There are bad horror movies, and then there’s The Dentist. A film so utterly ridiculous it makes you want to floss your brain afterward. Directed by Brian Yuzna—yes, the same man who gave us Society (a film about rich people literally eating each other)—this one trades body-melting orgies for the high-stakes terror of… dental hygiene. That’s right: a slasher film where the bogeyman is your insurance provider’s worst nightmare.
Somewhere, a Hollywood executive said, “What if we made a horror movie where the killer doesn’t just pull teeth, but insurance fraud?” and everyone in the room nodded like this was fine.
Meet Dr. Alan Feinstone: The Tooth Fairy From Hell
Our “villain” is Dr. Alan Feinstone, played by Corbin Bernsen, who went from L.A. Law heartthrob to “guy who kills patients with a dental pick” faster than you can say “malpractice lawsuit.” He’s a wealthy Los Angeles dentist with a mansion, a beautiful wife, and a perfect life—except, of course, he’s batshit insane.
Alan suffers from obsessive–compulsive disorder, paranoia, and a psychosexual fixation on teeth that would make Freud throw his cigar into traffic. His problems begin when he finds his wife cheating on him with the pool boy. Because apparently, even in horror movies, dentists can’t compete with shirtless guys holding a skimmer net.
Alan doesn’t just get mad; he unravels completely. Within 24 hours, he’s murdering dogs, fondling sedated beauty queens, and pulling teeth like he’s auditioning for Extreme Makeover: Carnivore Edition.
A Day in the Life of a Mad Dentist
The “horror” of this movie is supposed to come from Alan’s job: dentistry. The film leans hard into the universal fear of sitting in a dentist’s chair while someone pokes your gums like they’re testing a cantaloupe. Except here, Alan hallucinates rotten teeth, drills through molars like drywall, and occasionally strangles people between cleanings.
One poor beauty queen, April Reign (Christa Sauls), just wanted a routine check-up. Instead, she gets fondled while unconscious and nearly garroted with her own pantyhose. Nothing screams “sexy horror” like a man in scrubs whispering, “Say ahhh” while eyeing hosiery like it’s lingerie.
Patients scream, assistants quit, and Alan responds to professional criticism the way most dentists respond to Yelp reviews: with murder. He kills an IRS agent extorting him, fires his hygienist for having morals, and stabs the pool boy for being hotter than him. Honestly, at least Alan is consistent—he treats cavities and critics the exact same way: with sharp instruments and zero anesthesia.
The Supporting Cast: Fillings, Not Characters
The rest of the cast is as forgettable as the complimentary toothbrush you get after a cleaning. Linda Hoffman plays Alan’s unfaithful wife Brooke, whose biggest crime (besides adultery) is continuing to live in a house decorated like a Pier 1 clearance sale.
Ken Foree—yes, the same Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead—shows up as Detective Gibbs, because apparently someone needed a paycheck. His entire job is to look suspiciously at Bernsen while wondering how his career went from fighting zombies to investigating dental malpractice.
Mark Ruffalo appears in a small role as Steve Landers, the beauty queen’s manager. That’s right—Mark freaking Ruffalowas in The Dentist. The future Hulk once played a guy who gets punched in the face by Corbin Bernsen. That alone is scarier than any of the movie’s gore.
The Gore: Plaque and Carnage
To the film’s credit, it tries to gross you out. We get close-ups of bleeding gums, drilled teeth, and rotting hallucinations. There’s also a scene where Alan rips out his wife’s teeth and cuts out her tongue because nothing says “marriage counseling” like involuntary oral surgery.
But the gore is weirdly tame compared to other ’90s slashers. Half the time, the violence cuts away before anything gnarly happens. The scariest shot is Corbin Bernsen’s sweaty close-up while holding a dental drill, which is unsettling for all the wrong reasons.
It’s like the filmmakers wanted to traumatize viewers with the idea of dentistry rather than the execution. Which, to be fair, works—dentists are already terrifying. We didn’t need a horror movie to tell us that.
Themes: Clean Teeth, Dirty Mind
The Dentist pretends to be about obsession, perfectionism, and the dark underbelly of suburban success. In reality, it’s about Corbin Bernsen screaming at people to floss more while committing casual homicide.
The movie conflates dental hygiene with sexual repression in ways that feel both silly and deeply uncomfortable. Alan’s obsession with “dirty mouths” is less about plaque and more about punishing women for existing. He doesn’t just want to clean teeth; he wants to purify the entire female gender, one molar at a time. It’s American Psycho, but with fluoride rinses.
The Climax: Drill, Baby, Drill
The movie ends in a flurry of nonsense. Alan kidnaps a teenager, forces her to promise she’ll brush three times a day, and then flees to a dental school where he instructs students to start pulling out teeth. He hallucinates his pool boy everywhere, shoots a student by mistake, and winds up in an opera house having a meltdown.
Finally, he’s arrested, but not before delivering one last operatic monologue about mouths, sin, and how only he can see the decay beneath the surface. It’s less “scary” and more “like watching your drunk uncle rant at Thanksgiving dinner after too much boxed wine.”
The final shot has Alan locked in a psychiatric hospital, strapped to a chair while a dentist works on him. The dentist is revealed to be his mutilated, toothless wife Brooke, who gleefully stabs at his gums. Roll credits. Roll eyes.
Final Diagnosis
So what do we have? A horror film that thinks dental work is terrifying enough to carry a slasher. A script co-written by Stuart Gordon, who gave us Re-Animator, yet somehow forgot to include any actual fun. A cast of semi-familiar faces doing their best to look terrified of teeth.
The Dentist isn’t scary. It isn’t sexy. It isn’t even funny in a “so bad it’s good” way. It’s just a middle-aged man screaming about oral hygiene while ruining his practice, his marriage, and his sanity. Think Dr. Phil with drills.
The only genuinely frightening thing about this movie is the realization that it spawned a sequel. Someone at Republic Pictures looked at this and said, “Yes. More of that.” Humanity truly is doomed.
