Ouch!

If you’re looking for something to make you lose your lunch, you’re not going to find a better film this year than Teeth. I don’t care if Saw V comes out on Halloween, and let’s just forget about Greg McLean’s alligator movie before it’s even released - Teeth is the real word for squeam.

Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of artist Roy Lichtenstein, Teeth is a pleasingly campy, repulsively gory black comedy about a spokeswoman for chastity who discovers she has a vaginal set of chompers after giving in to her urges. What follows is a mesh of David Lynch and the Troma Films, with whackers flopping to and fro and stumps spurting as men reveal just how deprived they are. I have never laughed so hard while in the process of groaning.

Jess Weixler makes a memorable debut as Dawn, the gorgeous and virginal head speaker for The Promise, a middle school/high school chastity education program whose pledges wear red rings until the night of their wedding, wherein that cherry is popped and replaced with a gold one. Dawn lives in an unnamed town with a nuclear reactor and two big smokestacks in her backyard, a constant reminder we’re not in Kansas anymore. She lives with her ailing mother, her righteous stepfather, and her drug-abusing, heavy metal-loving step brother, Brad (played by John Hensley), who has been sexually attracted to her since the tip of his finger got chomped in an incident of show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine that went awry when they were kids.

Dawn faces ridicule on a daily basis as peers pop soda cans in her face and taunt her with coarse language, and she finds it difficult to do anything in the way of dating beyond going to a PG-rated movie with her boyfriend or going on chaperoned walks through the woods. One of the running jokes in the film is how appealing Dawn’s naivety is to just about every man she runs into. Things change one day when her desires overcome her, and she leers her equally-chaste boyfriend out for a swim near a cave that has become a notorious make-out spot. Lichtenstein loads this scene with vaginal and penal symbols - the long shaft of a tree hanging out over the water, the moss-encrusted oval opening of the cave - and films it in such a way that the tension mounts to a ... climax as Dawn has second thoughts and her boyfriend, too worked up to take no for an answer, ends up six inches shorter after forcing himself on her.

The movie escalates from there to increasingly disturbing altercations with other boys at school (and in one instance a pedophilic gynecologist who gets a little too invasive with his fingers), and builds to the inevitable showdown between step sister and step brother, which is so outgoing in its attempts to make you retch that they really should hand out barf bags at the concession stand. If this description makes you squirm, then don’t even bother seeing this film, because, aside from actually showing the chompers, it leaves nothing else to the imagination.

Lichtenstein is skilled at skirting the line between reality and The Twilight Zone, and deftly capable of horrifying us and making us laugh at the same time, which is not a simple feat. Weixler is to be commended for keeping a straight face and drawing on a dramatic reserve that fills out her character rather than making her a sheet for the high camp gorefest this film could so easily have become.

I wouldn’t call this a female empowerment vehicle. It’s not Basic Instinct or The Brave One. It’s close, but it’s too grounded in its roots as a comedy to preach. The message is there - men are hormone-crunching pigs who give in on a whim to their desires, and there is the implication, at the end, that Dawn will have to use her gift to get along in the world, but this didn’t bother me. I was too busy laughing. But I wasn’t holding my sides while I was laughing. I was holding something else, thankful it was still there.