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Saturday, January 26, 2013

The Tooth Fairy


Why do we live in a world where there are 2 slasher movies about the Tooth Fairy? Is there something scary about her that passed me by? Or are we just running out of scary horror villains to feature in movies? Ponder those questions as we watch The Tooth Fairy...and prepare for SPOILERS!

The story begins in a peaceful small town in California, all the way back in 1949. 2 boys, Donny and his anonymous friend....let's call him "Fifi Kittenscrotum", for now...find themselves standing in front of the home of "The Tooth Fairy", a reclusive woman who supposedly gives the local children toys in exchange for their last baby teeth. Kittyscrote is afraid of her, but little Donny really wants the new bike the Tooth Fairy promised him.

When he enters the house, Donny demands to see the bike first. He sees it, and agrees to let her pull his tooth out with a string. He ties the string to his tooth, she yanks it out, and the pain sends him rushing to the door. The Tooth Fairy runs after the boy, and stabs him several times, splashing the door and windows with blood. His friend just runs away.

Now we're in modern times, and we meet a little girl named Pam, and her mother Darcy. They stop for gas, and to ask for directions to the nearest bed-and-breakfast. Both requests somehow provoke the redneck gas jockeys into nearly raping Darcy, and she and her daughter barely escape intact. That makes perfect sense!

Next, a guy named Pete moves some furniture. He hears a car pull up and rushes outside, expecting to see Darcy and Pam. Instead, there's a cab, and a woman named Star Roberts. I wonder if she's any relation to Star Jones. She's supposedly studying to be a vet, but she looks like a hairstylist from Vegas.

Star spots some hummingbirds, and shows off her knowledge about animals. Then a shirtless werewolf named Jacob shows up, and...wait, no, it's a local kid who does odd jobs, and his name is Bobby. Then Darcy pulls up, and she tells Pete about her scary encounter at the gas station, while she, Pete and Pam unpack their stuff.

Pete tells Darcy that the guys who tried to attack her have a personal grudge against him, because he found them living as squatters on the property he brought, and he had them removed via court order. Oh, and now we know them as the Hammonds. Yay!

Out behind the house, Pam finds several dusty antiques, and a little girl named Emma. Emma's a ghost, which is immediately obvious to anyone who has ever seen The Boogeyman, Darkness Falls, or any film since 1931. Pam, of course, remains clueless. But hey, she and Emma bond over the antique bicycle, so it's all good.

In the closest thing this movie has to a plot twist, Bobby puts on a shirt and does some carpentry. The girls ride past him on the fixed bike, and he looks up...but only sees Pam. She and her new dead best friend ride through the woods, and Pam discovers that Emma has never heard of Harry Potter, when they stop the bike at a "haunted" river.

Emma then warns Pam about the legend of the Tooth Fairy. After giving her the bloody details about the killings and the Tooth Fairy's disfigurement, Emma tells Pam that she has to get home before dark. As soon as Pam leaves, Emma fades away. Almost immediately after that, Pam is ambushed by the Tooth Fairy, and falls off of the bike. The fall knocks her last baby tooth out.

She returns home, moments after her parents wonder where she vanished to, and she shows them her tooth. That night, Pam tells her mother about her new friend, and asks her if witches are real. Darcy promises that witches aren't real, but lets Pam sleep with a light on, to make her feel safer.

Star brings one of her textbooks out to the front porch, where she finds shirtless Bobby working out. Her version of flirting involves reading a passage about pigeons to the young man. Bobby reveals that he wants to study electrical engineering when he goes to college. Then they smile and make googly eyes at each other.

The Tooth Fairy sneaks into Pam's room, and the young girl wakes up and screams. Pam runs out of the room, looking for her mother, and goes out to the porch, where she is assaulted again! It's not the witch, it's a kooky neighbor named Mrs. MacDonald. She warns the family that they will all die if they don't leave the house immediately. Then she leaves.

Bobby finds a wood chipper and repairs it, then tests it out with a board. As soon as he finishes, the Tooth Fairy sends him through the shredder, in gory fashion. From the house, Pam hears his screams and wakes up her parents. Pete explores the barn, and finds what's left of Bobby in the wood chipper. He calls the sheriff, while Darcy tries to keep their daughter calm.

Pete admits to Darcy that the death has him re-thinking the plan to run a B'n'B. She gives him a pep talk, but the next morning they find that the car was stolen. They visit the sheriff to report the theft, while Pam wanders away and runs into a certain scary lady wearing a red hood. Does this family have a streak of bad luck, or what?

Anyway, Pam somehow slips past her, and has another encounter with Emma. Emma tells her that she can protect herself from the witch if she can scare her away with her own reflection. Yeah, I'm sure that it'll be that easy.

At the sheriff's office, Pete and Darcy don't get much help. They leave, and miraculously find their car attached to a tow truck owned by the Hammonds. The Hammonds claim that they took the car because Darcy never paid for the gas she pumped, and then mention that the sheriff is related to them.

After a short fight, Pete gets the car back. When he and Darcy arrive back at the house, there's a couple waiting to greet them: Pete's old buddy Cole(a shifty, conniving musician) , and a groupie he's screwing, named  Cherise. They claim that they came to help Pete move in and fix up the place, but Cole later admits that he really just visited to ask for an $800 loan.

