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Though bearing bigger star power and a heavy-caliber writer, Jennifer’s Body is an utterly pedestrian horror romp whose saving grace may be that hey, at least it’s not PG-13.

Jennifer’s Body is the kind of teen horror movie that wants us to believe that bona fide blonde babe Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia, Mean Girls) is in fact a dumpy loser. Of course, as the movie’s written by the overbearingly hip Diablo Cody, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is some kind of intentional dig at how the Teen Movie genres operate. (Seyfried even sports glasses and pinned-up hair, which for time immemorial has been code for “ugly duckling.”) Surely Cody knows what she’s doing? Surely she’s taken even a passing glance at the genre she’s diving into, and the discussions surrounding it?

No, not so much. The most surprising thing about Jennifer’s Body is precisely how pedestrian it is; save for the occasionally overbearing cuteness of the dialogue, this is your standard-issue Dead Teenagers movie with about two or three ideas and a handful of creepy moments shoring up a whole lot of same-old.

In brief: “Needy” Anita (Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) have been friends since childhood, though they do seem a mismatched pair: Needy’s a down-to-earth latchkey kid with a steady boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, who really does look like a teenager and thus way too young for Needy) and Jennifer’s the vain cheerleader siren with a string of lovers. Why do Needy and Jennifer remain friends? Hard to say. There’s some overtures that there may be a deeper attraction between the two, but it’s hard to say if this plot thread is a red herring or simply badly developed. Even their one lingering kiss is bizarrely asexual, as if everyone involved knows how gratuitous it is.

Jennifer and Needy go to a roadhouse one night to catch a band Jennifer’s drooling over. One horrible fire later, Jennifer is drugged and abducted by the band, only to turn up in Needy’s house later that night seriously changed. Evil, even. “Not like high school evil,” Needy later tells Chip. The kind of evil that eviscerates and partially devours the horny boys Jennifer lures to their doom. Jennifer taunts Needy, no one believes Needy, Jennifer goes after Chip, and so on, and so forth.

The three leads are more or less up to the task; Seyfried makes Cody’s biggest verbal transgressions sound halfway natural and Simmons is convincing as a basically good-natured teenage boy. Fox sells Jennifer well enough, but given the persona she’s cultivated since her emergence into the public consciousness, “bitchy sexpot vamp” isn’t much of a reach. But she does walk and talk like a human, which is a step up from her Transformers work.

The lone spark of true originality comes in the form of the band that lures Jennifer to her doom: an indie rock act called Low Shoulder, fronted by the charmingly amoral Nikolai (Adam Brody). Brody is inspired as a debonair musician asshole, the kind of guy you might think girls like Jennifer would typically go for. The revelations of what Brody and his band did to Jennifer to make her such a (literal) man-eater carry the kind of comedic/horrific bounce the rest of the movie fails to maintain.

It’s not that Jennifer’s Body is bad; it’s that it is proud to be mediocre. With Cody writing you might expect some of the tiresome dialogue that so thoroughly soaked her Juno, the kind of verbiage that sounds a lot like an aging woman trying her best to sound young. Some of those pretensions are there, regularly halting the flow of dialogue; no matter how many times someone says “salty” when they mean “beautiful,” I’m just not buying that teenagers could ever talk this way. Cody is no Amy Heckerling, though it’s not for lack of trying.

Perhaps in vain, I approach horror movies that lay a claim to brains to see what they’re about, once you get past the spurting arteries and witty barbs. Jennifer’s Body, near as I can tell, is about nothing. There are brief, passing hints of some deeper, murky “meaning” to it all—some stab at the fruitful niche genre of “teenage body horror” and “sex horror”—but these themes are merely teased at to loan some of their thematic power, not to be developed, used, or even commented on. Jennifer’s Body is thus not really about anything but what it is plainly about, which is not necessarily a sin. That it is so mundane, however, is.

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