Jenifer

I just watched a movie that scarred my soul. Permanently.

Jenifer is part of the Showtime Masters of Horror collection. For those of you that don't know, Masters of Horror is a series on Showtime that showcases short films (around an hour) by highly acclaimed horror directors. Low budget kind of stuff, but still effective. Jenifer is the creation of Italian horror virtuoso Dario Argento, and it fucking annihilated my soul.

Warning: Spoilers and soul-crushing disturbing content ahead.

This film is about a bestial girl with a knockout body but a viciously deformed face, complete with a gnarly set of fang teeth. She's essentially an animal, and craves two things- sex and flesh. The story revolves around a detective coming across a lunatic attempting to slaughter a young girl (Jenifer), said detective shooting said lunatic, and detective man taking this poor, deformed, apparently retarded girl into his care. Things start getting weird (as if that's the word) when detective man stops his car during the search for a permanent home for the beast, and beast jumps his bones.

That's right, she fucks his brains out. Apparently having a satanic animal mentality gives you some magical sex powers, because while he's understandably freaked out by the scenario, he's unable to stop. Things get far worse when the pair return to detective man's house, detective man argues with his wife about Jenifer staying another night so he can continue the search for permanent beast housing, and Jenifer first reveals her bloodthirst by disemboweling the family feline with her teeth.

Yeah.

The scene spares you no quarter: family walks into bathroom at sounds of commotion, Jenifer is sitting on the floor swinging the cat's corpse with her mouth and devouring kitty entrails. Fucking brutal.

Needless to say, wifey and sonny are none too happy about this, so they bug out. Jenifer again works her beastly sex magic on detective man that night, further tearing his now-frail psyche. Detective man spends the next day boozing it up, only to return home late that night to find Jenifer devouring the entrails of the 5-7 year old daughter of his neighbors.

Yeah.

Detective man uses his mighty detective powers to reach the conclusion that Jenifer can NOT stay, as she is NOT simply some poor, defenseless, deformed girl with some great T&A. So, like any rational individual with a now permanently scarred soul, he hires some circus bro to break into his house and kidnap her or something. He returns home that evening, an initially is relieved to the point of laughing out loud because the plan seems to have gone as... planned (pardon my lack of appropriate vocabulary right now, I can barely form thoughts after watching this movie). But of course, nothing is right, as he soon discovers the disemboweled, dismembered corpse of circus bro in the fridge (Jenifer didn't want to throw out the leftovers apparently).

This is the last straw, but detective man is too deep in her spell to abandon/kill her, so he takes her and runs away to some far off cabin in the woods (after burying circus bro in the backyard). He boozes himself practically into unconsciousness, has more freaky beast sex with the freaky beast, passes out, and wakes up to go find a job the next day. He finds work in the convenience store dealy in the nearby podunk town, gets friendly with the owner, things start to look up but you KNOW somebody's getting disemboweled soon because there're only 10 minutes left in the movie. Short story shorter, detective man returns home to his cabin to find Jenifer disembowleing and devouring the still-living son of the shop owner, TOTALLY flips out, grabs an axe, and drags Jenifer out into the woods to end the nightmare.

But, kids, this is a horror flick, so there is no resolution. Just as he's about to hack beast bitch to beast pieces, he's shot by a hunter who only sees the same thing detective man saw at the beginning of the movie: lunatic about to cut up innocent girl.

So the movie comes full circle, and ends, and you wish you never watched it.

Spoilers and fucking FREAKY shit end here.

I think this movie ripped my soul so bad because of a combination o things that can be summed up in a single phrase: great direction on the part of Mr. Argento. The movie is almost entirely devoid of the bad ("scary") lighting frequently employed by horror flicks, so the setting is entirely ordinary. Everything is just like the everyday world, except for the glaring issue of a FLESH EATING SEX BEAST. The normalcy of the setting, lighting, etc amplifies the fucking freak out that is Jenifer, and makes everything that happens SO much worse. And the combination of sexpot/entrail-eater just makes your soul want to cry.

Really, I don't think anyone should watch this movie unless they're a hardened horror veteran. Otherwise it'll just inspire a lifetime of nightmares and therapy bills, and nobody needs either of those.

Jenifer: Not for the faint of heart/weak of stomach.

Icky.