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Teeth (2008) Director - Mitchell Lichtenstein; Starring - Jess Weixler, Hale Appleman, Lenny von Dohlen, John Hensley, Vivienne Benesch, Josh Pais, Ashley Springer; Screenplay - Mitchell Lichtenstein; Rated R for graphic violence, nudity, sexual content, and language; view trailer here.

I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Honestly, movies like this are putting me on the verge of redefining the term "trailer trash".

You know what I am talking about. You settle into your seat before a movie starts, and as the lights dim you see a trailer for some movie you have never heard of before. Something about the trailer catches your attention. Perhaps the way it is cut, what the studio and filmmaker chooses to hide to draw you to see the film later. Maybe it is something about the concept for the film itself that captures your imagination.

The trailer for Teeth did both for me. Certainly the story was novel. A young girl named Dawn O'Keefe (Jess Weixler) makes a shocking discovery about an anomaly with her body: she has teeth inside her vagina. The trailer presented the film as a refreshing riff on the horror genre.

There were also things about the trailer that had me convinced this film was attempting to be smarter than your average horror film. There were some things about the montage of scenes from the film that struck me differently. Hell, the fact that the main character's name was Dawn O'Keefe appealed to me for audacity of that particular joke, especially when paired with the film's tagline: "Every rose has its thorns." Hints of that potential are scattered all over the first third to half of the film. That made it all the more disappointing for me when the film chucked it all in favor of the lowest common denominator.

Dawn is presented as a somewhat atypical teenager. She is a very active member and spokesperson for a prominent pro-abstinence group. She travels to various local schools and speaks to pre-teens and high school students about the virtues of not having sex until marriage. It is a principle she has taken very closely to heart. Which is why she is greatly confused when Tobey is introduced into her life.

Dawn's commitment to "save it", however, is wavering and further complicated by a general ignorance of both her body and the desires it is suddenly overwhelmed with. A scene that illustrates an institutional double standard prevalent in matters of sex education shows that Dawn's ignorance is fostered as much from without as it is from within. It would be a pointed message if the scene had been written more tightly and the larger context of the film itself weren't so frivolous.

Things get even more complicated through Dawn's naïveté about how strong Tobey's resolve is regarding their pledge to stay pure. A trip to a local make-out point near a secluded lake is deemed safe by Dawn and Gwen because the four are visiting it during the day, not after dark when bad things might happen. The more time Dawn spends around Tobey, the harder she finds it to resist the urges that course through her.

Instinctively, she pushes Tobey away in order to save them both. That commitment she cannot stick to, and in a fit of weakness she invites Tobey to meet her back at the make-out point for an afternoon swim. The two eventually make their way back to hidden cave where their horny brethren have done the deed in the past. As is to be expected, things start to get out of hand.

And in that moment the plot jumps off in a different direction and becomes one of the most overly simplistic stories I have ever seen on screen.

I attended a performance of the Sinus Show at Alamo Drafthouse one time as they lampooned Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. The film was about two-thirds done when they stopped the film to do a sketch on stage and then when they returned to the film, it had been advanced forward about fifteen minutes. A rape scene involving one of the main characters had been excised because, as the Sinus performers explained, "We do comedy, and if there's one thing that isn't funny it's a rape scene."

At the risk of wandering into spoiler territory to make a point, I have to say that the interaction between Dawn and Tobey at this critical juncture begins as possibly the last well-handled scene in the entire film. It is a textbook date rape scenario that Dawn finds herself in and as the action unfolds, my heart really breaks for Dawn. No one ever deserves to be violated in that fashion and regardless of whether she has been sheltered in her life about sexual issues, having that knowledge would not have protected her much, if any, under the circumstances.

It is at the heart of this immediate crisis that Dawn's physical peculiarity manifests itself in full self-preservation mode with the expected results. The aftermath is gory, violent, and disturbing. The problem I have with the film arises because the camera lingers entirely too long on what is left of Tobey's genitalia and the scene becomes bloody absurdist comedy as Tobey gets away. The "humor" robs the scene of all its power and spurred a tastelessly inappropriate joke in my head.

As Dawn and the movie recedes further from the incident, Lichtenstein's script devolves away from loftier thematic elements (if in fact that was ever his intention) and reduces its main thesis to one that dictates that if you have a penis, you are predestined to be a rapist. In fact, I may even be less reductive in making that statement than the film is showing it.

