Teeth (2007)
(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) Some horror-movie concepts are so obvious in retrospect that it’s a mystery why they haven’t been done before or more often. Why, indeed, hasn’t anyone used the idea of the timeless male phobia of the vagina dentata into a high concept for a film, before or after? (A much smarter writer than me recently investigated and didn’t find any further examples.) Fortunately, you could say that writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is good enough that it doesn’t need an alternative nor a follow-up. The story of a young woman who discovers that her intimate parts have cannibalistic appetites, Teeth decides to go for vengeful comedy/horror, saddling the protagonist with a succession of terrible males who deserve every maiming they get. From 2022, Teeth feels like a film about ten years ahead of its time—with sharp feminist overtones that would feel quite at ease alongside such overly transgressive works as Promising Young Woman and the misguided 2019 Black Christmas (not to mention the 2021 version of Slumber Party Massacre, among many others). But it may age a little bit better than some of them—it comes across its toothy edge honestly, and packages it into a darkly comic tone that seems more earned than performative. Needless to say, it remains a recommendation for those who can handle the subject matter.