#the movie in question is pretty woman it's free to watch on tubi and it's very bad

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Lucius drew a penis. And we got to see it. There was a whole cock on our screens for like 10 seconds. Stede and Ed spent a minute making porn noises about stabbing. Thank you for providing an example of the take im literally arguing against in this post. We may not get a sex scene like that but to say it ""wouldn't fit the tone of the show" is on its face incorrect. This show enjoys both romance and sexual humor. I can imagine multiple sex scenes that would fit either of those descriptions.

I cannot stress enough that this is an M rated romcom you guys. The fourth highest grossing rom com of all time has a scene where Richard Gere preforms cunnilingus on Julia Roberts on top of a piano in 1990. (A movie which OFMD references, by the way, which is part of why I'm bringing it up in this context). Sex scenes are absolutely genre typical. Demand more from your queer rep.

People who are like "oh we won't get a sex scene"

David Jenkins could make streaming history. He's got a middle aged interracial gay couple in an industry that only lets gay men fuck when they're twinks and even then barely. Why wouldn't he? My only hope is that they don't show us Ed's cock so that I can keep being a trans Ed truther. I might not get that. There is a real danger of them making my little headcannon canon non compliant by giving us a full frontal

[horrorlad]

Horrorlad Reviews: The Dentist (1996)

Or at least, like, talks about it a bunch. 

Boy was I overthinking my first real Horror Lad post! It was going to be Grave Encounters, but that will have to wait, because I got insomnia and decided to rewatch a movie I hadn’t seen seen since I was 14, which wound up being the perfect opportunity to write out a post!

Let’s talk about The Dentist!

So, The Dentist is a 1996 movie starring Corbin Bernsen. It was directed by Brian Yuzna (one of the producers of Re-Animator, he also directed the 1989 body horror film Society which I haven’t seen, though a cursory image search tells me I need to add to my watch list immediately).

Anyway, The Dentist is about a teethsman who catches his wife giving some other guy a BJ and gets so grossed out about it that he has a nervous breakdown about, uh, how dirty mouths are, I guess? He loses his absolute shit (though he didn’t seem to have it all that together to begin with; this guy’s Jack Torrance is way more Kubrick than King), and we the audience get to tag along for all the wacky fun.

Full disclosure: I can’t give an unbiased review of this movie. I watched it several times in high school, then completely forgot about it for ten years, until tonight. There’s too much nostalgia wrapped up in it.

That said, upon rewatching it, I am in LOVE with the structure of it as a film. You know how, some movies, you can tell that the people behind the scenes are having a blast? This is one of those movies. The structure of the shots vary wildly, and I suspect that there was not one tripod or stabilizer on that set. The makeup and effects are fun, every actor has an opportunity to shine at least once, and the pacing is totally bonkers. I will note, however, that for a slasher movie the confirmed death count is pretty low, AND most of the murders are less dentistry-related than you might expect. Still, it’s a good time, and right now it’s available to watch for free (with commercials) on Tubi, which is pretty sweet!

Read on for the content warnings and spoilers. In the meantime, I give The Dentist 3.5 tanks of nitrous oxide (use with caution).

Content warnings and plot synopsis below the cut.

Content Warnings

Also, I don’t really know what to classify this one as, but there is a lot of “ick” factor to this movie — rotting teeth, sludge, etc. If you’re easily squicked out by that sort of stuff, I’d proceed with caution.

Dental torture (and how!) – it’s basically the whole movie, folks.

Sexual assault – multiple instances, including a character having their head forced down while giving oral sex (in a daydream), and another character being assaulted while on nitrous oxide.

Spousal abuse (physical and emotional) – again, there’s a lot of this.

Child abuse – A young child has their gums stabbed by the dentist.

Animal abuse – a dog is shot offscreen.

--------------------------------------

Okay, spoiler time!

Whoo boy, here we go!

I have no idea why I watched this movie so much as a teen. Probably because it was free on FearNet (remember FearNet?) and I would watch just about anything.

Watching it as an adult, my first thought is… man this is weirdly paced. My second thought is that there’s a lot more non-dental-related murders than I would have expected, but we’ll come back to that.

So, our hero(?) is a dentist, and we meet him at the beginning of a framing device, miming dentistry and offering to tell us about his story. The bulk of the movie is then a flashback about how he got to where he is, interspersed with his monologuing or whatever. We meet him and his wife (who are a straight couple in a movie and thus required to completely hate one another) on their anniversary, a fact which becomes clear while he’s in the middle of throwing a fit about his laundry.

