Oral Fixation

First I have to start out by saying I am in no way a horror flick guru or anything even close to that. I am more of the Romantic Comedy type. The reason for this is because I am the type of person who can be scared by her own shadow. So when a friend asked me to attend the NJ screening of this movie I was a little hesitant, but I went anyway and I am so glad I did. This movie was incredible. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. The plot was amazing. It played with your mind. The whole cast was amazing. The stand out for me was Emily Parker who plays Rachel Marks. She played this character so well and she put so much depth into this character. The writer/director Jake Cashill did an amazing job with this film. Good Luck to this movie! It deserves a huge theatrical distribution!!!

First, a note of caution: there's a very early, unfinished rough cut of the film circulating on the internet, released by someone who has since been dealt with legally and otherwise. Sadly, the rough cut has been downloaded and reviewed a handful of times, and the reviews are justifiably poor, considering what the downloaders were presented with. Such is life in the age of the internet.

As for the final version of ORAL FIXATION, it's a dark, almost fantastical tale which was inspired by a true story that took place on Long Island, NY, in the 1980s. The real story centered on a dentist who felt compelled to uproot, pull his child from school, move towns and switch his home telephone number because a female patient of his had become obsessed with him for reasons I will not reveal here.

What you will see in this film, although bizarre, is not that far from the truth. And in light of recent cases of obsession, such as that of the female astronaut who drove 900 miles non-stop wearing an adult diaper to allegedly murder a romantic rival, the events portrayed in ORAL FIXATION my seem even less out-of-the-ordinary.

Budget constraints limited our ability to fully explore the scope of the story, but what we were able to deliver is, in our opinion, a fast-moving, engaging genre pic that sheds light on a particularly dark side of human nature.

I'm getting more and more convinced most of the comments to this movie that are on here are actually written by people affiliated with the making of it. Nobody in their right mind could give this 10/10, not even 5. The idea isn't new, the actors, especially Kerry Aissa, deliver the generic, painfully predictable story boringly and just plain bad. While some of the self mutilation may cause you to cringe, it can not remotely make up for the rest of this terrible movie. The camera work is static and can not add any suspense to the overused cliché situations that have been done countless times before.

3/10

I wish the cast and crew of Oral Fixation well, but not the film that they created. It's a bargain-basement psycho-horror flick, that I should have known going in and did to an extent. But I also had some hope that it being an independent movie that it might try a little harder under the radar, and having won a few awards at minor festivals. It's not even so much a horror movie, if one may get that impression from the cover (my first thought was 'ah, The Dentist with a girl, I like that concept).

It's mostly just a stale retread of psycho-stalker flicks like Fatal Attraction, all the way down to a similar abduction of a little kid with a very nasty side-effect. Some of the actors do their best with it, but it's not much to work with to start and so it's mostly one-note; Emily Parker, who may keep some men glued due to some large natural breasts (sorry, I don't mean to sound like a pig, but they stick out in a story that give her nothing to work with an actual actor), is also one-note as a killer. At least she gets some chance to go over the top with bug- eyes and a big goofy psycho-smile. Other actors like Kerry Aissa and Aidan Sullivan eventually turn up with the same exasperated expressions on their faces, scene to scene.

And the plot isn't much of a help, going through a few hackneyed twists surrounding the 'did he or didn't he' form of betrayal between the dentist, his wife and the crazy girl who loves to get her teeth cleaned without anesthesia. Even the one aspect, her loony pain-in-pleasure fetish-motif drilled in by a-hole father, doesn't give Oral Fixation or the character of Rachel Marks any added interest. And even the other aspect of the horror element I had hoped for in a cringe-worthy manner- of the very creepy approach to shoot torture via teeth drilling and knocking out ala The Dentist and The Dentist 2- is lacking. And that final scene of the movie, along with other scenes, had me howling laughing.

Not many of the decisions or things characters do make much sense, the film opens with little good context for us, and the fight scenes are given the kind of touch that would make film school teachers' heads spin ala The Exorcist (seriously, saying EACH LINE as you HIT your TARGET with a CLUB is so TIRED). Oh, and as another Minor pet peeve, useless color tinting in the early scenes of the movie for almost no reason except to establish the POV from Rachel Marks... which is DROPPED after this anyway. Pretty sad.

Rachel (Emily Parker) has an unhealthy fixation with Paul, her dentist, when she's not sneaking in his house to spy on him, she's mutilating her mouth in order to see him and deviously planning to make the happily married dentist her own. Turns out that her father experimented on her messing up her brain real bad or some such nonsense.

The acting is sub-par for the most part and the plot-line is a tad too silly to take seriously. I'm glad that I found this on Instant Netflix so it's not like I went out of my way to view it, or wasted my money on it, if I did it's likely that I'd be harder on the film than I am now. It's not all bad, as Miss Parker has fairly nice breasts but maybe I'm just stretching to think of anything that I liked about the film.

Eye Candy: Emily Parker & Aidan Sullivan both get topless, but Aidan only shows her left breast

My Grade: D-