Wow! What a Halloween that was! I can't even begin. Just.... just wow!
Hope yours was just as exciting and you've still got plenty of fun - size Snickers to eat for breakfast. I also hope you're finding a lot of good deals on scary stuff off the clearance racks.
I've decided to go ahead and keep this blog active even though I've closed up my menagerie of evil souls for the year. After all, now that Halloween is over, the pressure is off. I don't have to pander to those looking exclusively for the best of the newest horror movies on the most popular streaming service. I can dig a little deeper and talk about movies people haven't thought about for a while. I can even review stuff on Hulu.
Just not this week.
This week's movie streams on Netflix and it's called Teeth.
This 2007 film by writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein tells the story of a teen girl named Dawn (Jess Weixler) who discovers in a most traumatic way that her pet cooter bites.
Dawn's one of those confused but well-meaning youth group kids that believes in sexual abstinence before marriage. She volunteers her time talking to younger kids about saving their precious gifts until their wedding nights. She even wears a red, rubber ring on her left hand to remind herself that she's married to Jesus until someone replaces it with a gold band.
Disgusting, right? But who can blame her? The lack of useful information available about her lady bits borders on criminally negligent. Her health textbook even has a giant sticker covering up a diagram of the vagina, per school board regulations.
That's not to say she doesn't think about sex, though. After all, she is becoming a woman, and she has the hots for Tobey (Hale Appleman), the new boy in her youth group. As they talk constantly about not having sex, they find they have a lot in common, like virginity, except not Tobey.
Tobey has trouble with what words mean in general. Take the word "no", for instance. Dawn tells him no when a date in the woods gets too heated for her liking, but he continues, and that's when they both discover that Dawn has a rare mutation known as vagina dentata, which means exactly what you think it does. Tobey is righteously dismembered, and Dawn finds she has some soul searching to do.
Losing your virginity is tough enough, but to be raped, and learn your lady business is armed with flesh-mangling incisors is a lot to handle in one afternoon. Dawn's crisis of faith that follows is only natural, as is the trail of severed heads she leaves in her wake, even if they're not the kind of heads you're used to seeing roll in a horror film.
Some eggheads might say Teeth is an exploitative pile of cheap gags and gross-outs. I prefer to think of it as a coming - of - age tale, an empowering allegory about the struggles a young woman typically endures when coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality, but I'll put the Oprah - speak aside and let you decide for yourself.
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