I’m not sure Teeth deserves its own thread (I tried posting a comment elsewhere but Word Press wouldn’t let me) but there’s something slyly (and comically) subversive about this story of a teenager, a good Christian girl who preaches abstinence and chastity, who discovers her vagina is blessed with a bite (a nuclear power plant forever looms in the background). It is crude and crass (there are a copious number of severed penises), but the film could also be read as a post-feminist, coming-of-age, “superhero-esque” origin story of a serial killer with a code (a la Showtime’s underrated “Dexter”) who targets brutal, oppressive, sexually abusive misogynists (teenage boys, wacky gynecologists, dirty-old-men). Though a favorite at Sundance in 2006, it didn’t do too well at the box office . . . will audiences be willing to line up for Teeth II???
I liked this. Screw subtext and fuck allegory; let’s have more horror movies with the psycho-sexual social commentary right there on the surface. The lead was quite good, and the film was never cutesy about its horror OR its social-theoretical pretensions.
An intriguing double-bill might be set up with Larry Fessenden, a filmmaker working in an entirely different tonal key, but who keeps using horror tropes (the vampire, the wendigo) as if the generic conventions are subtext to his social-realist character dramas.