), and even Lance Henrickson shows up for a few moments.

At the end of the film, I felt acutely disappointed. I wanted Jennifer’s Body to succeed and live up to its ambitions. It’s a heavy burden to write, produce and distribute a self-consciously feminist horror film — we have such high expectations! It’s telling that I walked out of Jennifer’s Body feeling that feminist horror fans deserved better. It’s been nice to see Ginger Snaps referenced in so much criticism about Jennifer’s Body, but I’m bothered by the implication that we should be content with one really good feminist horror film – OR – that there’s really only room for one. Blarg! There’s also so much at stake in the business of film here – let’s face it: if one woman filmmaker falls short, all women filmmakers fall short. If Jennifer’s Body isn’t successful, will anyone get the money to try this again? (Also telling that I went into this movie thinking, “I don’t care if it’s as crappy as so many critics have said it is, it had just better make a A LOT of money.”)

A good night of sleep later, I’ve chilled out about it. I think that Jennifer’s Body plays much better with some distance. My guess is that we’ll be studying this film in a few years. Not because we’ll decide that it’s more successful than we first thought, but because its flaws are super interesting. I think we’ll end up applauding the ambitions of Cody and Kusama, if only because Jennifer’s Body points out how fraught making a feminist genre film really is.

(*My favorite moment in the film, besides a terrifically gross/creepy scene in which Megan Fox maniacally chews up a Boston Market rotisserie chicken and then pukes up demon bile all over Needy’s kitchen, is a Maroon 5 joke funny enough to be worth the price of admission.)