Star rating: 3/5

Love hurts. It hurts a bunch of times in this movie, and it hurts with a vengeance. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is a contemporary update of the vagina dentata myth, a popular folk legend about women with toothed vaginas that crops up in various societies across the world. Cultural critics believe it reflects a fundamental fear of female sexuality. In Lichtenstein’s hands, it’s the premise for some of the smartest and sickest schlock horror to emerge from the indie film world in years. Yes, in this unrestrained gore fest, love hurts, bleeds and sprays like a busted faucet head.

The story centers on Dawn (Jess Weixler), a teenager in small-town USA who leads the local abstinence pledge group. One day, Dawn and her friends go on a picnic, when a new guy from school cuts her off from the rest of the group and forces himself on her. Dawn then discovers that, down below, she isn’t quite like the other girls, and the new guy learns the painful price for unlawful entry. From there, follows a string of first upsetting, then vindicating, sexual encounters for Dawn, who leaves behind a trail of streaming stumps and weepy man-boys in this cruel feminist fantasy that could only have been dreamt up by, well, a man.

Viewers must be warned that the film is unapologetically graphic, and there’s enough severed shlong in this movie to put you off sausages for weeks. Yet, at the film’s core lies a moral tale about the deficiencies of the abstinence pledge, and the trouble with small-town hostility toward sex-ed and evolution. Such aversion to biology and human nature leaves people in the dark about fundamental issues, and you have to ask yourself, do the scenarios that play out in the film differ that greatly from the depraved imaginings of a confused, uneducated ignoramus?