This was not the movie I expected. I saw previews in which the freakishly hot Popular Girl and the attractive but movie-mousy Best Friend have a power-based friendship that devolves when the hot chick is revealed to be a vampire, and I was pretty sure I’d be seeing a horror-slanted riff on the darkly comedic high school ground broken by Heathers. Coming out of the theater though, I can better relate it to the cinematic version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that Joss Whedon disliked so much. There’s still a little black comedy, sure, but it’s pretty much an even split between an actual horror movie and an over-the-top zany comedy.

Jennifer’s Body follows the devolution of that primary relationship I mentioned after the aforementioned Jennifer turns out to be a demon who is gradually eating the boys in the senior class. Which is not really a good measure of… Well, words are kind of failing me here, which is unfortunate because it’s a surprisingly good flick. Mixed in with the hilarity and the occasional scares is a pretty decent metaphor for growing out of school relationships that are based more in history than reality and toward adulthood. Then again, the paired sex scene between the main characters in dueling scenes[1] made no sense to me at all, so I’m not trying to say it’s all oniony layers of impressive and thoughtful depth here.

But I can say that Megan Fox has the best set of dying words I have ever seen on screen.

[1] 2018 edit: I know what I mean here, but damned if I can figure out how to phrase it better. They each were having sex with other people, in different locations, in one intertwined scene in the movie, is what I mean to say.