Pictured: a totally hinged man. Nothing unhinged going on here, no sir.

At any rate, he gets all suspicious after an interaction with the pool guy, and catches his wife having an affair with the guy. He continues framing-device-monologuing about decay and the world being filthy and all that, daydreams about assaulting his wife and murdering the pool boy, etc. He follows the pool guy to the neighbor’s house, acts all weird, shoots a dog — your basic Tuesday.

Eventually, he winds up at the office, starts hallucinating, assaults a couple of patients, and finally calls an early end to the day (self care is important). We get this delightful (in a heavy-handed sort of way) scene that keeps cutting back and forth between him setting out spooky dental tools and his wife getting dressed for the big anniversary surprise he’s has planned, and that’s when things really start to go haywire.

Okay.

So like.

I get that he’s a dentist.

I get that he’s a dentist whose whole shtick is having the themed exam rooms (though why we have aaaalll these rooms for a bunch of hygienists and one dentist is a little beyond me).

But you mean to tell me that this dude’s special anniversary surprise for his wife was to show her his new, opera-themed dental exam room?

“Oh, honey… you really, really shouldn’t have…”

Like, I know he’s settled on a revenge plot by this point, but I still definitely believe that this guy was legitimately planning the entire time to show his wife his fancy new dental suite as an anniversary surprise. Not to be that guy, but no wonder she was having an affair.

Honestly though, I love this scene. I love the camera PoV shots as he shows off the dental suite, I love the excessive gesturing with his left hand. I love how the scene starts off with his point-of-view of her, and then transitions into her point-of-view of him, cut with those big beautiful teeth-yanking shots. It’s ridiculous.

And then, they get home, he has some monologuing about the pool, etc.

Next scene, it’s the next day, some cops come to ask questions about the murdered dog, his wife is out back on a pool chair with her giant sunhat covering her face (the way normal, totally-not-drugged people hang out by the pool) while the pool guy does his pool guy stuff. Eventually the cops leave, yadda yadda yadda, the pool guy scoops the wife’s tongue out of the pool, he sees how fucked up she is, the dentist murders the shit out of him. It’s beautiful.

Don’t you love it when you finish your to-do list first thing in the morning?

The end.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Somehow, there’s still almost half a movie left.

This movie starts with this dude fighting with his wife, catching his wife cheating with the pool guy, hallucinating his wife’s nasty mouth on everyone, etc. You’d think that, with his wife tortured all to shit and the pool guy dead, the movie would have wrapped up.

I mentioned before that the pacing of the movie is weird, which it is. I mean, he has his “oop guess I’m evil now” scene on his way to work the next day, which basically means that just over half of this movie is the origin story. It could be longer, with the big climactic nonsense taking up the last quarter or so. It could be shorter, with him freaking out about his wife, losing his shit, and having a proper dental rampage. Instead, The Dentist flies in the face of conventional story structure.

But this man is a busy man. He’s a dentist, damn it.

He has to get back to work!

Things are happening fast now, let’s get condensed.

We go back to work, he pulls some malpractice shit on that lady whose dog he shot yesterday, then strangles Jessica-the-hygienist (I think that’s her job) when she calls him on it. Later, a man from the IRS comes in and uses the dentist’s shady tax junk to get free dental work which is, uh, inadvisable. IRS man, Marvin Goldblum, starts talking about our dentist’s wife (and about how unhinged shiksas are in bed, in case we somehow we didn’t piece together that he’s an awful Jewish caricature), and I’m sure the rest of his appointment goes totally normally.

Get a guy who looks at you like this.

Meanwhile, the cops are definitely onto him regarding the murder of that dog (after all, murdering dogs is THEIR turf). They go to his house, where he left the body of the pool guy he murdered just laying around outside for anyone to find (which they do). Then they go upstairs and find his wife, who is alive but so fucked up.

Back at the office, Karen-the-other-hygienist, looking for her coworker who got murdered earlier, stumbles upon the very fucked up IRS dude. We get to listen to the dentist give a little monologue about how grossed out he is that his wife put some dude’s “dirty, rotten… in her mouth!” before he injects air into a vein in Karen-the-other-hygienist’s neck to kill her.

Next up, this girl who has been waiting for two days to get her braces off gets called back. She’s adorable and chipper, so this, of course, can only go well. When’s the last time you had your dentist pull a gun on you?

