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RATING:   
Part morality tale, part tongue-in-cheek B-movie satire, this indie feature by writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein — son of the late pop artist Roy Lichtenstein — is a squeamishly-funny, grossly-bloody horror-comedy.
Splicing elements of 1950s monster movie madness with fearsome folklore, Teeth is about every man's ultimate nightmare: A killer kitty — and we are not talking about a cat here.
Goody-goody teenager Dawn is the leader of her school's purity group.
Little does she know what is lurking below her belt and inside her pants — until a dude tries to rape her and loses, uh, his member.
Faced with the gory consequences of her sexual experimentation, Dawn has to come to grips with her unique (and bloodthirsty) anatomy and the horny men who also want to do the same.
Actress Jess Weixler (winner of the special dramatic jury prize for acting at last year's Sundance Film Festival) plays Dawn to the hilt and her nuanced performance of the wide-eyed victim becoming an empowered female is delightful.
It cannot be easy playing a girl with a viciously-toothed vagina but she balances nudge-wink humour with earthy believability.
You can't help but root for her character who, as the embodiment of the "vagina dentate" myth, is interestingly both heroine and villain.
And while the movie pokes fun at sexual abstinence, its underlying moral also ironically ends up promoting it.
But it is these incongruencies that make this audacious debut such an original.
Yes, it pushes the boundaries of bad taste but that should not surprise you — after all, you have bought tickets to a film in which a vajayjay is the villain.
This movie bites. But it hurts so good. - TODAY/sh
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