Outrageous gynecological satire is one for the horror fanboys and the film theorists

Teeth is an inventive old-school exploitation movie masquerading as a social satire—or rather it’s made by people who’ve studied up on their Roger Corman and Troma films enough to know the two forms aren’t mutually exclusive. Here’s the over-the-top premise: Dawn (Jess Weixler) is a girl with a problem. Maybe it’s because she lives in the irradiated shadow of a twin-towered nuclear plant, or maybe evolution decided to skip a few steps. Whatever the reason, Dawn has a secret inside of her that makes her very special. She’s the living embodiment of a monster out of ancient Greek and pagan lore—the “vagina dentata,” the emasculating swallower. In a word, her vagina has “teeth.”

Dawn doesn’t know this to be unique because she’s a religious zealot who preaches abstinence in her hometown’s schools. (Some of the film’s most satirical scenes come early, with Dawn lecturing an auditorium full of kids about how cool it is to save yourself for marriage.) Dawn’s commitment to chastity gets challenged, though, because there’s this new boy at school she kind of likes. Then Prince Charming turns date rapist and, well, what’s a girl with such a unique gift to do?

What Dawn does, she does with extreme explicitness via a hilarious, note-perfect performance from newcomer Weixler. Whether preaching the dogma of self-restraint or wondering at and succumbing to the multiple rebellions alive in her own flesh, Weixler’s Dawn is luminescent—as carefully modulated a comedic performance as indie cinema is likely to deliver this year. A star of at least Parker Posey-like magnitude is hereby officially born.

Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein allegedly studied with feminist theorist Camille Paglia, and the feminist subtexts here are so overt they’re practically texts. But if Paglia was one inspiration, junk culture was another. In addition to inverting the predicament of Linda Lovelace in the porn classic Deep Throat (Lovelace gave men pleasure rather than agony because she had a vagina in her throat), Teeth shares much of its premise with ’50s exploitation smash I Was a Teenage Werewolf, another tongue-in-cheek allegory about the revolt of the body during puberty, only with a protagonist on the other side of the gender divide.

Teeth is a lot more aware of its sexual subtexts though, as well as the large body of feminist and post-feminist theory that has accrued to popular culture in the ensuing 50 years, and it manages the near miracle of playing to both the fan boys and the theorists simultaneously by working on both levels at once. It’s a movie you can take your slob cousin and your thesis advisor to on the same evening, and how many movies get to say that?

Lichtenstein here reminds us that a strong, essential and un-catalogued strain within the horror genre is, well, gynecological. (He even creates the most harrowing and outrageous gynecology scene this side of David Cronenberg to prove it.) Teeth gets its laughs and its screams not only from the monstrous betrayals worked on us by our own bodies but from the strange transformations that happen to us via the bodies of others. It’s the stuff of primal phobia and nightmare, and, by presenting it in a way that makes us laugh as well as scream, Teeth actually takes it easy on us, no matter how explicit its presentation may be.

Distributors: Roadside Attractions
Cast: Jess Weixler, John Hensley and Josh Pais
Director/Screenwriter: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Producer: Joyce Pierpoline
Genre: Horror comedy
Rating: R for disturbing sequences involving sexuality and violence, language and some drug use
Running time: 87 min.
Release date: January 18, 2008 ltd.
Reviewed: 2007 Sundance Film Festival