By now you’re looking at that headline and wondering if I’ve a. had some kind of massive stroke while writing this or b. am really feeling my Star Control 2.  The answer to that is actually a lot more b than a, but it’s actually really appropriate because today, I’m talking about Diablo Cody’s foray into writing horror, Jennifer’s Body.

We’ve all been hearing about this one for months on end, the endless will-she-won’t-she that is a naked Megan Fox (she won’t) and the equally endless problems with the script (there were many), so it was actually a relief to finally be able to plunk down my money and see how it played out.  The answer: it was not the train wreck I expected, but rather a wreck of a whole different sort.

The plotline is fairly horror movie standard–a high school girl finds herself possessed by a demon who in turn drives her to feed on human blood and gives her incredible powers in exchange for doing so.  Her relatively mousy friend (who I actually thought was pretty hot herself) must stand in the gap and stop her friend from turning the male population of the local high school into a wandering buffet.

I found myself wondering, throughout most of the movie, if English is actually Diablo Cody’s first language, because at any given time,  parts of the movie are utterly incomprehensible.  This is where the headline kicks in–in the old PC game Star Control 2, there’s a race of pandimensional beings called the Orz.  The Orz language is so bizarre that it can only be partially translated by computer, and the rest is packaged into a series of “best-fits”, or words that closely approximate whatever the hell it is the Orz are talking about. They’re denoted by asterisks as seen above.  So while you’re talking to an Orz, they might well lapse off into talking about *silly* *campers* who are always *jumping in front*.  But the last time anyone made an Orz *frumple* they got shot at, so that’s not a word you want to hear.

This is the big problem with Jennifer’s Body as Diablo Cody’s script will frequently lapse into nonsense words that require explanation or subtitles, and still make no sense.  For instance, Jennifer refers to attractive men as *salty* *morsels*, which won’t be explained, and even then in rudimentary terms, until much later in the film.  The movie is literally scattered with lines that furrowed my brow in bafflement.  What the hell is she even talking about?  And considering that both Megan Fox AND director Karyn Kusama shared my frustration at this, it’s not just me, folks.

Yes, yes, I know “teenagers have their own language” and slang words and all that nonsense, but this is NOT Heathers.  This is a horror flick.  Nonsense words need not apply and haven’t applied yet.  In horror flicks, teenagers speak translatable, serviceable ENGLISH.

Meanwhile, the horror movie aspect of things is fairly well done if a little on the pedestrian side–we’ve seen pretty much all of this back in the nineties, folks, and Jennifer’s Body basically just feels like Scream repackaged with a succubus and Megan Fox.

I expected this to be a lot worse.  And in the case of the dialogue it was indeed the worst case, but the rest of the movie managed to pull it together to at least manage to be a fairly well built retread of several older, better movies.  This is Diablo Cody’s version of dress-up in which her little horror script puts on Mommy Scream’s shoes and Auntie Friday the 13th’s eyeliner and declares that it too is a big girl now.

The Screenhead Ten Scale won’t *frumple* but instead hands this *silly* *camper* of a film a fair-enough six out of ten.  A rewrite in English would have fixed so many problems here.