Two Front Teeth (2006)

directed by Jamie Nash and David Thomas Sckrabulis
85 minutes
USA
4 stars out of 5
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I've really been pining (get it? Christmas trees? pine trees?) for a half-decent Christmas horror movie this year, because I've run almost out of options for ones I haven't seen, and now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel and watching things that are truly atrocious. In Two Front Teeth, I've finally found a Christmas-themed horror comedy that's good and funny. The director later went on to make WNUF Halloween Special, a segment from V/H/S 2, and to write several films for Eduardo Sanchez, including the terrifying Lovely Molly.

Fair warning: This movie's sense of humor is pretty stupid. It's generally inoffensive, but it's probably only amusing to people who enjoy awful puns and think those newspapers that have headlines about women getting pregnant by Bigfoot and/or women delivering half-bat, half-human babies are funny. The most important thing to this movie is being funny- there's little to no concern about aesthetic and style, and certainly no attempts to be "so bad it's good" or really to go for any specific type of humor at all. The only goal is whatever will be humorous and the film absolutely hits that goal.

Two Front Teeth also has basically no plot and feels remarkably like everybody was just making it up as they went along, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending, again, on how you like your jokes. There's no pacing, so don't expect the best to be saved for last or anything, because except for the final battle between the real, wholesome St. Nick and an evil impostor called Clausferatu, the action happens basically whenever the film feels like making it happen and is not confined to climaxes or pivotal narrative moments.

Good acting is also not a huge concern, which frees up opportunities to just be funny rather than focusing on the specifics of exactly how to deliver lines. I don't doubt that this was all scripted and planned out, and I don't want it to seem like I'm implying that it's only good because it feels like there was little directorial interference- it's just that the end product of the script, direction, acting, and cinematography is something that feels fun and off-the-rails. The passion put into making it is the most important thing. I wish more horror comedies would embrace being goofy, because Two Front Teeth was excellent and just what I needed to recover from some direly horrible movies.