Teeth

So five years ago (wow!), my friends and I briefly contemplated renting this indie horror comedy flick. Previews and word of mouth had us giggling about the concept, which was basically that an innocent high school girl has sharp teeth in her vagina and chomps people's dicks off. Hilariously gruesome, right? To the best of my knowledge, none of us ever did see it (Sween? Trev?) but when I found the movie on Amazon for five bucks the other month I decided to give it a whirl.

The thing is, I pretty much had the movie figured out from the very beginning. Our heroine is a naive-beyond-naive Christian girl whose hobbies include quilting and abstinence. And, you know, she has teeth in her vagina. It's probably part of the reason she's never attempted to pleasure herself and struggles to even so much as imagine the appeal of sexual intercourse. Her high school's religious right policy against sexual education leaves her unaware that normal vaginas don't actually have teeth, and some very blatant recurring motifs suggest to the rest of us that this mutation she was born with gives her an "evolutionary advantage for survival."

(Time out! Bullshit! Having a toothed vagina - or vagina dentata, if you prefer the classy term - cannot possibly be an evolutionary advantage. Yes, the ability to ward off rapists is a survival advantage, but it comes with a much heavier sexual reproduction disadvantage. Those with toothed vaginas will undoubtedly have a tougher time reproducing and thus transmitting the condition down to the next generation. Come on, now! If you're gonna make a movie loaded snuff porn levels of genital gore, at least don't try to tack on subtext that has no right to exist! Okay, time in.)

At any rate, the movie unfolds exactly as you'd expect it to, as I've already said. In a nutshell, the innocent and terrified young woman learns how to use her mutation as a weapon with which to fend off rapists and other terrible guys.

Now, let's unfold that nutshell, so that none of you ever have to watch this thing. First the girl gets date raped by a boyfriend she had trusted as a fellow abstinent Christian. During her panic, she, umm, snaps those jaws shut, so to speak, and our assailant is suddenly out of penises. Terrified, she flees. She sees a gynecologist. She ends up biting his fingers off. Terrifed, she flees. She seeks out this other guy who has always respected her and been all kinds of pleasant to her when the other kids made fun of her for being a Jesus freak. He gets her drunk and romanced enough to have sex with her - so, also kind of a rape, but whatever - and then, in a twist, our girl is suddenly in control of her vagina teeth, and she lets her new guy finish unwounded. The next morning, she's checking out her naked body in the mirror, all pleased with herself, and it's like, "Whoa, wow! We sure have come a long way from that super innocent Christian girl who had no idea what her own body was doing just two days ago or so!" This, movie rookies, is the obvious moment where our heroine has come of age, gained empowerment, taken control of her situation, and however many other clichés you want to throw on top of all those. It should come as no surprise then, that when she hops back aboard the guy for a second go-round, and he starts being a total ass, talking to his friend on the phone about how he's banging her right now and everything, that she gives him the old wiener-ender right then and there. Yikes! Then she goes home and seduces her evil stepbrother and bites his dong off as well, and then she hitchhikes to another town and gives a terrifyingly knowing smirk to the old man who gave her the ride after he begins to make suggestive mouth gestures at her. The end!

I'll give Teeth credit where credit is due, which is merely to say that I appreciated the lead actress's performance and the brief running time. Now I want to air some grievances.

First, it was rather slow-moving and bland, as far as genital mutilation horror comedies go. I mean, by the time you're making a movie full of severed penises and graphic rape scenes, you've pretty much crossed all the lines worth crossing. Why not get clever from there? Where was the scene where a guy goes down on the girl and comes up babbling incoherently with blood dripping out of his mouth? Why wasn't there ever a reference made to her propensity for turning tampons into shredded cotton messes? When one guy tried to have anal sex with her - see, the movie even went there - why didn't the movie force its heroine to find a clever way to make him come through the front door? (All that happened was she shook her head. Given all the rape in the rest of the movie, why did "no" mean "no" just this once?) The movie was certainly already going for shock value, so why did it suffice for the same old trick several times over?

For that matter, aside from shock value, just what was the movie trying for? I already mentioned the repeated references to evolutionary defense mechanisms, so it'd be easy to think of the movie as a cautionary tale for men. Or was it a cautionary tale for women? Or a revenge fantasy for rape victims? When the protagonist went from being a victim who bit dicks off accidentally to a seductress actively hunting penises instead, was it a sign that she'd undergone an emotional maturity and a sense of empowerment? Or had she become another femme fatale trope, snagging vulnerable men inside her own little bear trap? By staying away from committing to any of these, the movie kind of failed to be anything but, well, shock-laden snuff.

And that's really what Teeth was at the end of the day. I shouldn't be surprised; five years ago, when we'd all half-jokingly bring up seeing the movie, it's all I expected it to be. For whatever reason, somewhere along the way - perhaps when I saw all the critical acclaim? - I decided that the movie was going to be clever or meaningful in some way. Nope. Just a standard cautionary tale of sorts with an ambiguous moral message and a handful of dismembered (or dis-membered!) young men.