Past Misdeeds: The Oracle (1985)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Poor Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers)! It's not enough that she has to be married to super-moustached jerk Ray (Roger Neil), no, she also has to find a planchette that belonged to the old woman who lived in Jennifer's and Ray's new apartment before them, accidentally awakening her own mediumistic powers with it.

At first, it's all fun and games and a ghost (or is it a demon?) scrawling "help me" on a piece of paper during a Christmas party, but all too soon our bedraggled heroine has nightmares and visions of the most disturbing kind. The ghost seems to have become quite obsessed with her and is enthusiastically trying his hand as an interior decorator (preferred style: destruction and bava-green lighting). Ray, like every husband or boyfriend in every Findlay film, isn't getting less jerky, either, and aggressively berates Jennifer, like you do with the woman you love when you fear she is losing her mind.

After some time, the ghost makes itself a little clearer. It looks as if he belongs to a certain Mr. Graham and is in dire need of Jen's help in taking revenge on the people who murdered him. Ghostly Graham manages to send Jen a dream in which she can see the faces of his murderers quite well. Not surprisingly, attempts at informing Graham's wife (Victoria Dryden) of the truth about her husband's supposed suicide only bring the young woman's own life in danger. Evil Lesbian hobby & professional killer Farkas (Pam La Testa; somewhere between the worst evil Lesbian clichés and utter perfection) ain't someone to mess with.

And these are still not enough problems for Jennifer. Additionally, the ghost is growing a bit too protective of her and kills everyone trying to get between him and Jennifer in ridiculous and gory ways. I won't blame anyone - ghost or not - for killing off Ray, though. Jennifer will certainly be better off without that guy.

Roberta Findlay, you're my hero! The Oracle is the first film the great lady made in the final (horror) phase of her career, after she left the world of pornography - although not the porno facial hair - behind for something only slightly more reputable, and it is glorious.

There is only a small amount of Findlay's patented semi-documentary shots of the scummier parts of New York - which would go on to take more and more room in her horror films - on display here. The Oracle places a much greater emphasis on rubber monsters, rubbery gore and Farkas and her artificially deepened voice (don't ask why - it's a Findlay film), yet I can't rightly complain about the relative absence of dirty streets when the film shows us this stuff instead.

Findlay did learn the fine art of cheap but effective photography when she was working as (not always billed) camera operator/director of photography on the sexploitation films she made with her then-husband Michael (whom I suspect to be the source for the jerky husbands and boyfriends in her horror movies) in the 60s, so her films are usually much nicer to look at than their budget would suggest. (Although I have seen her films called "amateurishly photographed" in more than one review; obviously, there's no accounting for taste).

What might be a problem to some viewers is the utter inability of anyone on screen to "act" in the more conventional sense of the word. Fortunately, there's more important things to acting in cheap little numbers like this one, and most everyone on screen has that special something to endear her or him to me for evermore. The men have their porno moustaches, Farkas a silly potty-mouth and the charming butchness of terror, and Caroline Capers Powers is intensely good at going into full body hysterics like it is seldom displayed outside of Italian genre cinema.

Powers performance in the last thirty minutes alone would be more than enough to recommend The Oracle, yet there's still more and more to love about it. How about lots and lots of multi-coloured goo? Bonus moustaches? A plot that starts out slow and boring yet gets as hysterical and jumpy as the main actress? A sex scene that is nearly as wooden and disturbing as the one in Don Dohler's Nightbeast? More (hysterical) running around than in a whole season of Rupert Davies-penned Doctor Who? Random classy-looking shots and moody lighting between the moments of shoddy insanity and bad effects? Some wonderful moments of serenity in a exceedingly badly secured New Yorker mental institution? A soundtrack that was composed by a monkey randomly pushing buttons and keys on a synthesizer? And best of all, a scene in which Ray's head is ripped off by the hands of an angry ghost? The Oracle truly has it all, possibly even more.

