Teeth stars Jess Wexler as Dawn (yes, the movie’s that subtle), a resolute virgin and leading member of her local chastity group. She is so sexually innocent and fearful that when she is finally beseiged by an onslaught of hormones she finds her vagina has teeth: this upsets her at first – and upsets the guys emasculated by her out-of-place gnashers even more – but by the end of the film she has become reconciled to them, as she realises she can use her odd superpower to wreak vengeance on evil men.
This isn’t the schlocky B-movie horror that you might expect from the subject matter. In fact, it’s not quite sure what it is – there’s a stab at horror spoof, but mostly it’s a mix of gross-out comedy, fluffy first love story and feminist moralising drama. The focus, however, is myopically fixed: this is no more than a one-issue movie denigrating American chastity goups, and listening to idiot teens waffle on about purity quickly becomes as irritating as you’d expect. Crucially, in such a proselytizing movie, the central conceit doesn’t bear scrutiny: the vagina dentata myth is reversed so that it symbolises the woman who is afraid or ignorant of her own sexuality; does it really serve Lichtenstein’s point, then, to have the teeth become a tool of empowerment?
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