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Teeth

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Ugh. Many reviewers will have you believe that Teeth is a wickedly funny, subversive black comedy about female empowerment that will have girls chuckling quietly and guys uncomfortably holding their groins. I’ve read some early reviews that are so positive, it’s like they’re trying to make you feel stupid for being inherently grossed out by the concept.

If I’m being paranoid, so be it. The concept is this: a girl is inexplicably born with teeth in her vagina and cuts guys’ penises off while having sex with them.

I have a suspicious feeling that I’ve done my job fairly well with the above sentence; you now either want to see the movie, or you don’t. I’m guessing most of you, regardless of gender, don’t.

That’s probably for the best. Because while Teeth does have some redemptive qualities – a great lead performance, and at least two scenes that border on actually being kind of, sort of funny – the rest is a muddled morass of “social commentary,” one-note characters, and yes, bloody shots of dismembered members.

Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein obviously wants biologically altered main character Dawn (Jess Weixler) to be a hero and not a monster, but in order to do that he sacrifices the reality of the film: in Teeth, every single male character is a repugnant, casually evil horndog with rapist tendencies.

The film begins with a flashback of a little boy and a little girl whose parents have just married. They’re sitting in a kiddie pool together, the little boy gets curious, and soon enough one of his fingers is bleeding from a bite mark.

Flash-forward to present day. The girl is Dawn, a proud abstainer who gives speeches to little kids about the dangers of sex before marriage. (The kids randomly chant Bible verses, but otherwise the abstinence program seems to have nothing to do with Christianity, so it only confuses the message.) The boy is Brad (Nip/Tuck’s John Hensley), who was so radically disconcerted by his stepsister’s secret that he’s turned into a parody of a Goth lunatic. Oh, and he magically forgets all about her condition in one of the climactic scenes, in just one example of the screenplay’s complete disregard for making any sense.

Here’s another example: why would a guy, in the middle of having sex with a girl, explain to her that he had a bet with his friend over who could sleep with her first? So the audience won’t get mad at Dawn for cutting his penis off, that’s why.

Yes, soon Dawn has dropped the abstinence thing (and the movie drops that whole theme entirely) and starts having sex with guys left and right, usually with predictable consequences. Splitting those scenes up are a handful of utterly pointless scenes like the following: Brad’s dad walks in his room and tells him to get out of the house. Brad sics his ...