Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 7.0 | 18/32 | Body Horror 4/4
We start in your typical small town, with two giant nuclear reactors in the background. So, like Springfield?
Two kids, Dawn and Brad, play in a kiddy pool. Brad’s father, Bill (Lenny Von Dohlen), encourages Brad to play nicely with Dawn. Dawn’s mother, Kim (Vivienne Benesch), encourages Bill to go easy on him. So, Brad pulls out his penis and asks to see what Dawn has. Brad yelps in pain and shows his finger — the tip barely hanging on.
Cut to the present day, where Dawn (Jess Weixler) gives a chastity talk to a group of kids. The kids all wear promise rings to keep their virginity until marriage, in which you trade it for a wedding ring.
Brad (John Hensley), meanwhile, is a typical piece-of-shit teenager, listening to death metal, smoking weed, and shooting shit with a pellet gun. He will only have anal sex with his girlfriend, Melanie (Nicole Swahn), despite her encouraging him to try vaginal intercourse. He doesn’t remember what happened to his finger, but he believes Dawn did it.
In a sex education class, the teacher can’t bring himself to say, “vagina,” and the school has covered the anatomy diagram of the vagina in their books with a sticker. Dawn tries to explain the vagina’s “natural modesty,” but the kids will not let her finish her thought.
Dawn meets Toby (Hale Appleman of The Magicians fame), who just moved to town. She sees his promise ring (and cute face) and falls for him. They and their friends, Gwen and Phil, hang out regularly, but Dawn feels temptation creep in. At night, she fantasizes about marrying Toby, then guilts herself when she gets too close to touching her “natural modesty.”
One day, they decide to go swimming together at the swimming hole. Dawn tries to maintain a boundary, but Toby pushes. He SAs her, and her “natural modesty” kicks in, biting off his penis.
Thus begins Dawn’s traumatic journey to understanding her body.
It's true!! Vagina dentata! Vagina dentata!
The first thirty minutes hit close to home for me, having grown up a devout conservative Christian. I had a promise ring for most of high school but lost it on a youth group beach trip. We had abstinence-only sex education, and I prided myself on speaking up about how unreliable condoms are and whatever other nonsense they told us.
Also, I’m happy to see the family watching The Black Scorpion and The Gorgon.
I’m not shocked that folks treat this as a feminist film — critics and audiences alike have thrown “feminism” at nearly every rape revenge movie.
It becomes problematic when Ryan’s first rape of Dawn gets reinforced as being the actions of a “sexually attentive partner,” thus making the message, “so long as you give her pills and finger her first, she’ll like it when you rape her.”
Also, her comfort with castrating men after two times removes the “self-defense” angle, and Dawn merely becomes the misogynist trope of the castrating woman made literal.
I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s satisfaction from seeing shitty dudes get their dicks torn off. But we live in a post-Lorena Bobbitt world, where John Bobbitt received the full attention of the police to find and surgically reattach his now-functioning penis. The penis claims the headlines, not the rape and abuse Lorena endured that motivated it.
Thank you to Daniel Sheppard, whose writing helped me formulate my thoughts here.