Review of Jennifer's Body (2009) by Chads. — 18 Sep 2009

In a crowded gymnasium for troubled girls, Needy Lesnicky(Amanda Seyfried), a nerdy succubus slayer, walks past the other inmates as they engage in an athletic endeavor, and untethers the tetherball with a slam of her hand.

By paying anti-homage to Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite", the screenwriter serves notice to her "honest-to-blog" fans that she's no indie stalwart. While promoting "Juno", the ex-stripper was already in the process of distancing herself from the whole hipster culture, and sure enough, in "Jennifer's Body", we know for sure who the real Moldy Peaches fans were, when she mocks the whole notion of "indie" to absurd lengths by portraying the indie band as evil.

(Not just professionally evil, but really evil.) More than just a mere horror flick, "Jennifer's Body" sends up professional "indie"-ism, a form of twenty-first century hackery.

The screenwriter repositions indie rock as the new metal, in which she evokes the supposed devil worshipping ways of metal bands from the relatively recent past(Slayer, Danzig), who used the occult as a marketing ploy to sell albums.

More likely than not, these musicians probably didn't really salute Satan away from the stage; they didn't drink blood and howl at the moon. That's why Low Shoulder strikes me as hillarious.

The band trades in their indie cred for a cred which probably never existed. (***SPOILER ALERT***) By way of explanation for the musical group's virgin sacrifice, the lead singer explains how their turn towards the darkside is strictly a career decision, a means to remain commercially viable in an industry overloaded with similar sounding bands.

While "Jennifer's Body" fails as a horror film, it does succeed modestly on the level of satire; the film has a ghoulish strain of Spinal Tap in its backbone.