Megan Fox has a very pretty mouth.

She also has a naughty habit of sticking out her tongue and licking her upper lip for the cameras – what is fast becoming her trademark pose.

But of late, a whole lot of crazy has been tumbling out of the 23-year-old femme fatale’s unstoppable trap.

More than her hot looks and even hotter bod, what sets Fox apart from all the other plastic Hollywood starlets with no acting ability is her wicked tongue.

The notoriously loose-lipped US actress hasn’t quite mastered the concept of filters when communicating her various deep thoughts.

What she’s an expert in, however, is the outrageous – and sometimes truly nutty – soundbite. While doing press for her new movie Jennifer’s Body, she displayed an almost fearless honesty and refreshing candour, blurting out whatever was on her mind to get the maximum shock value. Seems totally apt for someone with a bad-girl persona.

It’s also perfectly in keeping with how the young woman once described herself to Nylon magazine: “Outspoken, neurotic and silly.”

What do we know about Fox so far?

She had a relationship with a female Russian stripper at age 18 and prefers kissing women (“I feel much safer with girls”).

And she uses oddly similar turns of phrases to describe both her bathroom habits (“I forget to flush the toilet. Friends will tell me, ‘Megan, you totally pinched a loaf in my toilet and didn’t flush.’”) and her stage fright (“Every time I go on stage – instant diarrhoea”).

The Tennessee-born ingenue is even unafraid of dissing actresses more accomplished than herself.

To Esquire again: “I don’t want to have to be like a Scarlett Johansson, who I have nothing against, but I don’t want to have to go on talk shows and pull out every single SAT (a university admissions test in the US) word I’ve every learned to prove, like, ‘Take me seriously, I am intelligent, I can speak.’”

Bad temper

Fox also made public her “ridiculously bad” temper and mental problems.

She told Rolling Stone magazine: “I’ve had to say to (actor-boyfriend Brian Austin Green), ‘You have to go and stop talking to me, because I’m going to kill you. I’m going to stab you with something – please leave.’

“ I’d never own a gun for that reason. I wouldn’t shoot to kill. But I would shoot him in the leg for sure.”

She also struggles with the idea that she has “bouts of mild schizophrenia”, fearing she’d wind up dying young like her idol Marilyn Monroe.

And if this isn’t enough verbal incontinence, she even trash-talked Transformers director Michael Bay and compared him to the most evil tyrant in modern history.

After saying that working with Bay “is not about an acting experience”, she joked: “He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation... He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work (for).”

This resulted in Fox getting called “ungracious” and “dumb as a rock” by anonymous Transformers crew members. Bay responded in a post on his website: “Her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter (is) I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.”

Whether or not Fox’s tendency to make over-the-top statements is contrived or genuine, she is certainly all about provocation.

Addressing the reputation she’s recently developed for mouthing off a little too much, Fox told People magazine: “98 per cent of the things that come out of my mouth are intended to be harmless or even charming. They’re not ever intended to be offensive or controversial.”

Still, such attention-seeking blabbermouth ways may be sabotaging her budding career.

Jennifer’s Body – written by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody – marks Fox’s first starring role and is a high-profile follow-up to this year’s most successful blockbuster Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.

In it, Fox portrays a demonic cheerleader who literally feeds off the horny high school boys in a Minnesota farming town.

Poor showing

Jennifer’s Body opened in the US last month with a lacklustre US$6.8 million ($9.5m) and barely covered its US$16 million budget by the end of the film’s three-week theatrical run.

Its under-performance could explain why Fox seems to be toning down her inner drama queen and going on damage control mode.

While accepting the Best Sci-Fi Actress award for her role in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen at the recent Scream Awards, she was uncharacteristically nice.

She said in her speech: “I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to say something. There have been a lot of false reports about how I feel about this movie. I just want to be very clear that I’ve always felt I’m a very ordinary part of an extraordinary film...

“The movie took me out of obscurity and gave me a career, and I’m completely grateful to everyone involved with this franchise.”

Sounds like Fox finally hired herself a publicist. Or perhaps she has simply decided to walk the talk.

“I need to behave in a way that will cause people to take me seriously,” she had declared to Entertainment Tonight back in June.

Still, you can never be too sure what Fox will say next.

Whether naughty or nice, at least the loose cannon sex symbol is making us take notice, according to blogger Trent Venegas, author of www.pinkisthenewblog.com.

He told the Los Angeles Times: “The feedback is decidedly mixed. Some people love her and others hate her. In the celebrity game, that is the perfect place to be.”

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Megan Fox certainly isn’t the first outspoken Hollywood actress whose characteristic candour and colourful yet oft-times cuckoo remarks have made her endlessly quotable.

Here are some of our favourite what-was-she-thinking moments...

ANGELINA JOLIE

Before Fox, there was Jolie, who made crazy look hot.

The goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ refugee agency just visited orphans in Jordan and is a devoted mum to her six children.

But remember the time when the Goth sexpot had a bisexual relationship with model Jenny Shimizu and explained away her scars with “you’re young, you’re drunk, you’re in bed, you have knives; **** happens”?

Or when Jolie famously wore a vial of her then-husband Billy Bob Thorton’s blood around her neck? She said: “Some people think a big diamond is really pretty.

My husband’s blood is the most beautiful thing in the world to me.”

DREW BARRYMORE

Following a turbulent childhood marked by drug and alcohol abuse and stints at rehab, the former Hollywood wild child got clean and sober to become one of Hollywood’s most successful leading ladies.

Barrymore is viewed as a kooky free spirit. But perhaps all those illegal substances affected her in more ways than she’d care to admit?

Why else would she say things like “I don’t want to be stinky poo poo girl – I want to be happy flower child” and “If I die before my cat, I want a little of my ashes put in his food so I can live inside him”?

Even the more down-to-earth stuff – “Sometimes I bust out and do things so permanent, like tattoos and marriage” – sounds way out there.

SHARON STONE

She is one of the most opinionated actresses out there, championing feminist values and humanitarian causes like Aids research.

Her most well-known quote?

“Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.”

Of course, that was quickly knocked out of the top spot last year, when Stone sparked an international uproar by suggesting that the 2008 Sichuan earthquake could be karmic retribution for China’s treatment of the Tibetans.

She said “When you’re not nice then the bad things happen to you.”

Although Stone refused to apologise, she did admit she “sounded like an idiot”.

This article was first published in The New Paper.