The Dentist (1996) - Divorce Perhaps Preferred

 

Yes, the wifey might have taken you to the cleaners and fucked the pool guy, but you would have been better off without the murder charges and mental hospital, right? Brian Yuzna's The Dentist (1996) and its sequel were set to leave Shudder so I was like, "What the hell..." I have been trying to determine if the 90s was such a bad decade for horror. The Dentist was made by Yuzna starring Corbin Bernsen, an actor I'm surprised would take on such a rather grotesque role considering his career sort of remained respectable. That he would come back to the role for a sequel with Yuzna is even more surprising. I guess he had fun in the role of psychopathic dentist, Alan Feinstone, performing horrifying teeth pulling, mouth and tongue destruction, bloody drilling, etc. 

This film is every person's worst nightmare delivered on screen if you suffer dentophobia, and Yuzna goes all in, making sure it is realized in grisly detail. Earl Boen's sleazy IRS agent, Marvin Goldblum, has his mouth broken by a device, gurgling with his head quivering, while Alan's assistant, Karen (Patty Toy) finds her boss' patient in the chair with a stretched face. Poor Karen just tries to leave, with Alan holding her head to a table, injecting air from a hypo into her neck...and you see the air traveling through the vein in her neck! Jessica (Molly Hagen), his other assistant, plans to expose him for a very unsettling "hallucinogenic rape" of a model -- he believes she is his betraying wife with her shirt open, tits exposed, hands/arms stretched open to him -- and she, at the very least, just gets strangled with the nylon stockings (the ones he removed from the model he thought was his wife), gasping for air while trying to fight Alan off...at least she doesn't leave this earth, this mortal coil, with mouth/teeth torment and violence. Matt (Stadvec) arrives to find Brooke (Linda Hoffman), Alan's wife, tied to a lawn chair, with her face distorted from all the teeth and tongue violence. He doesn't fare any better when Alan emerges to slash and hack him with a butcher knife until he collapses in a bloody heap. Maybe Brooke's fellatio of Matt was worth it; I guess each viewer must decide.

The face distortion of both Brooke and Marvin is quite a makeup prosthetic certain to be etched into a viewer's memory forever. Gums without teeth, teeth pulled from gums, Alan eventually pulling a gun he shot a dog with, aimed at students in his dentistry class, while cops Ken Foree and Tony Noakes pursue him; the film really follows Alan down his dark path of self-destruction and lets us see inside his decaying psyche as the "filth and rot", the "infection" of Brooke's infidelity gradually drives him insane, revealing rotted teeth and warping faces. One could see that Alan was already tightly-controlling of his wife, expecting perfection, clearly too intense and thin-skinned for his own well being. Those who had followed Yuzna's career aren't shocked by the depths his films will go and The Dentist is no different. The final scene of Brooke smiling with with no teeth while beginning dental surgery on him inside a white padded cell as the camera pulls through a ventilation shaft once again shows Yuzna loves to end on a crazed note. I continue to notice Yuzna's particularly detestable view of the rich. It is in this film as others from the past. 3/5

This will be notable for an early Mark Ruffalo appearance as the agent of pretty model, April (Sauls), who punches Alan for groping his client while she was under nitrous oxide. Also in the film is Keehne as teenage Sarah, the young woman with braces who continues throughout the film to wait for their removal, only to have to fend off an especially lunatic Alan, promising him she'll brush her teeth and swear off candy in order to avoid a gunshot to the face. Oh, and clueless Jan Hoag as secretary Candy, so oblivious to what is going on that she's totally stunned by the end at the body count kept just out of her sight. I just wish the film gave Foree more to do than shrug off dentists and agree that dentists are like cops...a necessary evil.