Part of me anticipates that there may be a feminist criticism of my problems with the film. I can foresee some pooh-poohing of my distaste for the camera shot as being some veiled castration anxiety in my patriarchy influenced perspective. To which I can only say that I don't believe such anxiety exists within me. Watching the movie at Alamo, I would think that were I prone to such anxiety I would have refrained from ordering a chili dog to nosh on during the show.

And in a cruel twist of irony, my meal for some unknown reason was half off. That amused me.

It has always been something more of a running joke in horror/slasher films than a thematic element: those who engage in premarital sex are doomed to die at the hands of the vicious killer for committing that most egregious of sins. I appreciated how Jason X did a little self-referential nudge and wink sight gag on that staple element of the Friday the 13^th series. So in that respect, that sex equals death in Teeth is keeping with a long (if not necessarily proud) cinematic tradition.

Where I feel like Teeth not only fails to follow these basic horror rules but also peddles a fundamentally insulting deeper message lay in how poorly developed all the pivotal characters are. It is most obvious with Dawn and how her fate is laid out, but she is hardly the only example.

Dawn's naïve understanding of how her body works and the institutional measures that would keep her in the dark set her up initially to be a very sympathetic character. As she comes to terms with how she is different and pushes to learn more about her condition and what she can do about it or with it, it would seem natural that one of two things should happen. Either she would seek out a "cure" that would help her regain some semblance of normalcy; or she would view this as some sort of power that she can wield over men to try and push them more in line with the abstinence message she believes in so strongly.

An initial foray into the former territory lends itself to one of the funniest scenes I've seen recently on film...provided I did not think too hard about the subtext of what is actually happening in the scene. A visit to an ob-gyn goes horribly awry, as is hinted at in the trailer linked above. What undermines the scene in my eyes and gives the film a far more insidious slant is the idea that a male figure that Dawn initially believes she can trust betrays that trust for his own ends.

The punishment fits the crime without question, but the problem is one that the Sinus Show knew to avoid and I find myself wishing the film had as well: sexual assaults should not be played for laughs, lest they wind up trivializing the behavior. It is a sloppy mistake that betrays Lichtenstein's attention to detail in so many other aspects of the film. The scene is unquestionably played up for laughs and that bothers me on many levels.

Lichtenstein's attention to the non-human details of the film is extensive. There are so many subtle and overt visual symbols that seem to speak to a more nuanced look at gender issues and sexuality than one would expect in a film like this. One detail I particularly liked I thought played beautifully into the confusion Dawn was feeling.

The film was made here in Austin, and I recognized one of the streets Dawn is bicycling on during a pair of scenes sandwiching the doctor's visit. After getting over the initial recognition of the location, my eye was drawn to the fact that every billboard visible had been digitally redone to display an advertisement where sex appeal was one of the key selling points. It was a subtle point to make about how societies message to girls like Dawn can sometimes make it harder to discern what the right thing to do really is.

But when it comes to the human elements, Lichtenstein gets lazy in all of the worst ways. None of the male leads is sympathetic in any sense. Dawn's stepfather Bill (Lenny von Dohlen) is barely present and when he is there his only function is to be tremendously weak. Her stepbrother Brad (John Hensley) is a stereotype of the lowest order as a punk rebel asshole and is the key to the most ridiculous plot twist at the end of the film. It is a twist that is hinted at briefly in the opening to the movie but then never really addressed until the very end.

A male friend of Dawn's named Ryan (Ashley Springer) could have been the potential counter to all the negative male influences in the film. Instead he winds up playing down into the same pattern and in a way that not only shows Lichtenstein's lack of concern for how his male characters are portrayed in the script but gives way to Dawn seemingly becoming dumber in her actions as the events unfold.

The horror buff can say, "What did you expect, it's a horror movie about ‘vagina dentata' for chrissakes! Get off your high horse!"

But in 2000 there was a horror film from Canada called Ginger Snaps that dealt with similar gender/sexuality themes in the same genre. It is (pun gratuitously intended) a horror film with real bite, as well as one that does not shy away from the gore and threw some genuine scares in for good measure.

Teeth lacks the humor, intelligence, and style of Ginger Snaps and by itself that would hardly be a cinematic crime. Yet on its own merits, Teeth really has little to offer except sexual jokes that ultimately cease being funny and are in some cases overtly offensive, little in the way of true scares, and what amounts to a pretty shameful waste of an original concept.

Quite frankly, there are better things out there for horror buffs to chew on.

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