Film / Teeth

And a lot of cowboys are about to sing some very sad songs indeed.

Teeth is a 2007 independently produced black comedy/horror flick about a good-hearted girl whose vagina likes to bite off penises. She discovers her incredible gift one day when her love interest attempts to date rape her. Throughout the movie the audience is treated to very nearly every man in the movie attempting some kind of sexual assault on Dawn, and having his offending appendage(s) bitten off as a result.

A stage musical based on the movie with music and lyrics by Anna K. Jacobs and Michael R. Jackson is premiered off-Broadway in February 2024.

---

This film contains examples of:

• All Abusers Are Male: Even a practicing gynecologist decides to molest Dawn during her check up.
• All Men Are Perverts: Every prominent male in the movie (with the apparent exception of her stepfather) is looking to "score" with Dawn... with or without her consent.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Apparently a child will randomly experience a significant genetic mutation where she will grow giant shark-like teeth (they are explicitly compared to the teeth of some carnivorous fish in the film) in her vagina (which is a good 2 feet from where they should grow) AND the musculature that would be necessary for full control of the biting motion of these teeth AND this whole overly complex system developed wholesale, completely intact in one generation without any subsystems developing first and finally functioning together as a whole after generations of mutation. Behold a movie's application of Richard Goldschmidt's "Hopeful Monster" theory, which is a fancy scientific way to say "Yeah, we're totally BSing you here."
  • Having said that, the film does lampshade how unlikely it would be for this actually to happen. Dawn has a biology class early in the film, and the teacher gives a fairly accurate description of the evolutionary process, mentioning that it's extremely unlikely for a major new bodily function to develop spontaneously. A scene where Dawn looks at the mythology surrounding vagina dentata implies that there was once a time when many women did have teeth down there, but they largely died out after men learned to go after women who weren't likely to bite their penises off during sex, which would presumably make Dawn some sort of evolutionary throwback.
• Asshole Victim: All of Dawn's victims, though reversing the usual pattern in that her first victim initially seems a lot more charming and likable before his rapacious lust gets the better of him and her counter-attack is an instinctive reflex, whereas her later victims are progressively more obnoxious and despicable from the start and her revenge on them is correspondingly much more deliberate each time.
• Bathos: Most likely intentional.
• Black Comedy: Horror imagery mixes rather freely with bad guys getting what could be considered a comedic comeuppance.
• Bloody Hilarious: There's some comedy to be had in watching a bunch of lusty lads get "cut down to size" (so to speak) and turned into Instant Sopranos if you can stomach all the blood.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Brad has some very unsettling feelings about his stepsister. That said, they're Not Blood Siblings, not that it's any less creepy for it.
• Credits Gag: Towards the end of the credits before the special thanks is the disclaimer "No man was harmed during the making of this film." Why are we not entirely convinced?
• Creepy Physical: Dawn is actually molested by her gynecologist when she wants to have her Vagina Dentata examined. The doctor loses four of his fingers as punishment.
• Cursed with Awesome: Having a literal Vagina Dentata is no great shakes, but Dawn does eventually gain control over her teeth and learn how to use them to her advantage.
• Dirty Old Man: The guy with whom Dawn hitches a ride in his car at the end of the film.
• Double Standard: Pointed out by Dawn's classmates on why their anatomy textbook shows the male reproductive organ in all its glorious detail while censoring the picture of the female one. Dawn answers that it's because "girls have a natural modesty."
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Brad's pitbull Mother gets very anxious when Dawn is trying to seduce Brad, however Dawn herself isn't the evil one of the two, but still, he sensed her intentions.
• Fingore: The gynecologist learns the hard way that trying to "test" Dawn's "flexibility" with his hand is a bad idea.
• Flirty Stepsiblings: Brad's crush on Dawn. Stuffed with plenty of abusive creepiness. Dawn doesn't seem to realize this until Brad openly admits it and is disturbed at the idea. Still, she later decides to seduce him for the sole purpose of castrating him.
• Groin Attack: Straight and inverted, as several guys' groins do indeed get attacked... by Dawn's groin. As if to rub it in, two of the severed penises get eaten, one by a crab and the other by a dog.
• Hate Sink: Brad is abusive to his girlfriend and has openly lusted after his stepsister, Dawn, since childhood. When Dawn's mother is dying a slow and painful death, he leaves her to die to have sex with his girlfriend. When his father finally tries to throw him out, he turns the tables on him with a gun and sics a dog on him. When his father asks if he's upset about his mother, he says he doesn't even remember her and just wants to have sex with Dawn.
• Incest-ant Admirer: Dawn's older stepbrother Brad has wanted to have sex with her since they were kids. When he admits this is why he hates his father ("You made her my sister"), everyone including Dawn is shocked. Dawn only ever wanted them to be siblings and Brad is a grade-a Jerkass regardless. By the end, she decides to use her Vagina Dentata to castrate him.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: In a variation, when Dawn's gynecologist is getting his fingers reattached, he just reaches for the anesthesia mask when the surgeon starts asking him how exactly he got them chopped off in the first place.
