A Rundown of the 13 Best, Most Recent Horror Movies I’ve Seen
[4 of 13]
TEETH (January 2007)


[Teeth is] a dark feminist fable for our times, a terribly effective cautionary tale of sexual awakening, and the mysterious and potent strength hidden in the core of the female species.

Read the entire review here.

(Teeth UK quad courtesy of empireonline.com.)

TEETH
(Review)

“No men were harmed in the making of this film.”
So claim the end credits for Mitchell Lichtenstein’s wildly original and wildly disturbing Teeth. And that may be true, as far as things go, but there’s no reassurance that the men in the audience won’t leave the theatre traumatized.


Dawn (The Big Bad Swim‘s Jess Weixler) is a high school student who is part of an organization called The Promise, which promotes abstinence amongst teens. Unpopular with a significant portion of the student population, Dawn nonetheless sticks to her firm belief that sex should be saved for marriage.
And despite her mother (Vivienne Benesch) being ill, and her stepbrother Brad (Nip/Tuck’s John Hensley) being a rebellious heavy metal fiend, Dawn copes rather admirably. Dawn’s world is fine, if not exactly brilliant.
Till new student Tobey (Hale Appleman) arrives and throws everything out of whack, forcing Dawn to wake up to the cold, cruel ways of the world.


Now, I don’t want to blurt out the central idea that drives Teeth. You may get a notion from the trailer, but it isn’t really actually named till about halfway through the film, so I’ll avoid mentioning it in this review.
I can say that Teeth is Rated R, and is more black comedy than actual horror movie. Having said that, I must say that there is horror in Teeth, particularly for the males in the audience, but it’s not the standard horror of your average scary movie.
The fact of the matter is, it’s not often you get to see a film as unique and audacious in its subject matter and sensibility as Teeth. I’ve read a couple of short stories that have dealt with the same idea, but it’s really only in Teeth where I’ve seen a satisfying treatment of it.
And a big reason why, is that Teeth has a rather good cast, who bring a humanity to the far-from-normal subject matter. Weixler, in particular, delivers a fantastic performance, effectively painting her character’s need to do the right thing, with the misery and frustration of her self-imposed abstinence, and later on, the bizarre circumstances of her predicament.


Since I myself am abstaining from springing Teeth’s central premise in this review, I guess I’ll just say that it’s a dark feminist fable for our times, a terribly effective cautionary tale of sexual awakening, and the mysterious and potent strength hidden in the core of the female species.
There’s a lot of strong imagery and symbolism in Teeth, and one sequence sticks out for me. It’s the scene in the classroom where they’re studying the human reproductive organs, which seems to suggest that in trying to see women for what they really are, men can’t help but destroy them in the process.
Like Fruit Chan’s Dumplings and Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives remake, Teeth shows how far women are willing to go to exist and prosper in this patriarchal world, and like Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, it’s also a curious cinematic exercise in female empowerment.
It says, in very decisive terms, that it isn’t that women are dangerous, emasculating b!tches, but rather, that woman can be dangerous, emasculating b!tches, if we men are being total d!cks to them. (And sadly, nearly to a man, the male specimens in Teeth are complete noodges. Even Dawn’s father—played by Twin Peaks’ Lenny von Dohlen—ultimately proves to be an impotent force in his own household.)
Teeth also suggests that if we men continue to be total d!cks to women, then they could very well adapt to our misogynistic ways and teach us all a lesson we’ll never forget, by getting us right where it hurts…


Parting shot: Reviews of The Big Bad Swim, The Stepford Wives, and Death Proof can be found in the Archive.

(Teeth OS and images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

THE BIG BAD SWIM
(Review)

Noah Owens (Jeff Branson, TV’s All My Children) teaches an adult swim class at night, a class composed mostly of people who, at best, don’t know how to swim, and at worst, are deathly afraid of the water.
Off the bat, the point of The Big Bad Swim is clear: learning to swim as a metaphor for dealing with life. Even the film’s tag line doesn’t mince words: “Life Is About Keeping Your Head Above Water.”
It’s to the credit of writer Daniel Schechter and director Ishai Setton that the film avoids schmaltzy Hollywood waters and actually turns out to be one of those great little pictures that everyone should see.

Though we’re introduced at the top of the film to a bunch of students ranging from a couple married for 27 years who’ve decided to take the swim class because they’ve just had a new pool installed (Todd Susman and Darla Hill) to a cop scared stiff of the water (Kevin Porter Young), the film focuses largely on high school teacher Amy Pierson (Paget Brewster), casino dealer/stripper Jordan Gallagher (Jess Weixler), and Noah.
A narrative device the film uses to help move the story along is the video documentary being shot by Jordan’s brother David (Avi Setton) and his best friend Hunter (Phil of the Future himself, Ricky Ullman), who happen to be Amy’s students.

There is an honest and understated approach to the material in The Big Bad Swim that is refreshing, unlike the overblown flourishes of your average studio drama. Here, we have real people, lonely and looking for connections (even if they’re not conscious of it), dealing with the daily travails of life as best they can, struggling against the fear: of failure, of rejection, of uncertainty.
There are no Hollywood Big Moments in this film: no births, no deaths, no weddings, no divorces, no massive conflicts, no massive reconciliations. If there is any Hollywood narrative convention here, it may very well be the presence of the Dog.
But even Pizza (who plays Noah’s recently rescued dog, “Danger”) is an inspired bit of casting, as he (or she; I’m uncertain as to Pizza’s gender) is a brilliant example of canine understatement. Pizza gets a whole heck of a lot of mileage from just sitting around, looking mopey and put-upon.
And Pizza is merely the tip of the iceberg where excellent and understated performances are concerned. Most of the cast (particularly Branson, Brewster, and Weixler) deliver very low-key, naturalistic performances, and have much to do with how earnest and genuine this film comes across.

Now, though there are no Big Moments in The Big Bad Swim, there are personal triumphs. For Noah and his students, victory is found in the small grace notes, those tiny, mundane miracles that present themselves without fanfare everyday of our lives, instances when we can gain some level of respect and love, for ourselves and for those around us.
In The Big Bad Swim, change doesn’t come in pivotal life-altering epiphanies. Sometimes, it comes in small, slow stages. Kind of like learning to swim by starting out in the shallow end of the pool first, and then…
Oh, you probably get the picture.

Parting shot: The Big Bad Swim has won a number of awards, including the Audience Award Best Feature Film Winner at the Tallgrass Film Festival, Best American Independent Winner at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, and Best Feature Film Winner at the Annapolis Film Festival.

(The Big Bad Swim DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; image courtesy of annapolisfilmfestival.com.)