The Oracle

A woman is forced into investigating the death of a murdered man after messing with the former tentant's writing device that is used to contact the dead. Sometimes exciting and scary horror pic with some well done scenes, is ultimately too slow moving and dull to maintain interest throughout despite good premise. Rated R; Violence, Profanity, and Adult Themes.

I put this in a few days before Christmas and, to my surprise, it is set during the Xmas and New Year's holidays. So I officially have a new entry into my holiday themed horror flicks! Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) and husband Ray (Roger Neil) move into a new apartment once inhabited by a psychic medium. Naturally, Jennifer locates a trinket that communicates with the dead and they take her up on the offer. She is contacted by one William Graham, an industrialist who committed suicide some weeks earlier. Jennifer has visions of the true culprits, but no one believes her!

Filmed entirely in NYC, this Roberta Findlay cheapie really doesn't have much going for it. Still, I was entertained for all of the wrong reasons. There is lots of goofy gore and bad acting on display. Lead Powers is attractive and a decent actress, but never made another film (how does that happen?). The real reasons to see this flick are the DVD extras on the Media Blasters release. There is a hilarious half hour interview with Findlay about the film where she covers everything about the film from casting the big lesbian to her love of Jack Daniels to the South's love of horror films ("It's the only good thing about it!"). There is also a audio commentary where Findlay pulls no punches. I love listening to her talk.

What is interesting is that this film came out a year before the more celebrated (and admittedly better) WITCHBOARD. They basically are the exact same film and it makes me wonder if Kevin Tenney saw this and thought, "I can do that a lot better."

A young couple rent a New York City apartment previously occupied by a strange elderly soothsayer. The wife plunders the deceased old lady's belonging and finds an oracle(a hand-shaped device used to communicate with the dead). She unwisely tests the item's power, gradually becoming a living instrument of revenge for a recent murder victim. As her involvement in the situation deepens, so does her frustration when her husband and friends express concern for her mental health...they dismiss her strange experiences as hallucinations, despite a rash of mysterious deaths taking place around them.

For a Roberta Findlay film, this one is actually not as spectacularly awful as it should be, and does manage to maintain interest and deliver some fairly gory moments. Standing on its own merits, however, it's a throwaway picture with typically staid performances(a couple of the secondary characters are commendably played, most notably the sadistic lesbian psychopath), and the special effects are...well...neither special nor effective.

Not recommendable, but beneath the crust of cheapness is a semi-worthy watch...*IF* you're willing to take a brain laxative and dumb yourself down for 90 minutes.

4/10

The Oracle, directed by Roberta Findlay wasn´t THAT bad after all. Ok, it was a bit dull at times but I´ve seen worse films, in fact many of them.The film itself was never really scary but it had its share of gore, so if you´re looking for that you´ll probably be satisfied with what you see.

The production company (Laurel Films,Inc) for the film was also interesting, since the same company is the one behind George A. Romero´s zombie movies if I´m not mistaking.

The version I saw myself was the Dutch release by New York Video. Comparing to the pictures on the back cover, this release seems to be cut since many shots were never to be seen in the movie, as the killing of the lady in the elevator-I didn´t see any blood in the film itself but on the back cover there was a still picture of it.

I´ll give this film **½ of *****. An ok way to waste 94 minutes.

Jennifer and her husband move into an apartment formerly occupied by a medium, and Jennifer discovers the writing device the former occupant used to converse with the dead. After dinner with friends, Jennifer uses the device and all kinds of weird things begin to happen, as various characters meet untimely ends and Jennifer has to contend with the widow of a murdered man and the obese lesbian hitwoman she employs to keep Jennifer quiet. Will the madness never end?

This off-kilter little exercise in no-budget filmmaking was directed by Roberta Findlay who, along with her late husband Michael, created a particularly putrid brand of grindhouse fare in the late 60s. Their flicks were virulent cocktails of lesbianism, violence, torture and perversion, and it's nice to see that the passage of time hadn't improved Roberta's filmmaking abilities one bit! Wires attached to books to make them fly off shelves, a man's head being pulled off by big booga-booga Halloween laytex hands, gratuitous disfigurement via noxious industrial waste-- sheez, this film seems like it's from another era. This thing must have only played in the handful of drive-ins and grimey remnant of flop houses that still operated in the mid-eighties, because no savvy viewer then would have accepted this as the gruesome slash-fest it was touted in ads to be. Only slightly amusing in it's incompetence