Jenifer (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This was episode four of season one of the "Masters of Horror" cable series.

A police officer comes upon a man about to decapitate a young woman. He tells the man to stand down, but he refuses, and the policeman has to shoot him. Just before dying, the fatally wounded man offers a cryptic warning to the officer, whispering "Jenifer." When the detective tries to comfort the hot-bodied young woman, he finally sees her face, and it is the deformed face of a hideous beast, or an alien.

Despite his initial revulsion, the policeman can't get the woman out of his mind. He even fantasizes about her during sex with his wife that night, causing him to sodomize her brutally. The next day, filled with pity for Jenifer and strangely attracted to her, the  policeman checks her out of her insane asylum and brings her home. Jenifer turns out to be a true beast and eats the family cat. When the police officer will not return Jenifer to her asylum, his wife and their son move out. Despite Jenifer's grotesque face, the cop has sex with her repeatedly. That is repulsive on its own, to him as well as the viewer, but the matter becomes truly horrifying when he finds that Jenifer has killed and eaten the adorable little girl next door. Instead of turning his monster over to the authorities, he drags her out into the wilderness and begins a new life with her in a remote cabin, where her behavior becomes ever more feral until he finally realizes that he must do something about it.

The actor Steven Weber ("Wings") wrote the screenplay, from a story in a Creepy comic. I'm going to spoil the ending without actually telling it to you, by saying that if you've ever read any old horror comics, you will know precisely how the story must end after the first five minutes, in which Jenifer's previous caretaker tries to kill her with a meat cleaver, then tries to warn the police officer (played by Weber himself).

When Weber got the story accepted for the Masters of Horror series, he had no idea that it would eventually be directed by the legendary Dario Argento and scored by Goblin, the group which scored many of Argento's greatest films. Argento locked in on the erotic aspect of the story, and amplified it to the point where the film is actually gorotica rather than straight horror, in that all of the shock comes either from the sex scenes or the explicit flesh-eating. In fact, Argento originally shot two explicit oral sex scenes, complete with penis-in-mouth close-ups. In the first, Jennifer uses her gigantic, deformed mouth to pleasure the policeman. In the second, a teen boy thinks Jenifer is going to give him a blow-job, but it turns out that her concept of eating dick is much more literal than he had hoped. The special effects guy explains in the special features that Dario Argento also had envisioned a genital close-up of Jenifer and asked for a scary alien vagina for this scene. The bizarre pussy was dutifully created, but Dario scrapped the idea before the scene could be filmed.

The DVD is loaded with extras - three hours worth of featurettes and documentaries to illuminate a 57-minute TV show! The film itself includes a full-length commentary by actor/screenwriter Steven Weber, and then there are two hours' worth of featurettes, the best of which is an interview with Dario himself, in which he explains how the film's pre-production was done via email, and offers his commentary over the two deleted scenes. The original version of the teenager scene actually shows Jenifer gnarling chunks out of the lad's penis. There is also a screen-to-script featurette and the usual interviews with the main actors, as well as with the the make-up and special effects people.

This is obviously not for people who are repulsed by the idea of watching Jenifer devour human and animal entrails (or penises!), nor for people who can't accept the idea of Weber having sex with a creature with a hot body and a deformed face, but this DVD is a must-own for people interested in horror comics, gorotica, or Argento. I'm not particularly interested in any of those, but I found the special features to be fascinating and the film to be watchable. The screenplay is not expertly crafted, but one rarely gets to see gorotica directed by a big name director. Of course, my tolerance may be explained by the fact that I've had sex with some women even uglier than Jenifer, but then who hasn't, after a few ill-timed pints?