No Tooth. No Trade: The Tooth Fairy (2006)

The Tooth Fairy (2006)
rating:**1/2
starring:  Lochlyn Munro, Chandra West and Steve Bacic

At a first glance, you might say this is a straight rip-off of the underrated Darkness Falls, with a similarly themed villainess exploiting the Tooth Fairy folklore. However, while Darkness Falls is more of a memoir to the monster movies of the before time, The Tooth Fairy is more in touch with its slasher roots;cliches, gore and all.

Some time during the late 40s, a diseased lady, rumored to be a witch, was luring children with promises of trading their last baby tooth for something they desire. She easily demonstrated this for us in the first 5 minute by mercilessly pulling a boy's tooth off the roots and hatchets him to death.

Moving forward to "now", young Pamela Wagner (Nicole Muñoz) and her mum (Chandra West) moves to the same house where "the Tooth Fairy" once dwell in, now dead for some time now and her legend subsided into mere obscurity. Staying with them is Peter Campbell, Mrs. Wagner's boyfriend, played by Lochlyn Munro, who many of you may remember as the ill-fated deputy from Freddy vs Jason)

Snooping around the old garage, Pamela was met by a local girl who quickly became her friend and was warned of the evil spirit haunting her house. Easily enough, Pamela's a wee bit jumpy when a mysterious figure suddenly topples her off her own bike, knocking her last baby tooth. Now with the Tooth Fairy back, she begins to prey on Pamela's loved ones unless she gives up her tooth and fall victim to a seemingly indestructible monster.

Reduced to cheap latex and glue, The Tooth Fairy
had to kill her way to have her presence known.

While entertaining at some point, The Tooth Fairy suffers through low budget and undoubtedly messy plotting; the story is very thin and gaping, failing to answer a lot of questions and leaving them dangerously open like a manhole in a flood. For one, wasn't even fully explained that, if the Witch is only after the children and their tooth, why does she murder people that may or may not even be connected to Pamela? More so the fact that she collects children's teeth, seemingly having no sole purpose but for the sake of just getting them.

In an attempt to heighten the game, the movie even tries to place some fantasy elements to the plot, throwing in rituals that help our leads stop or wound the Witch, which kinda reminds me of those rites used to stop the villain in Warlock (1989), but the execution of these "magic" is very cheap and since the whole plot leans more to slasher trappings, it felt and looked out of place.

Despite this, The Tooth Fairy, for all its cheapness and cliches, still manages to be a decent time-waster; some weird characters were added into the bunch, ranging from two inbred brothers who harasses one of the leads (apparently knows each other from before) to a spiritualist friend who mistaken our Witch with something she calls a "Spirit of Eltrain". Of course, their sole purpose is to heighten the bodycount and to give a laughably cheesy quality to the film.

And speaking of bodycount, the murders are no tame dog either, ranging from a nicely shot woodchipper shredding to a number of decent hatchet murders. Plus, the Tooth Fairy herself, though cheaper looking compared to Darkness Fall's Matilda Dixon, does have her shining glory as a nasty murderess, complete with a well made make-up.

Lack of plot is no problem if you got
the woodchipper running fine.

While sporting a crusty script with questionable lines and plotting that tries too hard, The Tooth Fairy is enjoyable in its sense as a B-flick slasher and nothing more. A bit more fleshing and less cliches might do the trick, but it was Inventive at least, making it worth a rent.

Bodycount:
1 boy hacked to death with hatchet
1 male shredded in woodchipper
1 female hacked apart with hatchet
1 female found repeatedly shot on the back with nailgun
1 male castrated with hatchet
1 male hatchet to the back
1 male head chopped off with hatchet
total: 7