The old ball & chain and I have been waiting to see this little indy horror flick for a year now. We caught wind of it when it debuted at the 2007 Cannes/Sundance/Whatever Film Festival and have been waiting with the proverbial baited breath ever since... well, except for me, who literally had worms, crickets, and other fish bait in my mouth, but that's a story for another time. I kept nagging all of my usual Underworld connections about getting a bootleg into my eager talons, but even my man the mighty Danish black marketer known only as Hubrecht couldn't oblige my vaginal dentata lust. Well, it's finally arrived on DVD courtesy of those weirdoes at Dimension's EXTREME label, so let the penis mutilations begin!

While fooling around with his stepsister Dawn in a kiddy pool (as most rapists-to-be often do), a little boy named Brad gets a nasty looking cut on his finger. Such is the lesson all boys should learn: stay out of strange holes. A St. Bernard didn't heed the warnings of this chain letter and he was soon bitten by rabid bats and killed by Dee Wallace Stone! Don't go poking at places you don't understand. Anyway, in very Tromatic fashion, the family lives just down the road from a nuclear power plant, so little Dawn's lack of need for a RapeX probably has to do with a special ingredient in the local water. Makes you wonder what kinda freaky things those mercury suckin' brats from Erin Brockovich might have goin' on south of their own Equators...

Years later, Dawn has grown up to be one of those obnoxious “abstinence over education” turds, speaking out to groups of kids wearing those stupid little red rings and telling them that sex before their wedding night is an unforgivable sin and they'll all be raped for eternity by half-badger, half-clown demons in Hell if they give up their virginities before they give up their hands in marriage. It's because of stuff like this that teens instead fall back into the gray area of interpreting their “purity in the eyes of God” and instead go down the anal and oral highways, ignorant to important shit like condoms and infecting each other with everything from herpes to HIV to whatever that dude in The Incredible Melting Man picked up while having unprotected space sex with the Sun... that whorish mass of incandescent gas... If somebody told me growing up that masturbation and premarital sex were wrong, I probably would've popped them between the eyes with a railroad spike, then skull fucked the hole until I whitewashed their cerebral cortex. Fuck yeah do I love getting my dick wet in some cerebral cortex!

No sooner does Dawn get done trying to make a roomful of kids feel bad for their natural urges does she meet another ring-bearer named Tobey and starts getting butterflies in her stomach. Back at home, Dawn's mom Kim is dying of Cancer or something, her stepdad's as silver-haired and unimportant to the world around him as ever, and stepbrother Brad has turned into a tattooed, pierced, asshole sociopath who listens to heavy metal music all day in his darkly lit room while he dehumanizes his girlfriend by paddling his meat canoe up her Hershey Creek and tries to make her eat dog biscuits. He still bears a nasty scar from the day he tried to spelunk in young Dawn's catacombs too. You'd think someone who smoked as much pot as he does would at least stop with the douche baggery for a few minutes a day, but that's not the case. As much as I hate the jock stereotypes and the nerd stereotypes and all of the other high school stereotypes in movies, I've discovered a special kind of hatred for the “Brad” stereotype at this point in my bad movie watching “career” too. I guess he’s supposed to be in the cast so the 10 year-old boys have someone to idolize because he’s so “cool”. Keep in mind, when I was 10 Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer were “cool” and look where that got them!

Speaking of high school, Dawn is fairly and justly harassed by her schoolmates for her ignorant, flowery views on sex and 'R' rated movies. Sorry kids, if you're a tool, your character gets no sympathy from me. Our heroine starts to have “impure thoughts” about Tobey, but before she can get busy flickin' the bean she gets nightmarish visions of the dripping jaws of the titular terror of Roger Corman's The Black Scorpion. Cool classic b-movie allusion, but it's way too blatant to be considered foreshadowing so much as it is a full on eclipse… not that that really makes a lot of sense on my part. Sorry. Back at school, the kids learn about how animals evolve defense mechanisms to protect themselves from predators...WE GET IT! JUST GET TO THE PUSSY FANGS ALREADY!

