[teflon]

Dri/Wri: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Jess Weixler

Pop Art's prodigal son 'pops' up in the mainstream with his faux B-Movie 'Teeth'.
I have to admit I was dreading watching this, the images which flashed into my mind were not ones I fancied seeing made real on the cinema screen or my LCD screen for that matter.

But you shouldn't judge things before you have tried them yourself.

This film is 'high concept' fare and it makes it clear even before the opening credits what that concept is. That age-old myth of Vagina Dentata. That's as far as I can go I think with that, kids can read this, and if they understand Latin then they deserve to know what I just said.

For the first half an hour I felt like this was some fly-over state mutant fundamentalist christian crap. Everyone in it apart from the main girl is gormless, ugly and incredibly dumb. It was only later that I realised this was completely deliberate, and that this film is actually pure dead-pan satire. It seems to be an outright attack on backwards conservative christian values, common in the 'bible belt' area of America.

The main girl is blissfully ignorant of her abnormality because the biology teacher is unable to teach sexual anatomy due to fundamentalist parents and local councils etc banning it from schools. So she is confused and scared when she experiments with a local moron who ends up losing his willy.

A subsequent visit to what seems like a fairly brutal gynaecologist (girls can probably attest to whether this is normal) results in him losing his fingers.

All the while, her naughty step-brother is doing bum-sex with the local girls and smoking weed and saying F-Off to peeps. This contrasts nicely with Dawn who is a complete square and so are all her friends. Her step-brother wants to do sex with her too, but she isn't so keen.

Jess Weixler is quite an attractive girl, and that slightly helps to maintain interest, but the pace of the film is incredibly slow. As if the fact they reveal the concept at the beginning is enough to keep the viewer excited all the way through some extremely tedious clap-trap between christian squares boring the crap out of eachother.

Most notably, the image I conjured up in my head with my pre-conceived notion of this film never appears. You never see any prosthetic manifestation of 'Vagina Dentata', it is all implied, although you do get some half-second shots of boys with blood gushing out of their stumps, which is fairly unpleasant especially when a dog eats an off-cut.

I'm not sure who it is aimed at, proper B movie gore fans will think it is pretty lame, christians will hate it, anti-christians will think it is boring. It really must be going for the post-modern, deadpan satire, secular film buffs. I suppose that includes me but I found it fairly bland, perhaps it was a daring film to make but the hype ruined it?

Watch it if you like; feeling vaguely bored and mildly disappointed.