You Succubus - JENNIFER’S BODY

As Black History Month leads into Women’s History Month, Schizocinema revs up a March full of female directors!  We start off the month, slightly late, with Karyn Kusama.  The director shines in smaller, intimate movies like THE INITIATION, and her debut, GIRLFIGHT, but her big budget studio work is always a bit of a catastrophe.  Despite the studio interference, second guessing, and poor marketing there is still something about them that pulls me in.  Take her sci-fi epic, Æon Flux.  That movie is all over the place, but so uniquely bonkers that I kind of love it.  One woman has hands for feet.  People send liquid email.  A flower grows out of Frances McDormand’s mouth.  It’s great.  With that in mind, I braved a look at her next, unfavorably received feature, the 2009 high school horror, JENNIFER’S BODY.  Would the Kusama magic hold?  

The Capsule:

Needy’s (Amanda Seyfried) BFF is the worst.  She is vapid, rude, and obnoxious.  She constantly takes advantage of Needy, and tries to sabotage her relationship with her boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons).  She has all the boys in town wrapped around her little finger.  And she occasionally eats them.  This latest development has Needy suspecting that her lifelong pal, Jennifer (Megan Fox), has become a Succubus. Demonically, not symbolically .  It all started the night Jennifer rode off with that terrible emo band, Low Shoulder, and came back drenched in blood.  Turns out they were a bunch of Satanists and their virgin sacrifice had unexpected results.  Jennifer’s transformation from high school bitch to hell bitch makes Needy seriously reappraise their friendship. When Jennifer sets her hungry eyes on Chip, Needy knows it's time for a permanent break up with her beastie bestie.  The only question is, who gets broken?

Between writer Diablo Cody’s post-JUNO backlash (which I didn’t understand) and Megan Fox’s post-TRANSFORMERS backlash (totally understood), JENNIFER’S BODY was heavily dumped on when it came out.  Not that I put much stock in word of mouth, but the trailer didn’t grab me, so I let the movie slip by.  I was a little leery even after realizing Kusama directed it, so this was my first watch.  And while it was not on the glorious mindfuck level of Æon Flux, I'm happy to say it has the Kusama magic touch. 

That goes for the Director’s Cut, at least, which is the only version I’ve seen.  Starting with the Director’s Cut or extended cut is not always a smart move, since theatrical cuts tend to be leaner and better paced.  In this case, though, I believe it was the right call.  From what I’ve heard, Kusama’s cut fleshes out Seyfried’s character a little more.  It starts with Needy in a mental institution, seemingly with good justification (she’s a K-I-C-K-E-R, just ask that poor nutritionist).  After she is thrown into solitary confinement, the movie flashes back to how she came to such an antisocial state.  Well, first there is a flashback to her peering in Jennifer’s window like a stalker (the beginning of the Theatrical cut), then we fully flashback to the beginning of her tale.   A little strange structurally, but effective.  The Kusama way.

Under all the blood and carnage, the heart of the story is about how abusive girls can be to each other under the veil of friendship.  Jennifer is clearly a horrible person even before becoming demonified.  She uses Needy as her non-threatening wingman (wingwoman? winglady?), a smaller gem to make the big one more impressive.  Needy lets Jennifer dictate how she dresses and where they go, insuring just the right level of shadow for her to remain in.  

Despite her name, Needy isn’t a complete doormat, though.  Kusama makes the relationship believable.  They casually trade insults and seem to enjoy each other’s company, as long as Jennifer is in the spotlight.  Needy puts up with Jennifer’s bullshit because she idolizes her friend, and vicariously enjoys the attention she isn’t confident enough to attract on her own.  She’s also got a secret crush on her, which Jennifer subtly (and later, not so subtly) uses as leverage.  Needy’s depth makes her easy to connect with, and gives her arc from pushover to ass kicker a sense of honesty as she realizes that Jennifer’s self-esteem hinged on her as much as, if not more than, the other way around.  

