The questions posed by the arch horror movie “Jennifer’s Body’’ include: Will there be a second chance for “Juno’’ screenwriter Diablo Cody? Does director Karyn Kusama deserve a third chance after the high of “Girlfight’’ in 2000 and the low of “Aeon Flux’’ in 2005? Can Megan Fox act?
The answers, in order, are: Probably not, yes, and lordy no.
The haters are already out in force for this one, storming the nation’s multiplexes with torches if their blogs are to be believed. Honestly, the movie’s not that terrible. That doesn’t mean it’s very good, though. “Jennifer’s Body’’ falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.
Even “Heathers’’ couldn’t sustain intelligent malice across an entire movie, and that had Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. “Jennifer’s Body’’ stars Amanda Seyfried, who was in “Mamma Mia!,’’ and Fox, the “Transformers’’ poster-girl who’s as of this moment the most generic and least interesting sex object in the land. The upshot is a horror-comedy that’s not nearly funny enough and certainly isn’t scary.
The worst part is that the set-up is rich with snap, crackle, and kink, and the movie very occasionally delivers. Jennifer (Fox) is the reigning queen bee at Devil’s Kettle High School and Anita, a.k.a. “Needy’’ (Seyfried), is her bespectacled best friend from childhood and current nerd-grrl acolyte. Needy still thinks she and Jennifer are on equal footing, but she’s about the only one. She does have a nice-guy boyfriend, though: Chip (Johnny Simmons), whose shaggy charm the movie needs more than Needy does.
Jennifer, by contrast, is a preening man-eater until an encounter with a Satan-worshiping indie rock band turns her into - irony alert - an actual man-eater: a pointy-toothed, demonically possessed succubus who lures the school’s stock boy types (jock, Goth, etc.) into the woods and eviscerates them for breakfast. Feeding makes Jennifer strong and indomitable (“and her hair is amazing,’’ says Needy in one of the better lines). Without blood, she becomes a pallid, powerless nobody. There’s a decent metaphor for high school hierarchies there, but the movie mostly lets it lie.
Two things keep “Jennifer’s Body’’ from clicking: The script isn’t nearly as wonderful as it thinks it is, and Fox has the personality of a lukewarm Thermos. (A third: Kusama’s a solid director but not the wild-and-woolly stylist this project probably needs.) Cody tries to rocket her dialogue along at “Juno’’ pace, but sardonic glibness is hard to pull off when characters are going screaming to their deaths - she should have either eased up on the gas or revved through to the far side of bad taste. Worse, the writer’s patented Cody-isms (“freaktarded,’’ “move on-dot-org’’) seem pushy and stale this time out.
The satanic indie band is a sharp satiric idea, though; Adam Brody plays the leader with the careerist cool the Strokes probably had early on. Seyfried is appealingly stressed, too, and the movie comes close to real transgression (as opposed to a jokey facsimile thereof) when an exultant Jennifer moves in on Needy for a long and hungry kiss. Suddenly “Jennifer’s Body’’ sparks with the heat and unease of an audience being pushed out of its comfort zone.
Then it loses its nerve, and the problem may lie with the movie’s leading lady. Because Fox has successfully been sold as a fantasy to millions of adolescent boys who have no idea what being with an actual woman is like, she lacks the individuality that would make Jennifer genuinely dangerous. True, the makeup crew turns her into a pretty good approximation of Shiva the Destroyer. At the end of the day, though, Fox is still Bambi the Boy Toy, and her movie hurts no one.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation. 
