By Robert Scucci
| Published 12 seconds ago

I have this nasty habit of watching movies with no rhyme or reason, falling into genre holes, and slowly digging myself out. I do this with actors and directors too, most recently stumbling upon Megan Fox’s Till Death (2021). It’s a home invasion thriller that plays it straight, but has so many funny moments thanks to its pacing and situational humor. Having never seen 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, I figured now would be a good time to check it out, since I now know she works well in the blood-covered baddie wheelhouse.

Jennifer’s Body has everything you could possibly want in a horror comedy. It leans into young adult tropes, giving it an inherent amount of campiness because every adult is beyond clueless. It’s high school, you know, the most important four years of your life, so for the kids involved, everybody is in a heightened state because they have little to no real-world experience, but they’re also in mortal danger thanks to a very peculiar series of events that occur in their community.

Throw a blood-sucking succubus into the equation, add gratuitous amounts of splatter for dramatic effect, and Jennifer’s Body ends up being way more fun than it has any right to be, thanks to Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried’s straight-faced commitment to the bit.

Besties Forever

Jennifer’s Body fittingly starts off more like Mean Girls than a horror flick when we’re introduced to our protagonist, Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), and her super popular bestie, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox). Jennifer is your stereotypical high school beauty queen who can have every underclassman groveling in her presence. Needy is much more reserved, dresses humbly, and likes to keep a low profile despite the fact that she’s best friends with the most popular girl in school.

Needy’s life changes forever when Jennifer decides to take her out to see the indie rock band Low Shoulder at a local bar. Their relationship dynamic goes like this: Jennifer wants to do something, Needy doesn’t, Jennifer bullies Needy into doing it anyway, and Needy reluctantly tags along.

A fire breaks out at the concert and destroys the venue, killing several people in the process, and the girls separate when Jennifer decides she wants to hang out with the band in their van against Needy’s advice. Needy goes home thinking Jennifer is going to do whatever Jennifer always does, but is horrified to learn that whatever happened between the fire and Jennifer’s return has changed her for the worse.

The next time we see Jennifer, she’s covered in blood, seemingly in a trance, before trying to bite Needy in the neck like a vampire. The next day at school, Jennifer looks totally normal, as if the previous night didn’t happen, complete with her usual glowing skin and on-point contouring. However, Needy sees through the illusion. Whenever Jennifer’s looks start to deteriorate, it means she’s hungry and needs to eat one of her classmates to preserve her beauty, starting with the captain of the football team, and chaotically spiraling from that point forward. 

A Vampire Story With A Twist

What sets Jennifer’s Body apart from its contemporaries is its willingness to have fun, and to do it with style. While a $16 million production budget may not sound huge these days, it was enough to allow for some great practical effects. The movie is mostly set in a high school, so it’s reasonable to assume a decent chunk of that budget went toward making sure we got some top-notch gore.

There’s also a level of campiness that really drives things forward because this movie is basically Mean Girls meets The Lost Boys in terms of its sense of humor. Jennifer knows she’s transformed into something terrible, and while Needy knows something is clearly wrong, she has to use her smarts to figure out exactly how to break the spell that turned her into a blood-sucking monster with impeccable taste in fashion.

The plot line involving the band, and their recurring presence in Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, keeps things lively, but also hints at a much more sinister undertone once you learn how connected they are to Jennifer’s sudden transformation from high school bombshell to salacious succubus. There’s really no fat on this movie. Every character and plot line that gets introduced serves a purpose rather than getting brushed aside and forgotten about. 

In 2026, Jennifer’s Body feels like pretty standard horror comedy fare, especially after movies like The Babysitter (2017) and Little Evil (2017). Both films, along with plenty of others, latched onto a similar formula, but Jennifer’s Body is still one of the earlier examples of the modern mainstream horror comedy as far as I’m concerned. It’s gory, but not too gory. It’s sexy, but not over the top to the point where any mature teen watching with their parents would immediately want to crawl out of their skin. Most importantly, it’s fun.

Between the emotional manipulation and blood sucking, we’re still reminded that growing up anywhere is difficult, and friendship matters. Especially when the occult is involved and your best friend happens to be the person causing all the collateral damage. After all, you want to stay on Jennifer’s good side.

