Choppy, choppy your pee-pee - words that would strike fear into the heart of any man, but words that are made even more terrifying when the chopping comes from gnashers that are in some young girl’s cooter.
I guess most teenagers are a little afraid of sex. You know, what with the weird organs, the smelly bodily fluids and the female fear of having one’s hymen pierced by a throbbing shaft of man meat and the male fear of busting a nut before contact with the hairy love cave has been established. Sex is fraught with danger.
Some adolescents respond by excessively masturbating, others conquer the fear of their first sexual encounters by turning to booze and drugs, and some just fuck everything in sight. A few, though, decide to ignore sex all together.
Dawn is one of these people. In order not to deal with her burgeoning sexuality, she decides to suppress it by committing herself to a life of chastity. She won’t have sex until her wedding night. She’s going to remain ‘pure’.
Now this might sounds like madness to some. You might marry someone with a micropenis, or someone with a cunt-splittingly huge dong. Or they might not be able to get it up or they might need you to dress as a Cardinal in order to achieve orgasm. Surely you should try before you buy. But no, Dawn lectures children on the benefits of purity. Apparently virginity is a special gift and you shouldn’t give it to anyone. That’s true enough, but building sex up to giant proportions is enough to drive someone mad. It’s not something to be frightened of. After all, it’s not like you’ve got teeth in your twat.
Oh wait, Dawn does. Not that she knows it, though. Hell, she doesn’t even know what a vagina looks like.
There’s a scene early in the film where the kids are learning about sexual reproductive organs. The teacher has no problem talking about the penis, but he recoils at talking about the vagina. And the pictures of the vagina in the textbooks are censored by a foil sticker. The very notion that we’re protecting children by keeping them ignorant is suitably mocked in Teeth. The best protection is education – teenagers should know all the facts.
But alas Dawn doesn’t know anything about sex and even admonishes herself for fantasising about a boy and for being tempted to masturbate. ‘Purity, purity,’ she mutters to herself. Doesn’t she know that there’s a beast between her legs?
Teeth isn’t a particularly coherent film, but if it does have a point it’s that bad things happen when teenagers either rush into sex or if they don’t educate themselves. For instance, Dawn’s half-brother seems to spend all day banging his girlfriend, and he prefers to do it up the arse. This kind of rampant sexuality has all kinds of negative consequences. But at the same time, Dawn’s head in the sand mentality isn’t healthy either. It means that when she finally meets a boy she likes, she isn’t able to deal with the situation and bad things happen.
Of course, Teeth takes things to an extreme. Dawn doesn’t just find a boy and then gets a little pissed off when he tries to look down her knickers. No, she finds a boy who decides to attack her. She’s attracted a rapist. But as dark as the scene sounds, it’s played for laughs. ‘I haven’t jerked off since Easter!’ yells the boy as he forces himself on her in a cave. You see what happens when you bottle things up? Tsk, tsk. But although the boy’s reaction to her plea for self-control is a little over the top, so is her response to his illegal entry. She bites his cock off…with her vagina. And then we have a hilarious moment where the two scream at each one – the girl because she didn’t realise she had teeth and the boy because, well, his cock has left his body.
Following this encounter, Dawn goes home, not really sure of what happened. But upon her return there’s a brilliant one-liner. ‘There’s dinner if you want a bite,’ says one of her parents. ‘I ate,’ is Dawn’s reply. That made me chuckle like only a brilliant one-liner can.
And there’s also a wonderful visual gag. Dawn still isn’t really sure what happened and goes back to the cave to see if she really did castrate her boyfriend. At first she doesn’t see anything, but then she finds a piece of her boyfriend’s cock being eaten by crabs. Got crabs? Yeah, unprotected sex is murder.
Another hilarious scene is when Dawn goes to see her gynaecologist. He’s a right sleazy bastard and states that, seeing as this is her first visit, she probably doesn’t know what to expect. Taking advantage of this, he sees her without a female nurse present and he even begins fingering her without gloves on. Cue some amusingly skeezy dialogue where he tells her to breath through the pain and where he comments on how tight she is. But my favourite bit is when he tells her to relax. It’s the way he says it. It’s like the word is split into two: ‘Re-lax’. It has the coldly condescending tone that only men can manage.
But Dawn gets her own back on the man and bites the doctor’s fingers off. But not before he drags her around the room for a bit, unable to free himself from her nether regions. And then once he’s free and his fingers are on the floor, he repeatedly shouts, ‘Vagina dentata!’ Oh my god, it’s true! Women do have teeth!
We’re told that vagina dentata is a common myth and that it’s up to a male hero to come in and break the female’s power. But there isn’t such a hero here. We just have pathetic, sleazy man after pathetic, sleazy man, and when Dawn finally meets a seemingly decent guy and safely has sex with him, he turns out to be a scumbag and she snips his knob off. Finding a decent man is hell these days!
But the dick-snipping hilarity peaks when Dawn fucks her half-brother. You see, he’s had the hots for her since they were children and Dawn gets a little mad at him when he fails to give a shit about their mother dying. So to get revenge, she has sex with him and then castrates him. And this leads to many wonderful images. The first is the image of Dawn releasing the hacked cock out of her vagina – it goes ‘plonk’ on the floor. And then after this we have the shot of the boy’s dog picking up the severed penis in its mouth. The boy gasps and tells him to drop it, but instead the dog gobbles the dick up, leaving just the head on the floor. And this leads to the final wonderful image – the shot of a sad head lying on the floor with a bolt running through it – damn Prince Albert made that part inedible.
So unfortunately no one gets to break this girl’s power. But then that’s kind of the point. None of these men are worthy of Dawn. They’re all just trying to use her. And so therefore they can hardly complain when she bites.
And so while the film rightly mocks the trend for young people to devote themselves to a life of chastity, it also rallies against misogyny. You don’t have to wait until you get married before you give yourself to someone, but you have to make sure that the person is worthy of your affections.
