Disappointing. That’s all I can say. Why I would have had any expectations about this movie at all, I have no idea, so the disappointment I felt throughout the entire movie took me completely by surprise.
This impressively-packaged Anchor Bay release came with the recommendation “From Producer Stephen J. Cannell” (who co-wrote the “teleplay” with Cory Strode and Cookie Rae Brown (no relationship to “Sneaky Pie Brown”, the famous cat writer, I can assume) which was based on a story by two other writers (!) – Daniel Farrands and Carolyn Davis), I was led down the garden path to believe that I might actually get a movie of some quality and substance here.
Not so. Instead I was treated to a tepid, barely-coherent (yet completely simplistic) tale of a little girl who is being stalked by a malevolent tooth fairy—or possibly an old deformed crazy woman, or the ghost of the old deformed crazy woman, or possibly all three. See, this old, deformed, crazy, ghost tooth fairy murders kids after they give up their last baby tooth. Sometimes she plies them with the promise of a whiz-bang shiny bicycle (as she does in the prologue). Usually, she just sneaks into their room and tries to kill them with an axe. Failing that, she illogically kills every adult she can get her hands on, presumably to give the movie a high and squishy body count. Meanwhile, the aforementioned pre-murdered adults represent the dullest-witted morons to grace a small screen in quite a while. While body after body piles up (deaths include “via woodchipper”—in which the victim’s fate is written off as an ‘accident’, as in “he accidentally fed himself into the machine feet-first”—and “life long girlfriend beheaded so I might as well have sex in the room right next to her headless, armless body with the only other person left in the house because I am Captain Sensitive!”), the “heroes” (a couple who, we’re told at the end of the movie, had separated but decided to get together to give the relationship one last shot… thanks for telling us now) ignore the pleas of their terrified little girl that a witch-fairy-ghost thing is out to get her. The only one who will help her is another ghost, a little girl victim murdered long ago, whose soul cannot rest until the fairy-whatever’s “magic music box” is destroyed and all the captured baby teeth are restored to the other murdered children and…
Ah, screw it. This thing is a mess.
One wasted opportunity after another comes and goes throughout the agonizingly slow 89-minute running time. The biggest waste is the premise itself. The idea of a childhood boogeyman coming to life and invading the adult world has often been explored (Stephen King’s It the novel) and is rarely successful (“Stephen King’s It”, the miniseries) and could actually have made for a good movie.
If any of the myriad of writers had given a s**t about the so-called “teleplay”. Or the actors had given a s**t about their non-characters. Or if the witch-fairy-ghost thing was remotely scary and didn’t come off like a random person in a cloak running around with an axe.
The DVD features extras (what DVD doesn’t these days?), but I skipped them in favor of doing something more useful with my time. The box claims that they consist of featurettes, a commentary with the guilty parties (Cannel, Bowman and “star” Jesse Mutch—the latter of whom isn’t even listed in the box credits) and a trailer. But who cares, really? If you ever meet anyone for whom this is their favorite movie, please show them anything else. This is obviously the first movie they’ve ever watched.