This isn’t directly related, but I came to a weird conclusion when watching this just now.   The accelerated pace of technology dates modern movies 1000x more than clothes or music, so much so that it messes with your perception of time.  A movie from the ‘90s doesn’t seem that old to me, but a movie from 2009 seems fucking ancient.  Jennifer talks about someone’s My Space page.  They use words like “texting” and “Wikipedia” like they are exotic.  One kid is listening to an iPod in the car, I swear, it looks like he has a defibrillator hooked up to the stereo.  No satellite radio? Was this made in the Stone Age?  

Not knowing much about the movie gave me a few good “oh, shit” moments with the cast.  It took me a few beats before realizing the square-chested blockhead Jennifer was leading on at the bar was pre-Parks and Recreations Chris Pratt!  The big dumb guy from Coach (Bill Fagerbakke, also the voice of Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants) shows up as a grieving father.  The best surprise is J.K. Simmons, playing a fuzzy haired, cry-out-your-feelings kind of teacher, Mr. Wroblewski.  These days, I think of Simmons as the sadistic music teacher from WHIPLASH, or the sadistic Nazi leader in Oz, or as the not sadistic but still very angry J. Jonah Jameson in Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN films, so it was hilarious to see him playing such a sensitive milquetoast.  My favorite thing about Wroblewski, though, is that he has a giant scar on his neck and a prosthetic hand.  I figured that meant he had survived an encounter with a Succubus years ago, and that he would provide Needy a clue as to how to defeat Jennifer.  Nope, they never mention it.  He’s just a dude with a hook hand.  I love that shit.

Another great, bizarre touch is that along with her powers of fast healing, levitating, and erupting a mouthful of shark teeth, Jennifer has an unsettling effect on animals.  While she is seducing a football jock deep in the woods, an adorable menagerie of raccoons, beavers, and other woodland creatures gather round, eager to watch the bloodletting.  She’s like an evil Snow White.  When the cops discover they jock’s body, a deer is munching on his intestines.  Not typical deer behavior, in my opinion.  Never comes up, though.

There are flaws.  Diablo Cody’s dialog can be hard to take at times, and this comes from someone who loves HEATHERS and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  On the other hand, the cringiest lines are all Jennifer’s, so perhaps it’s intentional.  Needy’s lines are better, and Jennifer gets off a few good ones when she goes full evil.  “Nice hardware, ace” made me smile.  

The bland emo soundtrack is terrible, but again, this might be intentional.  The most intolerable songs come from Low Shoulder, the band who starts the whole mess.  The bandmembers spontaneously break into a Tommy Tutones song before butchering Jennifer as an offering to Satan, so clearly you are supposed to hate these assholes.  It makes sense that their shitty music could only catch on with the help of supernatural intervention (I also like the insinuation that the guy from Maroon 5 did the same thing).  

Even without the consciously stylized dialogue, the movie owes a lot to HEATHERS and Buffy.  It’s humor and tone are very reminiscent of their “darkness lurking beneath a pretty suburban face” vibe.  Needy researching how to kill Succubi in the school library’s unusually well stocked Occult section was an especially Buffy moment.  That’s not a bad thing, by any means.  In fact, it makes a better Buffy movie than the real Buffy movie.  Can’t beat the TV series, though, sorry Karyn.  

Predictably then, my favorite part is the film’s bookend, back at the mental institution.  I guess it’s a [Spoiler] to reveal Needy is there for killing Jennifer, although I made that assumption from the very beginning (the “my best friend was a succubus” defense rarely pans out in court).  The bigger surprise is that Needy learns from experience that those bitten by a demon and survive gain some of the demon’s power.  This explains, but does not excuse, why she was such a dick to that nutritionist (poor demonic impulse control).  More importantly, it gives her the strength to escape and, in the best in-credit sequence since the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, bring much deserved vengeance to those Low Shoulder douchebags.

Oh, I should also mention that the person who gives her a ride after her escape is an uncredited LANCE HENRIKSEN!  He seemed a little pervy, so Needy probably killed him, but I’d like to think that they teamed up to hunt demons, occultists, and talentless boy bands across the country.  They could ride around in a bus with Mr. Wroblewski, who turns out to be a werewolf.  Come on Diablo, let’s start cranking out those sequel scripts!

C Chaka

Special Bonus:  throwing in a few extra screenshots because this movie is gorgeous (Cinematographer: M. David Mullen)