I know that I'm usually putting a certain emphasis on the importance of filmmakers caring about the films they make, or at least not hating their audience with a burning passion. Roberta Findlay however is one of the great exceptions to this rule. The woman utterly loathed the horror genre and everything it stands for, and didn't have especially warm feelings for the genre's fans either, yet she still managed to make a handful of lovely films in it. I think her horror films are the products of someone trying to make films for the least respectable and least intelligent audience she could imagine, and just throwing everything that could possibly be of interest to that audience on screen (much like a monkey does with poo), in the hope that some of it would stick, even if none of it made any sense whatsoever.

It is this hateful and ignorant attitude to its own audience - and possibly filmmaking itself - that makes The Oracle such a fascinating experience for me. This movie is what happens when someone just doesn't give a shit about what she is doing one way or the other, yet is still too talented not to produce something interesting. And this, dear readers, is what I call "movie magic".

Past Misdeeds: Prime Evil (1988)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

At some time in the Middle Ages (the film will give us more than one date in a typical display of the amount of care and thought that went into it) a group of monks decides to change the object of their devotion to Satan.

Today - well, in the 80s - that very same cult is still active with some of the original members still running the show (of EVIL). You see, when a member is nice to the big S and sacrifices a blood relative to him all thirteen years, immortality and power are granted to him or her. There are "bonus points" (authentic Satanist terminology) if the victim is a virgin and female, but Satan doesn't seem too particular about it.

When the Satanists are not squabbling among each other or sacrificing relatives, they don't seem to do all that much (although I suppose they should spend a lot of time producing new offspring, what with the high mortality their children have).

Fortunately for viewers with a lust for excitement, the especially ambitious old fart Satanist George Parkman's (Max Jacobs) second sacrificial ceremony is bound to come soon. George's preferred victim is his granddaughter Alexandra (Christine Moore, who also had a very similar part in Roberta Findlay's other 1988 Satanist romp Lurkers). She's quite ideal for the job, for she is still virginal thanks to the damage her father's paedophilic tendencies did to her psyche when she was a child. While George was angry enough about his son abusing her to change him to the preferred victim the last time around, he doesn't have any problems with killing Alexandra now, it seems. It's a b-movie psychology thing, you wouldn't understand.

At the same time, the Satanists' handyman/serial killer (George Krause, I think) goes around kidnapping young women, for some never explained reason all coming from Alexandra's surroundings, so that they can be indoctrinated into the cult for no discernible reason whatsoever.

The Satanist leader, evil priest and scenery-chewer Thomas Seaton (William Beckwith) probably just likes to put his hypnotic mind control whammy on them, as he does with Alexandra, much to the chagrin of her hissy fit prone boyfriend Bill (Tim Gail).
What the Satanists don't know is that a courageous undercover nun named Angela (Mavis Harris) has infiltrated their ranks and is just waiting for the right moment to stab their favourite Satan doll in the heart, or something like that.

If all this sounds rather muddled, then it does so because it is. Of course, one shouldn't expect less (or more, depending on one's perspective) of a Roberta Findlay directed horror film from the 80s. The muddledness is still highly impressive even going by the special Findlay standard. The film casually jumps around between plot threads that seem to exists in a perpetual state of stasis, lets important things just happen off-camera and never bothers to at least explain them on camera, just as if parts of the script had been eaten by a dog, although my experience with Findlay's body of work tells me that she just didn't care enough about a film in the hated horror genre to bother to make it coherent. This might not be a praiseworthy way to go about making a film for most people - I certainly wouldn't recommend it - yet I found myself strangely transfixed while watching it. It is after all not every day that you find a film that incoherently jumps about from place to place but in which at the same time nothing ever seems to be happening, or if something has happened, you are often not allowed to see it.

For those who like it in their films, there is also some impressive 80s cheese to witness here. Especially the scenes taking place in a health spa are quite priceless, with fascinating discussions of multi-coloured condoms and the philosophy of "poking" which let me imagine Hamlet's great monologue beginning with "To poke or not to poke", though it's probably better for everyone's sanity if you don't mind me too much.

