Teeth (2007) Review, Or: Why Am I Still Straight After Seeing This Film?

Whenever a movie rapist gets his wedding tackle shot/cut/eaten/torn/etc. off, people will generally say “He had it coming”.  In Robocop, when Robo blows away the rapist’s junk through the woman’s skirt, people generally go “Holy shit did you just see that?!” followed up by “Damn if he didn’t have that coming…”  In Sin City, when Roark Jr. gets his cherry bombs blown off by John McClane Hartigan, we all clapped and cheered to see that pedophile get his ball juice splattered across the dock.  The list goes on, and each time the audience felt that justice was served.  Teeth is a different story.

Dawn O’Keefe (Jess Weixler) isn’t the most experienced girl around.  She’s never had sex, thinks girls have a “natural modesty”, and has never seen a picture of a vagina.  Her stepbrother Brad (John Hensley) is a sadistic problem child who seems to have a liking for anal sex thanks to his subconscious memories of trying to finger Dawn when they were younger, for which he received a strange scar on his finger.  Her boyfriend Tobey (Hale Anderson) has been strung along for a while now, but keeps his celibacy for her, even going so far as to wear the same red promise ring.  At school she’s ridiculed for her (retarded) beliefs, but this doesn’t stop her from being Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes…  until Tobey tries to rape her, and she bites Mr. Happy off.  With her vagina.

It seems that Dawn has “vagina dentata”, or vagina teeth.  These teeth, in an inspired move on evolution’s part, will promptly bite into and tear apart anything that enters Dawn’s bear trap without an invitation.  Unfortunately, none of the characters in the film really deserve what’s coming to them, aside from maybe the gynecologist who feels the need to test Dawn’s “flexibility”.  Dawn hasn’t even made out with Tobey for their entire relationship, and then when she does it’s at a lake in her bathing suit, right after telling him that she thinks about him naked.  Goddamn tease.  They then make out a couple of times, each time with Dawn telling him to stop when he starts going for some booby action.  When they get out to dry off, they get too close and Tobey understandably loses it.  While I won’t condone his actions, getting his trouser snake bitten off by Dawn’s irate beaver seems a bit much.  But it’s an accident.  A terrifying, cringe-worthy accident, so I’ll take it as a good horror movie moment.

It’s when Dawn tears off the other two unlucky chums in the film that I couldn’t help but see her, the supposed heroine, as kind of a cunt.  Well, more of a cunt.  The whole abstinence purity ring nonsense is right up there with environmental activists on my Must Die scale, so she was already shit out of luck from the get-go.  Tearing off the flesh puppets of mean high school kids (I’m actually not sure what her step-brother was, but they looked about the same age at the beginning) is going way overboard, and while I appreciate a horror film that actually manages to at least unnerve me, I also like protagonists I don’t want to drown in a lake of donkey cum.

I actually felt the only deep character was her stepbrother, whom the film portrays as the Big Bad for some silly reason.  Sure he’s definitely a prick, and he does treat girls like their nothing, and he does have a poor taste in both music and room decoration, but he’s only that way because his dad married Dawn’s mother.  Having the girl he loved as a little one be his sister fucked him up royally, as we see in a heartfelt monologue after he sicks his dog (named Mother, oddly enough) on his father, who tries to kick him out of the house.  He also has bitchin’ sideburns.  So when he finally gets what’s supposedly coming to him, at Dawn’s own decision no less, it’s really more sad than horrifying or funny.

That’s another problem:  this movie doesn’t know what it is.  Is it a horror film?  A comedy?  A drama?  There’s gore aplenty and the dong deaths are tough to sit through, but the whole abstinence angle is played up in a very heavy-handed, tongue-in-cheek way.  All of the deaths are accompanied by their own comedic angles, such as with Tobey’s “I haven’t even jerked off since Easter!” line or Mother’s actions after Brad’s dismemberment, which seems like poor taste for a vaguely serious or dramatic film.  However, there is drama aplenty, and the general tone and shots suggest a much deeper personal drama.  It’s all rather confusing to the senses, to the point where I can’t put my finger on exactly what writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein was thinking.  My best guess is that it’s an expression of his unjustified extreme feminism, since all of the men aside from the dad are rapists and bullies.  Then why did he give the kid from “Nip/Tuck” such a deep nature?  Am I just looking too much into it?  Am I a rapist for thinking such things?  IS THERE NO HOPE IN THIS VILE WORLD?!!

Then the movie ends.   Do we have character development?  Yes, Dawn becomes an even bigger bitch.  Does the problem have a solution?  If by solution you mean use the vagina to cut off the One-Eyed Willies of everyone who pisses Dawn off, probably.  Was I satisfied?  About as much as Tobey.

Lichtenstein is a capable director, as evidenced in all of the quality performances in the film.  Unfortunately, the pacing and overall feel are so poorly constructed that the film comes off as rather clumsy and unsure of itself.  To make matters worse, I only really cared about one character, whom the film had opposing feelings toward, to say the very least.  At the end of the day, it comes off as an entertaining rental or as a means of quieting down even the most raging boner.

5.5/10

(Isn’t it nice that I didn’t use the word “penis” once?  … wait…)