Instead of giving into their human carnalities, Dawn and Tobey agree to never spend time with each other ever again because God doesn't want them to be happy and would instead prefer to drive them both insane until they come to school one day and gun down the entire student body out of sexual frustration. This doesn't last long though, and the two find themselves together again at the local make out spot within a day of vowing to never see each other again. Dawn cock teases the poor guy, to which Tobey responds by spitting in Jesus's eye and trying to rape her. If you guessed that what he put into her wasn't going to be coming back out with the rest of him (and will subsequently get sexed up by a crab later on... heh heh, crab pun), then you've no doubt heard of this movie before... or figured it out by the opening segment in the kiddy pool… or it could've just been my various bouts of complaining that clued you in. Either way, Tobey no longer needs to worry about his baser urges, because he gets to be a eunuch now! Way to go Tobey. It's just too bad he'll bleed to death before he gets the chance to actually regret being a dickless rapist... literally.

The next day, Dawn babbles her way through another purity speech, briefly making “Adam and Atom” parallels before wandering off stage in a daze. Later internet searches turn up tales of the Vagina Dentata that, when you're already a girl going through the awkward stages of womanhood, probably don't make you feel any better about that bearded horror betwixt yonder thighs. Her first visit to the gynecologist only proves more painful to her already disturbed sense of self which, again, is apparently a pretty common thing for young women... especially if their gyno's are anywhere near as “aggressive” as this rubber gloved violator is. I fear the world of women and, after this movie, I feel this is with good reason.

Guilt ridden over her man(hood)slaughter of Tobey, Dawn seeks the support of a guy from her school who, incidentally, has a crush on her... and has a supply of anxiety pills... and thinks he's gonna be all smooth and get laid with his jazz music and champagne and room full of candles. Sorry guy-whose-name-I-didn't-catch, but the guy who listens to the girl talk about her problems is also the guy whose only action comes in the form of his right hand... or his left hand if he's feeling “adventurous”. Then again, roofie cocktails are the equalizer for the socially awkward... In the end, will it be possible for Dawn to find the “hero” (please hold all Bonnie Tyler jokes until after the review) to slay her “beast” and live a normal life, or will she have to get thee to a nunnery? Will there be repercussions for her part in the death of would-be criminal-turned-corpse Tobey or the mutilations/murders of everybody else who got a little too close for comfort? Also, it's not really a question of will Brad suffer his own loss at his stepsister's teeth, but rather how long will we have to wait for the satisfaction of seeing it? These answers and more can be yours, if the price is right… and your NetFlix/Blockbuster account is up-to-date.

Teeth signals the popping of director-writer Mitchell Lichtenstein's feature film cherry and it’s an okay experience for a first-timer. The concept behind it is very interesting, I just wish the execution could have been as involving as the plot. Don't get me wrong, this isn't some chauvinist bias against it because I love strong female characters... it's the movie itself that I'm not a big fan of. It was shot well enough, but not in any way that would make me hire the guy to do my wedding video. Speaking of videos, watching Teeth is almost like watching one of those music videos where everything happening in the video is taken word-for-word from the song. The constant beating us over the head with images of the local nuclear power plant displayed prominently in background shots makes me feel like a 3 year old watching “The Teletubbies”. So much so that I half expected a sun with a giggling baby’s face to pop up and start laughing at me. Yes, we get it, exposure to radioactive elements made Dawn grow mighty incisors in her birth canal and her journey is intended as a parody of the horrors teenage girls experience while their bodies mutate and they start shooting geysers of blood from their baby chasms. I got the point Mitchell, you don't need to repeat it for me a half-dozen times! Would it have been so hard to just sum up the movie in 30 minutes or less? I should be able to order a large pie from Pizza Island and this movie should be over by the time the Portugese delivery guy who can’t speak English comes knocking on my door. Teeth just feels like a short subject concept that was stretched a little too much to make it fill out an uncomfortably oversized pair of big kid pants that just don’t fit right.

I also wasn’t entirely behind the humor aspects, because it was an uneven balance between intelligent, fairly well written wit and shock value gross out stuff that’s supposed to make the audience squirm with unease like an episode of “South Park”. The concept could’ve worked as either but it got greedy and tried to be both. Oh, and Dawn's “Warning! Sex Changes Everything” t-shirt is neither cute nor ironic, unless you think being bludgeoned across the face with a cudgel is also cute or ironic... though I'm sure as there are some of you out there... in which case please don't come to my Cthulhumas party this year. Anyway, with all the dismembered phalli throughout the movie, I was expecting some kind of big reveal at the end where we actually get to see the poon jaws in all their gnashing glory. If you’re looking for something like a Predator’s mouth done up in a way that would make Screaming Mad George grin like a Cheshire, prepare for disappointment. The movie never goes that over the top and hoping it does will just get you another shot of the nuclear power plant shoved in your face again…