As of this writing, Jennifer’s Body is streaming on Netflix.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 18 seconds ago

Star Wars is a franchise full of quotable lines, which is why the Prequel Trilogy became the center of so many hilarious memes. One of my favorites comes from the Original Trilogy, when Darth Vader disses his old master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, with the hard line, “Now, his failure is complete.”

Even as a kid, I was fascinated by the idea that failure was not necessarily a fixed state. Just as the Dark Lord of the Sith could slip further and further into the Dark Side, it’s possible for a smaller failure to get increasingly worse over time.

Ironically enough, this line perfectly sums up the Disney era of Star Wars. The House of Mouse made some major mistakes with this franchise early on with a Sequel Trilogy so bad that it drove Star Wars out of theaters for the better part of a decade. They had to pivot to making TV shows, and the only real unqualified success was The Mandalorian. Now unable to get any new ideas to the big screen, Disney is about to premiere The Mandalorian and Grogu, and the fact that their last hope is to make a movie based on a past-its-prime series proves one thing: Disney’s failure is now complete.

The Beginning of the End

In retrospect, it’s clear that the beginning of the end for Star Wars was 2017’s The Last Jedi. While I personally enjoyed the film (it was beautifully shot and took big, creative swings), the majority of fans didn’t agree. The film subverted expectations in several hated ways, including killing Snoke and transforming Luke Skywalker into a cranky curmudgeon.

The second Sequel Trilogy film yielded solid box-office returns ($1.3 billion), but it generated enough negative word of mouth that the next movie suffered. Solo: A Star Wars Story made only $393 million against a $366 million budget, meaning it actually lost money once you factor in marketing and distribution costs.

This failure caused Disney to pivot, transforming several intended film projects (including movies featuring Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi) into TV shows. On paper, this was supposed to help drive subscribers to Disney+, letting the studio have it both ways: audiences would get their Star Wars fix at home through these series and in theaters through movies like 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. However, that final sequel film was a critical and commercial failure (it made “only” a billion and has a 51 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes), which is why we haven’t seen a new Star Wars film in theaters since 2019.

See You, Space Cowboy

The Star Wars shows on Disney+ have proven to be a decidedly mixed bag. Some series that seemed like they’d be surefire hits failed to energize the fandom, including Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett. Some shows were hard to appreciate if you didn’t know the deep lore.

For example, you might be lost watching Ahsoka if you didn’t previously watch the entirety of Rebels. Meanwhile, The Acolyte was a complete and mind-bogglingly expensive failure. Ultimately, the only breakout success was The Mandalorian, which focused (at least, at first) on episodic adventures in the vein of a Firefly-esque space western. 

Now, Disney is bringing that show’s two main characters to the big screen later this month with The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s the kind of film that fans would have eaten up a few years ago, back when The Mandalorian was the hottest show in a galaxy far, far away.

The show fell off in a big way over time. On Rotten Tomatoes, the first two seasons had both fan and critical ratings above 90 percent. But critics gave Season 3 an 84 percent, while fans gave it a much lower, much harsher 51 percent.

In other words, Disney waited until half the fandom hated The Mandalorian before deciding to bring its heroes to the big screen. Furthermore, even most fans looking forward to The Mandalorian and Grogu are worried it will feel more like an extended TV episode than a blockbuster feature film.

These factors at least partially explain why the film is projected to earn only $80 million in its opening weekend. That’s $4 million less than Solo: A Star Wars Story earned, meaning The Mandalorian and Grogu is on track to earn less money than any live-action Star Wars movie in cinematic history. 

Disney’s Failure Is Complete

Now, it’s clear that Disney’s failure is complete when it comes to Star Wars. The failure of the Sequel Trilogy created a ripple effect that turned Solo into a box-office bomb, ultimately canceling a series of intended films. After the failure of The Rise of Skywalker, execs kept canceling exciting movie projects, including Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron. Disney was forced to focus entirely on Star Wars TV shows, which generated mostly disappointment and failures after the initial success of The Mandalorian.

Disney is now forced to put The Mandalorian on the big screen as a Hail Mary attempt to make Star Wars relevant to moviegoing audiences again. But after over a decade of mishandling the franchise, they have ensured that The Mandalorian and Grogu will have the worst opening of any live-action Star Wars film. Sure, more projects are in development (like Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling), but Disney is in a precarious place. Should The Mandalorian and Grogu bomb as Solo did, it may poison future box office returns just like The Last Jedi did. 

