The Tooth Fairy (2006)
- Andrew Smith
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
"The childhood fairy tale becomes your worst nightmare"
Plot
When twelve year-old Pamela goes on vacation with her family to a bed and breakfast, the girl who lives next door tells her the true story of the Tooth Fairy. Many years earlier, the evil Tooth Fairy has since slaughtered a countless number of children after they lost the last of their baby teeth. Unfortunately for Pamela, she has just lost her last baby teeth and the Tooth Fairy returns to continue her slaughter.
Review
Picture something for me for a second. You're a kid. You're maybe six or seven years old and you've just lost a tooth – a huge milestone in your life. There's a little bit of blood, maybe a little bit of pain, but mostly you're just excited because you know the drill. You take this tiny, jagged piece of your own skeleton, tuck it carefully under your pillow, and you go to sleep. And then the expectation, the actual promise adults make to children, is that while you are completely unconscious and vulnerable in the dark, a total stranger is going to sneak into your bedroom. They reach directly under your sleeping head, take your tooth, and leave you some loose change. It is this incredibly beloved childhood tradition. But when you strip away the magic and look at the mechanics of it, it is a literal nighttime home invasion. I'm not sure about you but the story of the Tooth Fairy was always one that puzzled me. Why would a fairy want to take away your old teeth to begin with and why would she only wait until you were asleep before sneaking into your room? Couldn’t she just ring the doorbell and ask for it or rummage through the bins if you threw it out? It’s a story that society has just culturally accepted for years, one which has essentially conditioned children to be perfectly fine with an intruder breaking into their house and looming over their bed, provided the intruder pays for the harvested bone. It's a premise that has just been begging to be twisted into a horror film, adapting mythical comforting characters from our folklore into absolute nightmares – the whole killer Santa trope being the perfect example of taking a figure of comfort and entirely flipping the polarity.
I was looking forward to Darkness Falls when it came out for this very reason, but we all know what a poor showing that turned out to be! Aimed at very much a teenage market, Darkness Falls was a financial success but a critical flop. Why would anyone want a second crack at the whip? Well, someone did and here we have The Tooth Fairy, a slightly different take on the subject matter. Darkness Falls did manage to get one thing right and that was the story of the Tooth Fairy and turning her into an ethereal evil spirit/demon that operated strictly within supernatural rules. Here the film isn't sure what it wants her to be: an evil witch who has lived for centuries, some crazy old woman or just a demented slasher in a hood. I mean if she was a witch, why does she have to feed people into wood chipping machines or chop their hands off with axes? Can't she just use witchcraft or something on them? I'm sounding a bit stupid now, but the script makes me that way by blending three common slasher tropes into one and hoping they fit. It's almost as if they didn't have a clue what to do with the character after the opening scene and thought she should go around killing people - and not even to take their teeth. Most of the people she butchers are totally innocent!
The Tooth Fairy abandons its own established mythology immediately after its historical prologue. It needed the spooky backstory of a witch, but it also needed the kinetic action of a slasher to fill the next eighty minutes of runtime. The narrative demands the Tooth Fairy hunts one specific child, but the home video market demands she slaughters a dozen adults in increasingly creative ways. So, the market wins out over the myth. It's a calculated calculation of what the filmmakers’ specific audience values. The filmmakers know they aren't going to win awards for a cohesive ghost story. They are aiming for the video store crowd who rented the film specifically to see wild, practical gore. So, whilst the villain’s identity makes zero sense, in the context of the bigger picture of market forces, it does. Sadly, that is what you see a lot of in low-budget filmmaking. It doesn’t help The Tooth Fairy that there’s a sub-plot about the main characters having to battle the local hicks too, because one witch/ghost/hooded slasher isn’t enough and you need to have some crazy bumkins to throw a spanner in the works at inappropriate times.
At least the titular character has a lot of fun in killing some of the characters though, including a great scene involving a woodchipper. It feels like an incredibly inefficient, exhausting way for a supernatural entity to operate but this is where The Tooth Fairy really comes into its own and its little moments like this woodchipper scene that make my day when watching low-budget horror films. Something that surprises me and has a bit of zing and zest about it. You know then that the director and writer have aimed the film at a more mature audience instead of opting for the quick buck with the teenage market. The make-up effects are nice and realistic too (read that as practical make-up effects rather than CGI slop) so when someone does meet their unfortunate end in the film, there's as much blood and gore as you would expect. Characters get blasted into walls with nail guns, there are decapitations and even a moment where a very specific, sensitive male appendage is sliced off. Obvious care and attention to detail is given to these sequences so they feel genuinely gruesome, as opposed to just some box ticking exercise.
Acting isn't too bad either, but I must say that I wasn't expecting Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino to show up and my expectations were very low to begin with. You'll have seen the two leads before but might not be sure from where. Chandra West has been in a few Full Moon horror flicks such as some of the Puppet Master sequels and Lochlyn Munro has been in stuff like Dracula 2001, Scary Movie and Freddy Vs Jason. P.J. Soles, slasher royalty having played Linda in the first Halloween film, is on hand now as the local harbinger of doom. They're not new to the genre and perform ably. It's good to see a solid cast for a change but the script lets everyone down so easily. It could have been a solid chiller but it turns out into a rather dull slasher flick. The story is predictable, the pace is slow and plodding at first and there's only one thing you keep watching the film for and that's to see how someone else dies.
Final Verdict
The Tooth Fairy is an average slasher film which has plenty of earnestness about its core attraction – the gore and deaths – but fails to wrap it up in a cohesive story which makes sense. Ultimately, the script's bad decisions let everyone down. It’s a predictable, slow-plotting slasher where you are only watching to see how the next person dies. But the core characters are likeable enough, the Tooth Fairy is busy once she gets going and there’s a general feeling that this would have been more at home in the Eighties amidst the golden age of the slasher.
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The Tooth Fairy Director(s): Chuck Bowman Writer(s): Stephen J. Cannell (teleplay), Corey Strode (teleplay), Cookie Rae Brown (teleplay), Daniel Farrands (story), Carolyn Davis (story) Actor(s): Lochlyn Munro, Chandra West, Steve Bacic, Jianna Ballard, Carrie Fleming, Peter New, Jesse Hutch, Ben Cotton Duration: 89 mins |  |
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