WHAT'S that insistent tapping we hear? It is, perhaps, the sound of a thousand budding film academics launching themselves into a thousand weighty PhD theses.
Teeth, in which a teenager's vagina develops hungry fangs, has been advertised as a comedy horror in the vein of The Little Shop of Horrors. And, yes, it does offer moments of outrageous hilarity amid the accumulating barbarism (a dog scoffs a severed penis at one point). But Mitchell Lichtenstein's curious picture has as much in common with Todd Haynes's early cerebral shockers as it does with the average video nasty. Pay attention, Freudians, feminists, misogynists and fundamentalists: there something for everyone in the myth of the vagina dentata.
The film begins with a lengthy crane shot that takes us from the cooling towers over a power plant to the front garden of a bland suburban house. Brad and Dawn, two children who are about to become stepbrother and stepsister, are playing grumpily in a paddling pool. Brad winces and displays a bleeding finger. The parents deduce that the young girl has bitten him. It transpires that they have grasped only part of the truth.
A decade later, Dawn (played with wit and control by the terrific Jess Weixler) has grown into a born-again Christian and an evangelist for sexual chastity. One terrible afternoon, while visiting a damp, overpoweringly allegorical cave, her boyfriend, hitherto equally happy-clappy, is overpowered by carnal urges and forces himself upon the poor girl. One vaginal chomp later, a few inches of the unlucky fellow's flesh lie on the cave's floor.
Deflecting accusations of misogyny, the writer-director, son of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, only allows the barbed teeth to engage when Dawn is being mistreated. The film is, thus, more of a feminist revenge fantasy than it is an investigation of male sexual anxiety. Comparisons with Carrieare unavoidable, but Lichtenstein is keener on allowing his protagonist to escape victim status.
Sadly, though the gory sequences are impressively unsettling and the broad jokes remain funny throughout, Teethdoes run out of steam somewhat in its last half hour. You can't really have a killer vagina ascend the Empire State Building in the closing reel and, deprived of such a grand-slam denouement, Lichtenstein allows a certain directionlessness to creep in.
Still, this remains one of the most aggressively unusual horror flicks to have come our way in quite some time. Which is not to suggest it is recommended as a date movie.
DONALD CLARKE
