By Kofi Outlaw

There is nothing I love more than a movie that doesn’t confuse what it is, with what is not. Films that are pure camp flounder when they take themselves too seriously. Films that try to delve into dark and sordid territory with a wink and a smile, often risk falling off the tightrope that is black comedy. TEETH—the story of a young girl with the fearsome anatomical mutation of “vagina denta”—is a movie which never pretends to be any less ridiculous than its laughable premise. And that is what makes it so darn enjoyable.

Dawn, a teenage girl living in small town U.S.A., faces the same hurdle as every other teenage girl from any-town America: how to cope with her emerging sexuality. In Dawn’s case, this means taking to the stage every week at church rallies, to deliver mindless bubblegum speeches about the importance of “the promise,” (a buzz-word for abstinence,) to crowds of doe-eyed, slack-jawed tweeners.

At home, Dawn’s naïve sexual views are forced to contend with the perverse indulgences of her stepbrother, Brad, whose idea of a good Friday night involves getting drunk, stoned, and having loud, carnal, cringe-inducing “backdoor” romps with his goth-queen girlfriend. Brad has a serious aversion to the standard routes of sex, for reasons he can’t clearly explain (think childhood “injury”)—just as Dawn cannot explain her own subconscious notion that sex somehow equates to pain and horror. (Metaphor Alert!)


Brad’s depravity makes Dawn only that more sure that “the promise” is the path for her. So it’s a big step, really, when she, a boy she’s crushing on named Tobey, and a few other friends from “the promise” group take a day walk and end up at the lake where young teens go to first get laid. The chaste teens keep cool heads, however the mere proximity to the hotbed of carnality gets Dawn’s impressionable mind working in all the “wrong” ways. When her stepbrother finally makes it clear that he wants to be the man who first defiles Dawn, the young girl decides to take her “relationship” with Tobey to the next level: kissing.

Of course Tobey, being the hot-and-horny teenage boy that he is, forgets all about his commitment to “the promise” when he’s making out with sweet Dawn, and within seconds, the meek church mouse is pinning the helpless girl down, and violently forcing his way inside her. Unfortunately for Tobey, Dawn is a girl with a pretty extraordinary flower. One gruesome castration later, Tobey is a corpse, and Dawn is plunged into a downward spiral of confusion and shame about the snake-fanged “monster” living between her thighs.

But in a world filled with rapists, molesters and other insidious males with their malicious members, Dawn soon learns that there are distinct advantages to having a built-in sexual defense mechanism. In encounter after cringe-inducing encounter, Dawn fights back against a pro-phallic world, learning to wield her sexuality as the formidable weapon that it (literally) is.

Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein gets the tone of TEETH pitch-perfect. With subject matter this outrageous, and a not-so-subtle pro-feminist message at work, this film could’ve have taken itself WAY too seriously, and tried to poise itself as some kind of CARRIE for the youporn generation. Instead, Lichtenstein and co. render the film as a midnight showing, D-movie horror flick that is so trashy, it can’t help but to be entertaining.

The campy tone is bolted down in the very first frame, a shot of Dawn’s modest suburban house, the gigantic nuclear power plant in her backyard, complete with duh-Duh-DUH! warning music, which informs us that we are about to watch an old-school creature-feature unfold. Building on that promise we are treated to shockingly raunchy dialogue, (too explicit to even print,) camera work worthy of a low-budget porno, and a script jam-packed with every flimsy, corny, double (sometimes triple!) entendre, seen coming from miles away. And yes, more ketchup-covered, gnarled rubber penises than you could shake a stick at. (Snicker.)

The cast of TEETH does equally well at never for a second confusing the ludicrous nature of their subject matter with serious social commentary. Newcomer Jess Weixler plays Dawn so deadpan—first with painfully awkward, gut-busting naïvete about sex; later with equally humorous scowls, and general malice towards men and their members—that hilarity almost has no choice but to ensue from every airy, wide-eyed expression she flashes, every recycled bit of church-rhetoric she preaches, or every vicious hip-twist she gives, to relieve another despicable fella of his misused tool.

Through all the tongue-and-cheek, crotch-and-gore, antics, it gets a bit difficult to pinpoint where Mitchell’s sympathies lie as the filmmaker, or what message exactly we are to take from the film. Dawn’s impassioned speeches on abstinence are delivered like Hilter addressing the Third Reich at Nuremburg. Are we to take it that religious prudes, with their narrow-minded views, are akin to Nazis? On the other hand every new boy that Dawn cavorts with, turns out to be a scumbag hell-bent on raping her. (Even the one lad who is able to successfully copulate with her and keep his member eventually loses it for revealing he bet on the conquer.) Are those same religious prudes actually prudent for blindly adhering to their rigid views? The film never throws its lot behind any one point of view, and rightly so; the camp is what it’s all about.


I must say: it’s been a long time since I had so much fun seeing a trashy movie. I went to a late showing of TEETH, at one of the two theaters in the country currently showing it, and was part of a modest-sized crowd of grind house aficionados, not too shy to crack a six-pack in the theater. We laughed together, moaned at every awkward or disgusting bit of dialogue, and hid our faces in each other’s coats, as each gruesome, mangled bit of penis dropped from Dawn’s Venus fly trap. (Okay, so maybe that last bit is a stretch, but we definitely cringed as a team.)

TEETH deserves to have a wide-spread run in theaters. The premise alone has “cult-classic” written all over it, and the film definitely rises to that esteemed challenge. Go see it, if only to have a good bit of fun. I plan on keeping a copy of the DVD on hand for the rest of my life—to scare a bit of sense into all those hot and bothered young men my future daughter(s) might one day bring home to meet me.