Teeth (2006) – Review
This horror film enjoyed a pretty significant hype machine, and the reviews were mixed. The gimmicky premise (for those of you who missed it, a vagina with teeth) was enough to draw in some moviegoers, while scaring off others. Although I had my personal reservations, I was curious if they could pull this off without it being total schlock.
So, is it truly horrible? No. It’s fairly well shot, and genuinely funny at parts (although not at the parts you might think, but for those of you who are looking for it, don’t worry – there’s severed penises galore). The actors are fairly competent, and the script was not half as hammy as I imagined it would be.
In fact, what really surprised me is that it’s clear the writers had a message they wanted to convey. While the film has been billed as a “cautionary tale for men”, this is clearly not the case. Instead, Teeth is actually a criticism of the mystification of female sexuality and the Madonna/Whore complex that is pressed upon them at an early age. It concentrates primarily on fundamentalist Christian sexual morality imposing itself on the sexual education of our children, and the lampooning of the unrealistic expectations placed on our children is where the film truly shines.
Unfortunately, despite good intentions, Teeth relies too heavily on Old Testament morality itself, using horror tropes of “evil men get what they deserve”. In other words, the female protagonist delivers gory justice to perverts with the use of her Teeth. This becomes especially problematic early in the film, in which there’s a disturbing rape sequence. Due to the fact that Teeth‘s a horror-comedy, there’s even a joke cracked during this scene. This is so jarring, and the ugliness of rape so disturbingly real, that it took me completely out of the film at that point, and I never fully managed to immerse myself again. While the director tries to handle this with some gravity, spending several minutes of the movie showing her looking disturbed, it even further alienates the audience and makes it difficult for us to find a lot to laugh about.
There are good things about Teeth, and it certainly wasn’t what I expected. However, slasher film ethics and feminist critique do not mix well, like male genitalia and teeth.
