Debut Director Still Cutting His Baby Teeth Greg Kaczynski

Mitchell Lichtenstein’s feature film debut Teeth has a lot in common with the teenagers in his movie--perhaps too much.

Teeth is about a blossoming teenage girl, Dawn, who is an enthusiastic member of a youth chastity group struggling with her own burgeoning femininity. She is surrounded on all sides by lascivious men interested in helping her take that next step into womanhood. However, little do these plotting boys and men know, Dawn is harboring a nasty secret inside her “special gift:” it appears she’s got a full-blown case of vagina dentata, or teeth of the vagina.

As the story progresses and the men sexually force themselves onto her in various situations, they all get their expected comeuppance. With such a subversive premise, how can Teeth fail? Like the awkward characters portrayed, stumbling through adolescence unsure of who they really are or what they truly want, Teeth never really asserts itself as the film it might have been.

Lichtenstein never seems to decide what kind of a movie he wants to make. Is it an overacted farce? Is it an intense horror film? A coming-of-age story? A tale of feminist empowerment? Teeth wants to be all of these things, but falls short of truly achieving any one of them. It begins with a promising satirical tone, a Lynchian portrait of “perfect” Middle America: green lawns, beautiful homes, blue skies…and the ominous power plant smoke stacks belching out presumably toxic gas in the background. The opening is rich, full of saturated colors; the music is perfectly melodramatic, the acting slightly over the top. Even the title sequence is a CGI journey into absurdity. After this opening, however, the movie mutates into a commentary on the school politics of sex-ed, then it goes into the uncertainty of teenage relationships, wanders into John Waters-esque dysfunctional family territory, meanders into hard-core gore here and there and finally finds itself in the land of feminist revenge movies. At the end of the film, the audience is left with a sense of dissatisfaction that it never really focused on any one angle of the story.

Jess Weixler (Dawn) handles the material well, deftly switching acting styles without batting an eye from over-the-top farce to a scene where she portrays true, gut-wrenching terror at the horrors of her own body. It’s from her performance that it appears that the biggest flaw with the film lies with the unfocused vision of the director. Talented actors like “Nip/Tuck’s” John Hensley play predictable, one-note stereotypical characters (Brad, Dawn’s nasty, rebel step-brother), while at the same time, viewers are supposed to believe that real, emotional moments happen in these character’s lives (losing one’s virginity, a mother falling ill).

Perhaps the problem lies more in the writing than the directing. Chunks of dialogue feel stilted and heavy-handed, as if the characters have a personal agenda from the writer to deliver a very important message. Entire scenes don’t feel organic at all, essentially serving as set-ups for immediate payoffs audiences see coming a mile away. In fact, the majority of the film feels largely inorganic, and that’s the problem with high concept movies like Teeth that aren’t properly fleshed out; there’s only so much you can do with vagina dentata, and from there the writer/director needs to really flex his creativity to make this story stand out, to make it original and compelling. Lichtenstein takes this great concept and squeezes out a fraction of what could have been done with it. He gets some basic gags out and his political viewpoint, but ultimately, Teeth fails at creating interesting, three-dimensional characters and a compelling story.

Lichtenstein doesn’t seem to know what message he wants share with the audience. Hints are dropped that Dawn’s malformation may be caused by the massive environmentally dangerous power plant in her backyard, or maybe it’s a sudden evolution in her own body, soon to be the standard for oppressed females worldwide (shudder). The chastity group she belongs to is alternately handled as a kind group of normal teenagers and a strange, shadowy cult. Is sex the great villain of the film (indeed, if the soundtrack is to be believed, dropping ominous cues whenever copulation is even hinted at)? Is it men? Dawn’s vagina?

Solid satire needs to be focused and pointed, and Lichtenstein does not deliver on this end. The movie itself comes across as sloppy, transitions seem half-done, parts of the soundtrack/dialogue don’t sound even and the heavy-handedness of several scenes lends a film-school feeling to the movie. Teeth falls short in so many ways partially because it tries to take so many approaches to the subject matter.

There are some genuinely fun, clear moments in the film (the gynecologist’s office particularly stands out), but not enough. It certainly does not rise up to what it could have been: another Slither (a fantastic horror/comedy genre film that makes solid, creative choices and sticks with them). Teeth holds back, whether if because it simply doesn’t know what it wants to be or because it wants to be everything doesn’t really matter; it simply falls short.

Teeth is now playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5, Laemmle One Colorado in Pasadena and Edwards University Theatre in Irvine.

For more information, visit teethmovie.com.