Kind of like “Mean Girls” but as a monster movie. And Mean Girls was kinda good, and, this is kinda good.
Seriously, this is a funny one, because in some ways it’s as dumb as a teen scream horror can get—picture Adam Brody, the world’s least believable devil-worshipping bad guy, singing “867-5309” as he sacrifices someone to the devil, and you have a pretty good picture of where this goes in places. But, the thing is, it’s really well-directed, and the cinematography is at times great… like when Anita (Amanda Seyfried) is having awkward teenage sex with her boyfriend at the same time as Jennifer (Megan Fox) is killing a boy in an abandoned house, Anita senses it through the apparent psychic rapport they share as old friends—which could be a horribly mishandled conceit, but fortunately it’s so underplayed that it works—and she looks up to see a vision of Jennifer across the room, crouched like an animal over one of her victims. It only lasts a second but it’s absolutely perfect. This movie is full of little touches like that, that redeem it and ultimately do make it an enjoyable repeat view, even despite all the dumb teen scream, one-step-more-serious-than-Buffy-The-Vampire-Slayer stuff. I don’t love it, but I like it a lot, for sure, despite the glaring flaws. I’ve seen it a few times now and will watch again occasionally, it holds up.
As a testament to how just sorta different this movie is: Lance Henriksen has a cameo in it, and not only is he not the last to die, he does not die at all. Not even a little.