Later that same evening, the Hammonds sneak onto the property to steal Pete's car again. They also supposedly hired a female friend to help them by distracting the family during the intrusion. Gee, I wonder if she'll be dressed like a certain Tooth Fairy, and then folks will then die after a series of misunderstandings?

Cherise holds a seance, or a prayer ritual, or whatever the heck she's doing. Behind her, the bedroom door opens, and someone sneaks in. When Cherise finally sees her, she tries to escape through an open window, but the Tooth Fairy pulls her back into the room, then slams her back against a wall. Using a nail gun, TF pins the poor woman's hands to the wall, then nails her feet down as well. She finishes her off by leaving gaping holes where her stomach and face used to be located.

Cole and Pete hear her screams, and find the messy corpse pinned to the wall, At the same time, Pam has a close encounter with the corpse of the fake witch, then is nearly grabbed by the real one. Pam gets on her bike to escape, and screams for Emma to save her.

As she rides out to the woods, her parents try to find her in a truck. Emma appears, and tells Pam that they have to find TF'S tooth collection, to free the spirits of all of her victims. Meanwhile, Pete and Darcy visit the crazy lady next door, who tells them that they must burn the witch twice to permanently kill her.

Then we arrive at what is probably the funniest scene in the film. The Hammonds decide to set their plan in motion, unaware that the Tooth Fairy is lurking somewhere close to them. She castrates and slaughters one of the brothers, and the other one quickly finds him and demands, "What is your dick doing over there?" And then he gets killed as well. And the Oscar goes to...

Emma and Pam arrive at a graveyard, where the graves are filled with kids killed by the Tooth Fairy. She wanders out again, and her parents find her. She takes them to the graveyard, and asks Emma to show herself. The ghost makes a jar move, and tells Pam that adults can't see her. Emma can't move the jar again, but the other ghost-children use their collective power to make the jar move through the air, smashing it and releasing the candle inside. Pam's parents are convinced.

Cole and Star have a heart-to-heart chat, and remain the 2 most useless characters in the film. Cole then sinks lower, by screwing Star after recently discovering his last girlfriend's mangled body. Luckily, the Tooth Fairy decides to intervene. She kills Cole first, by slamming an ax into his neck/shoulder region several times, while pinning him face down on the bed.

Star then re-enters the bedroom, topless, and fails to realize that Cole is dead. She comes closer, lifts a large pillow off of his head, and finds that the pillow was covering just the neck-stump where Cole's head used to be. Then she faints, falling face-first into his bloody shoulders. Heh, that'll be fun to wake up on.

When they return to the house, Pete tells his wife and daughter to rescue the others, while he gets some fuel from the garage to burn the witch. Twice. Because that'll be a piece of cake, of course.

Cole's severed head comes rolling down the stairs, just as Pam and Darcy start to dry out from the heavy downpour of rain outside, Pete rushes in with the gasoline, and finds his friend's corpse, with Star still passed out on top of him. She wakes up and screams like a banshee. Pete tries to calm her down, then they rejoin the others.

The Tooth Fairy enters the house to grab Pam's tooth, and Pam leaps out of the bed holding a mirror in front of her like a shield. The witch runs away, but Pam chases after her, still trying  to hurt her with different mirrors. Then the Tooth Fairy meets Darcy, also holding up a large mirror. They force the witch to chase Pam outside.

As soon as the Tooth Fairy gets onto the front porch, Pete drenches her in gasoline, and then sets her on fire. Pam grabs the tooth collection when she drops it, and the witch chases her, with the flames gradually disappearing. With her face exposed, the witch looks like a cross between one of the hillbillies in the Wrong Turn franchise, and some of the early faces of Jason in the Friday the 13th films. Not terrible, but not very real-looking, either.

Anyway, she corners Pam once again, and Pete pours more fuel on the killer from behind. Pam places the tooth-box on Emma's tombstone, and the witch is set ablaze a second time when she goes to grab her treasure. As the Tooth Fairy burns for a second time, the ghost-children rise up and surround her, beating her body with sticks, and clubs. Then, at Emma's command, each child takes back the tooth that belonged to them, and they ascend to Heaven.

As the family walks away together, Pam runs back to the body one last time, and gets her baby tooth back. After they leave, the monster rises into the air, screams, then flies away. The final scene shows them selling the house, and saying goodbye to Star. They all drive away, and a closeup shot of an upstairs window reveals that the Tooth Fairy still haunts the property. THE END

Well, the kills were entertainingly nasty, I guess. The big flaw in this movie was that they couldn't seem to decide if the Tooth Fairy was a living killer or a supernatural one. I mean, one minute,she's teleporting and floating from place to place...the next moment, she's using the front door and grabbing weapons from the garage to kill folks with. At least with Darkness Falls, the killer was most definitely a vengeful ghost, no matter where she was. Eh, I'd say it's not quite a 3...let's give The Tooth Fairy 2.5 out of 5.

And what did this Tooth Fairy teach me?

-That a monster called The Tooth Fairy prefers to kill most folks in ways that have nothing to do with their legend or name.

-Ghosts just want to socialize.

-Rednecks take forever to plot revenge, then die with incredible ease.

No idea what my next SAW will be. I'm kind of winging it here, so it gets pretty random. See you sometime in the next seven days!