Director: Mitchell Lichtenstein

Starring: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Hale Appleman

Rating: 2/5


High school student Dawn (Weixler) is the most prominent member of True Love Waits, a group of Christians that have taken a vow of chastity until marriage. Fellow student Tobey (Appleman) has also taken the vow, but their mutual attraction proves a challenge to their beliefs. Dawn’s stepbrother Brad’s (Hensley) provocative behaviour is a different challenge, coming on to her whilst ignoring the plight of her terminally ill mother. Worse, Dawn suspects that she may be a mutant of a kind that you wouldn’t find in the X-Men: she has an extra set of razor-sharp teeth… erm… down there…

Googling her condition, she discovers the ancient myth of ‘vagina dentata’ – a fear of female sexuality manifesting itself with teeth where no teeth should be. Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of pop artist Roy) has taken this myth literally for his debut feature film and crossed it with a coming-of-age drama. This blackly comic horror story is in the tradition of subversive teen movies like Heathers, Donnie Darko and most closely Ginger Snaps, which equated menstruation with lycanthropy.

Until the 1970s, the severed head was something of a taboo in movies. Now they’re everywhere, showering down on the soldiers of Gondor like confetti in the 12A-rated Return of the King. I guess the next taboo to break is the severed penis, and there are plenty of the bloody little chaps in Teeth. Since there’s only one way for Dawn’s mutation to exhibit itself, the film has to present her with a selection of jocks, jerks and potential rapists for her to chomp down on. Wisely, whilst it doesn’t stint on the gore, it doesn’t overdo it before the novelty wears off, even though it resorts to a final sick gag already seen in Hostel Part II.

The film’s gross-out moments are almost its raison-d’être, because the rest of the film isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. It’s not all that taboo-busting either; the sex scenes are pretty tame, whilst the moments of castration focus on the contorted faces of the victims in a parody of porn movie faces. The only mutant tooth we see is in the tweezers of a police pathologist, having fallen out at the crime scene.

There are some witty moments, such as a distraught Dawn watching a Christian teenage disco where the sanitised pop has been replaced on the soundtrack by the screeching strings of horror movie music. But the script is disappointingly blunt, lacking the satirical edge of a film like Heathers. It also isn’t interested in the questions that it raises. An explanation for Dawn’s mutation is hinted at by the cooling towers of a nuclear power station looming over the house, but this bypasses the more intriguing issues: are Dawn’s teeth God-given (as Christian believers in ‘intelligent design’ might argue), are they an aberration of the kind which natural selection will occasionally produce and reject, or are they a genuine evolutionary step giving women greater power to choose the father of their children?

The sexual repression of the abstinence cult extends to the classroom, where the biology textbooks have covered the diagrams of female genitalia with huge stickers, and the spluttering teacher can’t bring himself to say the word “vagina”. But Dawn’s teeth aren’t by-products of sexual repression; the first scene shows that she was born that way, so the chastity angle is largely irrelevant. The teeth are a natural phenomenon, not a physical manifestation of the subconscious. This makes Teeth much less interesting than the ‘body horror’ movies of David Cronenberg, particularly Rabid and The Brood, where sexual rage produces violent mutations. Next to the vampiric armpit phallus of Rabid, a toothed vagina is a bit limited. It’s an admirably nasty idea, but Lichtenstein doesn’t know where to take it beyond the obvious, and instead of going somewhere subversive and dangerous, the film just fizzles out. These Teeth lack real bite.

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