Having had to endure ‘Resident Evil’ hiding behind the popcorn bag with half closed eyes and suffering recurrent nightmares from ‘I Am Legend’, I would not consider myself the most suitable person to sit through a marathon of mayhem and madness.
However, one fateful Thursday night, with Cineworld offering me a choice of either Up! or a film on meatballs , I decided to desert comfort- zone- Hollywood, and instead pay a visit to our indigenous alternative cinema. And what an alternative I found. The Irish Film Institute was hosting the opening night of the 12th annual Horrorthon film festival with the debut of ‘Jennifer’s Body’, the latest creation of Diablo Cody (well known for Juno- also quite a horrific film in my opinion).
Being too proud to admit to my friends that I am utterly terrified of poltergeists and other undead entities, I decided to rise to the challenge. With a glass of wine lining my stomach to calm the nerves, I was ready to conquer my fears and headed towards 102 minutes of blood-curdling suspense.
Realising that I was about to watch a film called Jennifer’s Body, I became slightly nervous, recollecting the dreadful chop-chopping of body-parts I had to tolerate watching ‘Hostel’. But the fact that the film starred Megan Fox pleasantly surprised me, and upon realising that Adam Brody (OC’s Seth Cohen) would play the evil Satanist, I refused to believe that I was actually to experience any horror at all. The cinema was packed with horror nerds of the male variety, ready to celebrate the joyous Halloween season, grunting Yay or Nay during the trailers at directors’ names I have never heard of. Thank God (or, more appropriately, Satan) for Megan Fox who seemed to have stunned the nerd constituency into silence.
Experiencing some financial horrors in 2008, the Hollywood production of ‘Jennifer’s Body’ certainly promises to blow some life into the lungs of a genre which is not only battling for its survival, but is most of all continuingly dealing with harsh denunciations due to what I would call terrible mal-productions. (Anyone recall ‘When a stranger calls’ and the numerous ‘Friday the 13th’ movies?)
However, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ does not fall into this scream-and-run or who-is-behind-this-door sort of horror. At least not completely. It is more like a chick-flick à la ‘Mean Girls’, with the only twist that Lindsey Lohan would be possessed by Satan and eat her friends’ limbs. The banality of the plot is somewhat rectified by the general inappropriateness of teenage language (usage of words like freaktarded and salty), a great soundtrack (including Florence and the Machine, and all-time classics like the 1994 hit ‘Violet’ by Hole) and witty dialogues such as: Jennifer: ‘I think the singer wants me’. Needy (Jen’s ‘bestie’): ‘Only because he thinks you’re a virgin.’
Jennifer: ‘I’m not even a backdoor-virgin anymore, thanks to Roman. By the way, that hurts. I couldn’t even go to flags the next day. I had to stay home and sit on a bag of frozen peas’.
Without dissecting the plot in detail (oops you got me here- there isn’t really that much flesh to work with), I would recommend the movie (due to be released on 4 November) to anyone with a soft-spot for unconventional horrorfilms and who does not take any of this horror-tschibang too seriously.
Unfortunately, there might be a slight dilemma for the film’s success: either it is not regarded funny enough to satisfy the chick-flick lovers, or not scary enough for those who count the days to their annual pilgrimage to Dublin’s Horrothon. Looking at the other 26 films shown over the October Bank Holiday weekend, none would in any way be comparable to ‘Jennifer’s body’: ‘Trick ‘r Treat’ will not even be shown in Irish cinemas but go straight onto DVD due to its subject matter, and ‘Grace’ (a woman bearing a dead child who turns out to be not so dead at all) might be facing the same fate.
Also shown were the zombastic ‘Day of the Dead’, and the Serbian production ‘Zone of the Dead’ where InterPol agents join forces with dangerous prisoners to fight a horde of zombies. I do mourn that special effects literally killed Hitchcock’s ‘suspense and surprise’ movies, however, for those of you who like to see films like ‘Shining’ taken to the next level of gruesome-ness, take note of the annual IFI Horrothon. For all the rest of us who more or less enjoyed ‘He’s just not that into you’, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ is just about enough horror to bear.
