Meet Jess Weixler, an indie heroine with bite

Step aside Ellen Page, star of the low-budget hit film Juno, and make way for Jess Weixler (pictured), another 'indie' film heroine making waves this Oscar season. Weixler, 27, is the star of Teeth, one of the most bizarre small films to open in the States for a long time. It tackles one of man’s worst nightmares - the myth of vagina dentata. Dawn, a high school student, has teeth where she shouldn't. Or to put it another way, when she realises the trouble she's in, she doesn't need a gynaecologist so much as a dentist.

Dawn is a goody-goody who leads the local chastity group until her impatient boyfriend forces himself on her and gets an extremely unpleasant surprise. Dawn's evolution from nice girl to avenger of male predators has had audiences alternately laughing and cringing since it opened in America last month.

Weixler, who won a special jury prize at last year's Sundance festival for her performance as Dawn, reports a wide range of reactions from people who've seen the film - from men who won’t even look at her to a group of 40-something women who told her: “This movie is great - you are our idol.”

The surprise is that the film is made not by an ultra-feminist but by a 51-year-old man, Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of the late, great American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Despite the screening at Sundance, it has taken a year to get the film into American cinemas and no release date has yet been set for Britain.

One country where it is bound to make waves is South Africa, where the vagina dentata myth has been raised recently by the introduction of a highly controversial anti-rape device, Rapex. Worn internally like a diaphram, the device is lined with rows of razor-sharp hooks which are designed to latch onto a rapists’s penis during penetration. It was invented by Sonette Ehlers, who was inspired by a meeting with a rape victim who told her: "If I only had teeth down there."