• Jerkass: Brad in spades; and Ryan, to a (slightly) lesser degree.
• Karma Houdini: Dawn gets no retribution for her actions, even when the victim of her teeth didn't do anything to deserve something as extreme as what they got.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Dawn gradually comes to realize she can deliver this to all of her would-be rapists and molesters.
• Lifetime Movie of the Week: Every prominent male character in the movie (excepting her apparently genuinely caring stepfather) wants to make some kind of indecent assault on Dawn. In just 85 minutes of screen time, she gets sexually abused four separate times by four different guys; then she launches an "assault" of her own on Brad. At the end, it's heavily implied another guy is about to try something indecent with her... and that Dawn is already preparing to make her uniquely devastating counterattack.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: Brad's insistence on only having anal sex is shown to be unsatisfying for his girlfriend Melanie, and he doesn't seem to care for her obvious distaste for it and dismisses her when she suggests they have sex they way she wants for once.
  Melanie: You know, I do have a perfectly good pussy.
  Brad: Oh I'm sure you do.
  Melanie: Well, I do and other boys like it just fine.
  Brad: Well fuck them then.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Contrast Brad's reaction with all the other victims; this may be due to his being stoned at the time.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The only time we ever see a vagina in the movie is a medical book diagram.
• Oh, Crap!: Brad has an almighty instance of this, as he finally realizes just how Dawn severely lacerated one of his fingers when he was a youngster. Said realization comes while he's in the middle of having sex with her.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Brad is a sleazy and perverted misogynist, prone to calling every female in his life a "bitch", including even his mother and his stepsister.
• Psychosexual Horror: The movie is about a teenage girl, Dawn, who discovers she has Vagina Dentata. Because she lives in a universe where for some reason every man wants to get in her pants, willing or not, she's castrating attempted rapists left and right.
• Questionable Consent: Dawn somewhat reluctantly agrees to have sex with Ryan after he plies her with some kind of calming medication (that makes her thinking a bit "fuzzy") and a glass of champagne. While she certainly isn't complaining the next morning, and she didn't actually drink any of that champagne (because the medication made her too "fuzzy" to hang on to the glass), the point remains that she wasn't thinking very clearly; and whether or not Ryan intended the medication to cloud her thinking, his actions the next morning certainly indicate he was bedding her under false pretenses.
• Radiation-Induced Superpowers: It's implied Dawn's "power" is a side-effect of living next door to a nuclear power plant. Dawn's mother's illness is implied to have something to do with this too.
• Rape and Revenge: The expedited version.
• Scare Chord: Used on a folk art picture of Vagina Dentata.
• Sexual Karma: misogynist Brad's taste for doggy-style is presented as satisfying just him and also seems to have been intended as yet another example of his delinquency. It's like Bondage Is Bad, except with from behind instead of bondage. It's implied that his taste for doggy and anal is due to the fact that he tried to molest Dawn when they were kids, but her teeth nearly bit off the tip of his finger, giving him Eurotophobia.
• Shower of Angst: Well, bathtub of angst. See the poster up there?
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Dawn is sweet, naive, pure, religious, and has a close relationship with her parents. Brad is a moody, rebellious, loud, abstinence-hating promiscuous Jerkass who hates and resents his parents. Of course, they're Not Blood Siblings, but the trope applies nonetheless.
• Space Whale Aesop: Don't rape Dawn, or her Vagina Dentata will bite off your dick! Also, don't rape anyone else either. People who aren't Dawn could just use a knife or their regular teeth to do the job.
• Stealth Pun: A crab is shown eating Toby's penis after he attempts to rape Dawn in the cave near a lake they swim in. He gets crabs from sex with Dawn!
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The badly traumatized Dawn runs to her friend Ryan for help and claims to have killed a guy. While calming her down, he manages to talk her into having sex with him. The next day, while having another round in the sack with her, he boasts that he made a bet with his friend that he'd be able to sleep with her. Furious at this betrayal, she bites off his penis. While his skepticism toward her claim of having a Vagina Dentata is rather understandable under the circumstances, angering a girl who's visibly upset over a credible claim she's making that she just killed someone is never a good idea.
  • Brad also counts as well, considering that he found out the hard way about his stepsister's... gift, after he tried to molest her when they were younger. Yet, he thinks absolutely nothing of it when she seduces him. Keep in mind that the incident is implied to have been traumatic enough for him to develop Eurotophobia, but the thought doesn’t seem to strike him until it's way too late to do anything about it.
• Vagina Dentata: The Movie.
• Viewers Are Goldfish: There are many, Many, MANY shots of the power plant Dawn lives near, implying that's how she got her mutation.

---