Harefooted Halloween: The Dentist 2

What I liked: Some of the visuals this time are really cool.  It starts out with Dr. Alan Feinstone (Corbin Bernsen (Tales from the Hood)) fantasizing about mutilating his ex-wife’s mouth all over again in a blaring white dental exam room which makes the blood pop right out at you.  Then later he imagines his ex-wife again along with another one of his victims taunting him, one zombified with rotting flesh and no lips and the other has pointed metal shards jutting directly out of their gums for teeth and an elongated tongue.  This is the same unforgettable figure on the cover of one of the VHS boxes.  It’s this image that’s burned into my memory from encountering it countless times in the video store.

A model for closeup shots of people’s various mouths is used again and it looks a touch more convincing this time.  They really dig in there with a Novocain needle and a drill and they have blood squirting from where teeth are yanked out and cockroaches are crawling around inside and it looks just great.  So nasty.

What I Didn’t Like: The story is surprisingly confusing.  Feinstone breaks out of a mental hospital, makes his way to Paradise, MO, retrieves a safety deposit box full of cash and fake ID documents and settles into small town life.  Eventually he becomes the town dentist after killing the current one, albeit accidentally, and starts murdering folks when he thinks he’s been found out.  So I guess Feinstone had a backup plan to assume a new identity somewhere remote because he knew shit was eventually gonna go bad?  And I think it’s alluded to that he setup similar safety deposit boxes across the country.  But he also knows the bank manager in the small town under his new fake name somehow which is how he gets in good with the townspeople and they know he’s a dentist even though he doesn’t produce any credentials and goddamn…none of this shit is ever explained.

Bernsen only gets to become totally unhinged in the last act of the film.  Before that Feinstone tries to keep his insanity in check by cutting into his arm with a razor for temporary relief.  He still acts weird and hallucinates filth penetrating all corners of the world but he’s nothing like the nonstop crazy fucking asshole of the previous film.  When Bernsen is finally let loose he’s awesome.  He hams it up, laughs manically, flashes ominous scowls, wipes blood all over his face and wacky shit like that.  It’s just a shame we have to wait so long for that turn to happen.

Overall Impressions: This has a similar pacing issue as its predecessor where the stuff you came for is jammed in towards the end.  The difference is Feinstone is attempting to act normal here for the majority of the runtime instead of bouncing off the walls from the get-go.  And admittedly that makes for a bit of a slog.  The effects and some of the imagery are actually probably better executed but the story is completely nonsensical and not as straight forward as it should be.  If you really enjoyed the first movie though you’ll get a kick out of the sequel.

The Dentist series is definitely a bizarre one that’s off the beaten path.  Like I mentioned in my last review it’s a brilliantly natural concept for a horror movie because so many people hate going to the dentist.  However, I don’t know if there’s more than one picture’s worth of material to mine.  Feinstone is an irascibly entertaining character to hang out with for a little while but I don’t think he can carry a whole franchise.  He grates on you.  Two is more than enough.  Oh that reminds me, don’t forget to brush twice a day.