The success of Brian De Palma's big screen adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie lead to a few low budget knock offs attempting to ride on its coattails but one of the most obscure, and by all rights one of the most enjoyable, has got to be director Brice Mack's 1978 film Jennifer.

The movie tells the tale of Jennifer Baylor (Lisa Pelikan), a student at a private girls school called Green View. The school obviously caters to ‘rich kids' but Jennifer is anything but. She's smart enough that she got in not because of her family's bank account but because of her grades. Jennifer is also a bit of a brownnoser determined to get in on the good side of all of her teachers, something that obviously means she's going to start having run-ins with some of the other girls at the school. Case in point? Sandra Tremayne (Amy Johnston), a more popular girl who has definitely got it in for her classmate. She not only harasses her and vandalizes her locker but she tries to frame her in a test theft in hopes that she'll get Jennifer expelled. Sandra and Janie (Louise Hoven) really put Jennifer through the ringer. The only one who seems to understand and appreciate Jennifer is one of her teachers, Jeffrey Reed (Bert Convy).

Jennifer's home life isn't much better. She lives with her father, Luke Baylor (Jeff Corey), has got some issues. He seems to want Jennifer to be a wife to him more than a daughter, and he's got some rather unusual religious and world views that come into play a lot and have since Jennifer was a kid and he had her tour backwoods churches as a snake-handler. All of this comes to a boil when Jennifer finally gets fed up with pretty much everyone in her life and decides to show them what she's really capable of…

So yeah, this one borrows from Carrie in pretty liberal doses and it doesn't even really even try to hide that but Brice Mack keeps up the pace rather well. The movie was made on a pretty modest budget from the looks of things, this becomes very obvious in the snake-tastic finale wherein Jennifer unleashes a horde of very obviously rubber serpents on her foes. The cast all throw fits of varying levels of sincerity when this happens in an attempt to maybe distract us from how obviously phony it all is but it doesn't work so well. A rubber snake is a rubber snake, no matter how scared someone pretends to be by said rubber snake. The film definitely ‘goes for it' with color, however, using all sorts of swirling lights (again, influenced by Carrie) to good effect creating a decent enough atmosphere of chaos and confusion.

As far as the performances go, it's actually kind of easy to see why the kids Jennifer goes to school with might not like her so much. She's a bit of a suck up and actually mildly annoying, but we also know that she's the product of a very screwed up environment given that her mother has left her to grow up with her demented father. Lisa Pelikan plays this part quite well, making us feel just sorry enough for her to earn our sympathy. Jeff Corey is quite a bit of fun as the Bible-thumping whack job of a father, he oozes poor white trash in the part and as such, he fits it well. Bert Convy, who appeared in seemingly every television show ever made in the seventies and hosted Super Password in the eighties, is amusing enough as the kindly teacher but the real showstopper here is Amy Johnston as queen bitch Sandra. She's such a ridiculously nasty character and so over the top in her methods to get rid of Jennifer that it's impossible to take her too seriously but she gives it her all the movie is all the better for it.

Jennifer arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.85.1 widescreen. This is a nicely detailed and colorful presentation that is free of all but minor print damage and skin tones look fine. Some scenes are a bit soft but that would look to be how the movie was shot more than anything else. Black levels aren't always perfectly inky but they're definitely very solid and color reproduction is typically very good. The image is free of any noise reduction so expect a nice amount of grain but don't expect it to get too distracting or overpowering. There are no obvious compression artifacts or edge enhancement problems here to note either. All in all, this is a nice transfer.