High school student, Dawn (played by Jess Weixler, resembling the love-child of Reese Witherspoon and Kate Winslet), is a goody-two-shoes promoter of waiting-til-you're married before having sex, and gives seminars to fellow students to that effect.Unfortunately, she is also afflicted with a rare condition well-known to feminist theorists as 'vagina dentata' in which the organs denoting gender have the capacity to 'de-flower' males with whom she copulates.
This ponderous difficulty makes for a delightfully playful film, rather as if 'Election' was crossed with 'Girl's School Screamers'. A clever hybrid, rather in the way that 'Hot Fuzz' cross-fertilises 'Bad Boys 2' with 'Midsomer Murders', 'Teeth' has the droll fortitude of 'Groundhog Day' too, as the unfortunate lead drily endures their horrible position.
Dawn makes the most of her predicament, taking revenge on her brother from Hell, releasing a howl of delight from the audience, but the chief pleasure of the film is in the perfect casting of Weixler as the prim, squeaky clean girl who was happy to wait, but can't quite resist the temptation to find out what happens when...
Of course there will be those po-faced killjoys who point out that the film's underlying moral could be construed as conservative (and did so with recent frolics '40 Year Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up'): give in to lust outside marriage and you will commit a sin tantamount to grievous bodily harm, if not manslaughter.
Amazingly, there were two walkouts at the screening I went to. Some people, as we know from observing the Mormons, are defiantly committed to not enjoying themselves.
The film had the same mordantly self-satisfied tone as comic short 'Happiest Day Of My Life', also shown at the Melbourne Film Festival, an LA wedding skit, in which roles are reversed and the women adopt the parts played by men in formal marriage rites, another satirical exercise that worked through all of the enjoyable consequences of its own inversions.
The film-maker introduced the short, which we would never have otherwise seen were it not for the Festival, though Film Festivals are rarely events to be celebrated so much as endured, the enforced viewings brought about by scheduling together with the concern that many films will never be seen again, or released at all, drives you to attend screenings you would otherwise avoid and brings on that peculiar sensation, 'film festival psychosis', in which the sufferer feels tormented by the conviction that he is constantly missing something, only to give in to the blurb-writers' puff and find out that he's missing nothing at all. Also that awful sensation of sitting through films with no merit, appeal or real value at all, interminable longuers, patched together out of various exercises in pretension, searching for but failing to find the way to rouse the emotion they long to evoke, while several hundred of us wait in the dark for something to happen which never comes about, experiencing that kind of headcrushing boredom only film festivals know how to bring on, then filing out and hearing that particular kind of sniggering among the relieved audience which can only mean, 'That was awful, why did we all put up with it?' Anyone who complains is told that they don't understand 'the Asian sense of Time'. But of course we put up with it because every now and then something like 'Teeth' comes along and provides an evening of pure delight.