Steve-o gets serious as a dentist. Numbing Steve Martin has done drama before with striking results — I'm thinking especially of The Spanish Prisoner, not the soggy A Simple Twist of Fate. But the role of Frank Sangster, DDS, gives this protean talent — comic, actor, screenwriter, essayist, playwright, novelist — precious little to bite into. Frank's life in root canal is flowing along nicely; he has a thing going on with Jean (Laura Dern), his hygienist. But Jean is a little prissy for Frank's taste — she won't do it in the dental chair. Enter Susan (Helena Bonham Carter), a new patient with no qualms about getting freaky. Susan, a junkie with an eye for Frank's drug supply, escalates his life into lust, extortion and murder.

Sounds tasty. And first-time director-screenwriter David Atkins — a former rock drummer from a family of dentists — creates a film noir atmosphere with creepy skull X-rays and a climactic tooth extraction that will have you postponing your next dental appointment. Atkins wants to expose hidden moral decay, but his slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in Little Shop of Horrors. Now that was one crazy dentist.

“Satisfied”

Only the genius of Tom Waits could combine the subject of mortality, a reoccurring theme in his work, with wordplay that name checks both Mick and Keith, whom he calls "Mr. Jagger" and "Mr. Richards," and the title of their magnum opus, "Satisfaction." And to show just how cool Waits really is, he even got Mr. Richards to play along, one of nine guest appearances the guitarist has made on three Waits albums. "This growling roadhouse stomp is a late-breaking response to the Stones' greatest hit," Rolling Stone said of the track.