Review: "Teeth"

If you saw Grindhouse, you probably fondly remember the faux, gore-tastic trailers that played before and between the two films. The Sundance-approved Teeth feels like one of those trailers come to feature-length life. And, in many ways, that’s a good thing.

Teeth, for those of you haven’t winced at the news already, is about a girl named Dawn with chompers…down there. Yes, as the film makes clear with its mentions of adaptations and mutations, she’s like one of the kids that Professor X wouldn’t let into the academy. The filmmaker—Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of Roy—wisely keeps her unaware of her “special gift” by placing her in a satirically conservative suburb in which the female anatomy is deemed too taboo to even be drawn in a sex ed textbook. Plus, Dawn is co-president of the abstinence club, preaching about purity to youngsters and fantasizing about being taken in her wedding dress. But when Dawn is raped, she discovers that her wedding night will probably stain her dress.

If the whole thing sounds dark and goofy, then, well, that’s because it is. It shifts tone over and over; at times it plays like melodramatic horror, others like a long-lost Tarantino female-revenge movie, and, occasionally, like a MADTV skit gone awkwardly awry. It’s not too distracting, however, because Jess Weixler, who won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance last year, is able to balance. She can play scenes for comedy and for drama while never sacrificing Dawn’s true conflicted character or her journey of self-discovery. Without Weixler driving it forward, Teeth could have played like nothing more than a particularly clever student film. (And, to be fair, in the hands of a less mature filmmaker, it would have been called The Scare Down There and had a musical number using "Vagina Dentata" instead of "Hakuna Matata.")

Warning: you will see far more than you want to see, though part of the fun was having the whole audience turn away from the screen collectively in horrified groans. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure (or the recent vasectomy patient.) But as far as female revenge satirical horror movies go, you could do a lot worse.