Our scrappy youngster runs off, and he gives chase (we find that Mr. Goldblum’s jaw elongation procedure is going well by the way), before eventually letting her go after she promises to take very, very good care of her teeth.

After all, he’s got his next job to get to.

Let’s go teach dental students the importance of pulling out everyone’s teeth!

Yeeep, he’s a teacher! And after he shoots one of his students while hallucinating, the cops show up, resulting in the slowest chase scene any movie has ever had (I mean the dude is literally just briskly walking down the hall and he still gets away from them). Anyway, the dentist winds up in an auditorium where a woman is practicing her opera singing. The dentist is entranced by this (we know he loves opera from that scene with his wife earlier) and reaches out to the singer, but he hallucinates his wife’s hecked up face on her and drops to his knees, presumably to have the rest of his nervous breakdown. The cops… uh… well, they just kinda stand around looking disapprovingly at him while he sits on the floor. And that’s… that’s it, I guess?

“Nah, let him rest, he’s had a big day.” 

 In our final scene, we have some orderlies at his new mental institution drag him down for his regular appointment, where his wife (who I guess is a dentist now) starts drilling at his teeth. This may or may not be a hallucination. It probably doesn’t matter.

Wow. That certainly was a film.

Alright, so, I’ve been typing up my thoughts as I watch, and I think I’ve figured out what I like about this movie, that had me coming back to it over and over as a youngster. There are some movies that just look fun to film, and this is one of them. A number of the shots are really charming, for lack of a better word. There’s the anniversary scene with his wife I mentioned before, but so many others — this movie plays around with point of view, extreme close-ups, some very fun effects used to indicate the hallucinations… there’s even a sideways shot of one of the cops coming down the stairs. I seem to have a real fondness for that sort-of manic, anything-goes approach to filming. Related side note: is there a single steady shot on this whole film? I’m beginning to doubt it.

Corbin Bernsen does a great job. I mean, all the actors do, really, but he is something else. Like, I can’t think offhand of many actors who could successfully take the character “dentist in bad marriage has a nervous breakdown because his wife gives someone else a blow job and it grosses him out; goes on torturemurder spree” without overacting to the point of distraction. “What are you talking about, this dude’s hammier than Easter dinner,” you say. Now, I get the urge here, but I have to disagree; Bernsen plays a fantastic Emasculated White Guy Throwing A Fit.

That picture I posted up there, after the bit about the laundry argument? A dude who makes that face over the idea of wearing the wrong cuff links to work is at most twelve seconds away from completely losing his shit at any given moment. And the dude’s anniversary surprise for his wife was to show off his new, opera-themed dental exam room; none of this behavior seems too off the wall for that character. Granted, I haven’t seen the sequel yet, and the image searches do suggest that our dear dentist is about to use his well-cared-for teeth to chew the hell out of some scenery in The Dentist 2, but in this movie? I’m just saying it’s not an unbelievable portrayal.

Disgruntled white dudes aside, the rest of the cast seems to have a fun time too. Shout out to the receptionist literally sobbing over what a great dentist this guy is (stunning work). If nothing else, stop by for wee baby Mark Ruffalo before he was famous. It’s adorable.

LOOK AT HIM.

ALL THAT SAID, I have to state again how surprised I am by the sheer number of not-dental-related murders! Like, by my count, this guy commits a hefty amount of malpractice, but for a guy on a torturemurder spree, he sure does seem to keep his torture and his murder fairly separate. Let’s tally it:

I’m tired, let’s wrap this up. The Dentist is a fun movie about a dude who loses his shit, does some dental torture, does some murder, does ZERO dental torturemurders, and then just kinda tuckers himself out and sits down. It’s a big silly mess, and I love it.

Tortures: six

The kid at the beginning, the lady he sexually assaults (it counts), his wife (not dead), that lady whose dog he shot, Marvin the IRS guy (alive when last we see him), and the person at the dental school near the end.

Murders: three people, one dog.

The dog (shot), the pool guy (knifed), Jessica-the-hygienist (strangled), Karen-the-other-hygienist (air injected into artery), and that’s… it..? He does shoot that person at the dental school, but it doesn’t appear to be a fatal wound, and Marvin the IRS guy was alive when we saw him last.

Torturemurders: HECKIN’ ZERO.

Zero! None of the tortures are murdered, and nobody he murders is tortured! What the heck kind of slasher dentist doesn’t even kill people via dentistry? No wonder everyone looks down on him at the end.

Alright, first post written. I’m going to bed.