That would make this more than just another cinematic failure for this galaxy far, far away. After nearly half a century of entertaining fans, we may actually be witnessing the end of the Star Wars franchise as we know it.

By Robert Scucci
| Published 23 seconds ago

Oh, how much I wanted the critics to be wrong about 2001’s Domestic Disturbance. It’s one of those weird psychological thrillers from the early aughts that has a severe identity crisis, like 2001’s The Glass House, which also had the potential to be a solid film if it didn’t constantly get in its own way, lay everything out far too soon, and pivot way too aggressively in the third act. Both films suffer from taking a simple premise, trying to overcomplicate it with psychological drama, and then completely forgetting what kind of story they’re trying to tell.

It’s a shame too, because John Travolta and Vince Vaughn play well off each other, and had they been given a better screenplay to work with, this would have been a memorable performance for both actors. But they weren’t, so it isn’t.

Your Classic “My Stepdad Is Trying To Kill Me” Setup

Domestic Disturbance is ultimately about one broken family trying to splinter off into two. John Travolta is Frank Morrison, a boat builder on the verge of financial collapse who lives with his new girlfriend Diane (Susan Floyd). His ex-wife Susan (Teri Polo) shares custody of their son Danny (Matt O’Leary), and is about to marry the ultra-wealthy Rick Barnes (Vince Vaughn).

Though Danny is known to get into trouble and lie to every authority figure in his life, he’s always honest with Frank, which immediately comes into play when the boy suggests that Rick isn’t the perfect man he seems to be. Behind closed doors, he’s emotionally abusive, aggressive, and a full-blown psychopath trying to fake it as a typical suburban dad.

Danny’s suspicions in Domestic Disturbance are confirmed when he witnesses the murder of Ray Coleman (Steve Buscemi), a mysterious man who shows up at the wedding unannounced and catches Frank’s attention as a suspicious figure associated with Rick. From this point forward, there’s no real mystery left to address. Frank and Danny know Rick is a murderer, nobody else believes them, the cops get involved, and they’re completely useless, forcing Frank to take matters into his own hands.

By the time we reach the third act, all bets are off. Everybody acts super intense, the family dynamic completely breaks down, and I personally found myself wondering why this movie failed to be even the slightest bit suspenseful despite its rapid-fire approach to escalation.

Domestic Disturbance’s Identity Crisis

The main reason Domestic Disturbance fails as a psychological thriller is because there’s not a single moment where anybody’s motives aren’t crystal clear. There’s some mystery surrounding Rick’s shady past and his overall intentions for the Morrison family, but outside of that, yeah, he’s obviously a shady guy, and the movie gives him plenty of “behind closed doors with Danny” moments to make sure the audience knows it. He’s physically abusive in the kind of way that scares the hell out of the kid, but not enough to leave marks, grabbing him by the arm or neck just hard enough to get his point across without going full psycho.

Frank, who’s not without his own past failings, is trying to do right by his son, who nobody believes, so he starts working with detectives Edgar Stevens (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and Warren (Chris Ellis), who seem like they’re only showing up in uniform for the free doughnuts. He does his own sleuthing and figures out what the audience already knows: Rick is about to go off the deep end, and nobody in the Morrison family is safe.

From there, Rick almost feels like a narrative switch gets flipped inside him, and suddenly he’s operating like a slasher villain. The same thing happens in The Glass House. A brother and sister suspect their new legal guardians are evil, they confirm it without any sliver of doubt, and then the evil people do evil things. Knowing how evil they are right off the rip just doesn’t make for compelling storytelling. There’s nowhere left to properly escalate, so it goes full ridiculous in its attempts to do so because it left itself with too little headroom, so logically, it needs to jump through the ceiling or stop dead in its tracks. 

There are better ways to play out a premise like this. While I’m not usually a champion of the “unreliable protagonist” trope in psychological thrillers because it’s been done to death, it’s exactly what movies like Domestic Disturbance need. There’s no meaningful buildup of tension here, just a slow crawl toward the inevitable ending we already know we’re going to get, followed by Vince Vaughn going totally berserk at the drop of a hat because that’s what the director told him to do. He does it well in this context, but the context itself is so beyond repair that a couple of talented actors can’t save what was probably doomed from the start.

Domestic Disturbance SCORE

Domestic Disturbance, currently streaming on Netflix, is one of those movies that makes you wonder what could have been. It has all the ingredients of a solid psychological thriller, but its vision never feels fully realized.