Review: Teeth

Penis-severing teeth may not be what every woman wants inside her vagina. But if you’re born that way, what are you going to do with them? Dawn (Jess Weixler, a prize-winner at Sundance 2007) does a nice turn as a high school virgin getting in touch with her privates. After her first pelvic exam, she picks up a Latin term and goes home to Google “vagina dentata.” Meanwhile, her screaming gynecologist picks his four fingertips off the floor, and heads into emergency reparative surgery. “Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered,” writes Camille Paglia in her 1990 book “Sexual Personae.” “The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination.” In the end credits Paglia gets special thanks from first-time writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein. (For what it’s worth, she’s also thanked in “Shirtless: Hollywood’s Sexiest Men.”) After fleshing out the mythic metaphor, Lichtenstein is not sure where to go with Dawn’s cock-chompers. Two ominous cooling towers upwind of her suburban ranch house may explain her mutation. The film’s opening credits show tiny blue living things attacking red ones, suggesting a battle of the sexes more primordial than Bush vs. Kerry states. “Teeth” gleefully shows bloody male crotches and sliced dick, including one swallowed by a Rottweiler dubbed “Mother.” Yet the only vagina, toothy or toothless, appears as a diagram in a sex-ed textbook. “Teeth” nibbles with less bite than the recent micro-distributed indies “Fido” and “The Wristcuttters.” As satire—feminist or anti-feminist—it’s unpenetrating. With John Hensley, Hale Appleman and Josh Pais. 88m. (Bill Stamets)