A year before Witchboard bewitched enough audiences to beget follow-ups and facsimiles, Roberta Findlay (Tenement) summoned similiar subject matter in The Oracle, but with nary a witch nor a board. Here, the evil antique in question appears to be the painted hand of a child mannequin clutching a calligraphy feather long enough to have been plucked from Captain Hook’s hat. Preloaded with ink, it scrawls simple messages from the beyond (e.g., “Help me” and “Nooo”) onto stationery. Its penmanship is ghastly.
When mousy housewife Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) finds it in the basement of her apartment building, the label on her overalls is practically her reaction: “OshKosh B’Gosh.” The kindly Italian maintenance man (Chris Maria De Koron, in full “I make-a the pizza!” mode) encourages her to keep it, not realizing it will ruin Christmas for her and her asshole husband (Scrambled Feet’s Roger Neil, who looks like an attempt to clone Tom Atkins at a Duane Reade photo counter).
After Jennifer communicates with the spirit world, results include a poltergeist tantrum, a runaway car, animalistic snarls in the elevator, claws emerging from the trash chute, things glowing Listerine-green — not coincidentally, all fit Findlay’s threadbare norm. That’s hardly a negative; rather, the in-camera action allows The Oracle to hit the sweet spot of ’80s indie horror, goofball faults and all.
Ending excepted, the money shot comes when a character stabs his own arms as he hallucinates them covered by tiny creatures — unmoving rubber things from a kid’s Fright Factory set (ages 8+, batteries not included). That Findlay puts more of her stamp on the single scene she could graft onto a porno — a hooker slaughtered by an androgynous killer (Pam La Testa, Findlay’s Blood Sisters) — says how little she cares for the horror genre. However, as framed by her XXX Liquid A$$ets collaborator R. Allen Leider, the story beams are just solid enough to overcome the director’s evident disdain.
For someone who never acted before or since, Powers brings what matters most: lungs. Has anyone ever screamed more on film? Hopefully a few of her cries were for a lozenge (“Riiiicolaaa!“), because they clearly weren’t asking for less dowdy dresses that didn’t look swiped from a community college production of Anne of Green Gables. —Rod Lott