Jennifer's Body Review

As the poster proclaims: hell yes. For fans of Heathers, Mean Girls and 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer', here's a tasty morsel of a high school comedy horror that puts girls in the driving seat and boys on the menu. If this doesn't appeal to you as a concept, stop reading now. There are dozens of reviews of Jennifer's Body already out there that have failed to see the delicious appeal of such a film. Go read them, and revel in the Diablo Cody backlash (a backlash against a funny, successful woman? Surely not...). Alternatively, if you're of the opinion than Megan Fox as demonic man-eater and the ever-awesome Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, 'Veronica Mars', Chloe) nerding up as The One Person In This Crazy Town Who Knows The Truth, plus Adam Brody ('The OC') as a complete penis of an emo band frontman, sounds completely fabulous, read on.

It can surely only be the genre that has American critics twice the age of the film's protagonists wearily dismissing Cody's "slanguage-laden", "glib teen-hip dialogue" as "self-conscious splatter over a sorely lacklustre scare flick" where they loftily praised Juno as having "introduced a writer with a fresh point of view about young people in today's world." You see, Miss Cody, it's okay to mash language into grammarian-baiting new slang in the context of a wiseass Sundance smash teen pregnancy indie flick, but if you do it in a comedy horror, you're just running after the self-referential horror bandwagon long after it's been carted off to the junkyard and melted down for parts.

To borrow a Diablo Cody phrase, this is "freaktarded" - the considerably less twee Jennifer's Body has easily as many angles on teen living as Juno, and it is pure genre-prejudice to believe that a film featuring demonic rites, sacrifice and supernatural terror is inherently inferior to a more "real" treatment of adolescence. So, what's the appeal of Jennifer's Body?