Review: Teeth - 2007 Sundance Film Festival

The devoted head of her school's chastity club, virginal Dawn (Jess Weixler) doodles wedding dresses in her school notebook and gives public speeches on the virtues of virtue. She keeps a smile on her face despite her mom's serious illness and her stepbrother's perverse interest in her budding womanhood. Her innocence makes her the target of a predator purporting to be revirginized, but when he forces himself on her in an idyllic cove, Dawn's not the only one who loses something.

In Teeth, writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein takes a kicky premise--that Dawn has the fabled vagina dentata--and pushes it to absurdly gory/campy extremes. Weixler plays her part perfectly straight, and this no-winking performance makes the movie wickedly funny. Amid the laughs, Lichtenstein manages to convey the horror of rape in a visceral way that's harder to watch than the no-holds-barred graphic castrations (yes, there's more than one).

Teeth is a superhero movie in horror genre trappings, and its closest kin might be M. Night Shymalan's Unbreakable (with "Strangers With Candy" alum John Hensley in the Sam Jackson role). It's hard not to cheer at Dawn's final scene, even though the path she's headed down is so very, very wrong. She really doesn't have much of a future--unless she forms a superhero club with mute avenger Thana from Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, poor beleagured Carrie White, and the lupine sisters of Ginger Snaps. Sure, those poor women have been resigned to a life without healthy sexual expression, but that's a small price to to pay for ridding the world of all those misbehaving penises.