What’s the point of being a carnivore if all we can eat is rabbit food?
Main Cast: Rachel Miner, Rider Strong
Director: Mark Young
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
A band of survivors are riding out the end of the world in an old hospital, attempting to rebuild society–albeit on a much much smaller scale. This band of nine grows by one when Viper (Michael Kelly), Ford (Rider Strong), and Torino (Alexandra Barreto) chase away a scavenger and rescue Neon (Rachel Miner) from certain death. They take her back to their hospital and introduce her to their leader, Darwin (Robert Carradine), along with the rest of the gang and over a few days they begin to bring her into the fold and put her skills to use–she’s pretty good at repairing things and their water filtration system is broken.
And then one night, Darwin gets up in the middle of the night, goes to the bathroom, and is slaughtered by a Rover. Upon seeing the band of Rovers attack one of their number outside the hospital, Neon tells them she may have inadvertently led them here as they had been attacking her when Ford and Viper found her.
The Rovers are responsible for the deaths of Neon’s entire family. They’re cannibals, far outnumber the others, and they have more weapons.
I’ve never been a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre. I don’t avoid it by any means, but I’ve always found there to be so many flaws in the stories I’ve seen, logically, that I just can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to accept this might actually be how people would live in the event something like that happened. But TOOTH AND NAIL nips most of my major concerns in the bud.
“It wasn’t something big and horrible that did us in. It wasn’t nuclear war or a deadly virus or a comet crashing into the planet. It wasn’t over-population or global warming. I wish it was. You know, something… lofty and magnificent. Something worthy of exterminating most of the human race. No. In the end it was none of those things. We simply ran out of gas . . . You’d have thought we could survive without gas. But the end of gasoline meant the end of electricity, nuclear power. There’s coal, but you still need trucks to deliver the fuel. No electricity means no refrigerators, and that means spoiled food. In days the grocery stores were picked clean, within weeks there was looting, rioting, and chaos . . . Civilization collapsed into anarchy. The smart ones moved south, until they realized that millions of other smart people had the same smart idea. All those people in one place fighting for the same shelter and food, it was a bloodbath. Within three years more than two-thirds of the world’s population had starved to death, frozen to death, or slaughtered each other.”
See, I like that. It makes sense and it doesn’t leave me wondering, as I so often do in post-apocalyptic stories, how come, all these years later, they’re still driving cars and using electricity? With this explanation in place, I can just sit back and watch the movie and hopefully enjoy it. And I did enjoy it. TOOTH AND NAIL isn’t brilliant or a great cinematic achievement, but it is an entertaining 94 minutes, and that’s enough for me.
Mark Young wrote and directed (and edited) this movie and while I haven’t seen any of his other movies, he seems to have a firm grasp on the important things. His characters all stand out from one another, I get a sense of who each one is, even if it’s made easier because each is a different cliché, one more stereotype character filled in. It’s obvious ten minutes in which ones are the red shirts and which ones will make it to act three.
His dialogue is too simple at times, but it’s nothing the actors can’t handle, and his editing style was very clean and natural. The story flowed smoothly without leaving me wondering what’s going on, who’s where, whatever happened to that character?
While technically a horror movie, there were absolutely no scares in TOOTH AND NAIL, either intentional and visceral or accidental. Hell, there weren’t even any jump scares.
The actors aren’t the strongest in the world, but I think they manage all right, although there are times when it gets pretty heavy and I want to shake my head and apologize to them for what they’ve had to endure. Dakota’s “getting ready for battle” sequence toward the end was just goofy and wholly unnecessary, as was the ridiculous make-up she went into her final battle in. Whatever, dude.
Rachel Miner does her Rachel Miner thing, and Rider Strong is always going to be Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World, no matter how much facial hair or how many sex scenes he has. Robert Carradine wants to be taken seriously, and maybe if he held back a little that might be easier to do, but everything I’ve seen him in lately feels like he’s still trying to break out of that Revenge of the Nerds Lewis Skolnick mold.
Nicole DuPort shows the most restraint, and the most development with Dakota, making an easy transition from gal Friday to Survivor Girl. Of all the characters, her arc felt the most natural.
TOOTH AND NAIL is a good movie, but it’s a throwaway. I’ll maybe watch it one more time before shelving it and moving on and will almost definitely never bother seeing it again. That’s not a criticism, just a fact. Young and company have made a decent movie, but it’s nothing especially memorable. It’s got some decent gore and pretty good effects, but even the kill scenes are pretty bland, and at least two important plot points were predictable early on. I can recommend it, but I also recommend you not buy it.
More 8 Films to Die For Series II
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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