Other moments in great dialogue can be found in the seemingly endless scenes in which George and his hypnotically yellow teeth discuss his future world domination plans with a female Satanist friend who just doesn't want to be poked by him. The latter can't have anything to do with George being a raving lunatic with the enthusiasm for smack talk usually only encountered in white middle-aged rappers.

Which brings us to the acting, or what is called acting in the part of New York the film takes place in. Well, everyone's line delivery is...peculiar, to say the least, and while Jacobs and Beckwith are keeping their performances well inside the boundaries of traditional scenery chewing, most of the other actors have probably been imported from a strange and alien planet where English is spoken in quite a different way with many...awkward...pauses.

But I'm mostly alright with that, really, something I won't say about Tim Gail's laid back interpretations of hissy fits, which reminded me of nothing so much as of an hysterical beagle.
Christine Moore, on the other hand, is nearly alright, at least compared to most of the others.

I have to admit I was a little disappointed by the film's photography. Usually, the best thing about Findlay's late period movies are guerrilla-style filmed location shots of a slowly decaying New York, scenes that grant something like Lurkers more power of persuasion than it should have. There is a little of that to be found in Prime Evil, too, and these are the scenes when the whole film nearly starts to develop a mood and become an actual horror film, but too much of what is happening plays out in claustrophobic sets, or possibly Findlay's living room. Even the best director of photography wouldn't have been able to make much of that.

Still, there is something about Prime Evil that makes it a satisfying watch for me. It is not so much the film's cheesiness (although the special effect standing in for the devil is quite priceless), or the pure cheek of declaring this patchwork a narrative that makes it worth seeing, it is something a little weirder and a little deeper. I wouldn't blame anyone who'd just declare this film "crap", but for me it possesses a hard to grasp quality that sometimes transforms the boring and incompetent into the plain strange. And how ever you want to call this quality, Prime Evil has it - at least for me.

On WTF: The Oracle (1985)

A Roberta Findlay film about a cursed planchette, a bedraggled housewife and men with moustaches!

What could possibly go wrong?

Find out the frightening truth in my review on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,other places,roberta findlay

On WTF: Prime Evil (1988)

Being the further adventures of a somewhat young, possibly be-tentacled man in the weird land of the late period pictures of Roberta Findlay, a woman with the gift of shooting very pretty pictures but without any kind of love for the films she does.

What will happen when the young man ventures forth into one of the lady's two Satanist conspiracy pictures of 1988? Find out on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,roberta findlay,other places

In short: Tenement (1985)

The multi-racial gang of sociopathic victim of facial muscle paralysis Chaco (Enrique Sandino) has found a nice warm home for themselves in the cellar of a rundown tenement building in the Bronx. There they can really live the gang lifestyle - snorting coke, smoking joints and eating raw rat.

Alas, their paradise is short-lived when one of the building's tenants calls the police on them. At least they are able to hide their drugs and weapons before the cops show up and so their stay in custody is only for a few hours.

Chaco is rather pissed by the whole affair and swears vengeance on everyone in the building. The same night, he and his gang attack their unsuspecting victims.

Theoretically, we now witness how the gang slowly works through the building, killing and raping like pirates and how the tenants are desperately struggling for survival.

I remember having had some nice things to say about Roberta Findlay's Lurkers, but I find Tenement to be much harder to get enthusiastic about.

Sure, Findlay's hand for filming urban decay is present, but it's really the only thing halfway praisable about the film. Tenement's core problem lies in its terrible hesitancy to commit to being nasty or poignant or disturbing. It has all the elements of a really mean little film, yet whenever the time comes to truly deliver on its promise of depravity and bad times, it doesn't follow through. There are scenes that should be highly tasteless and disturbing, but Findlay's direction gets so unsure and wavering whenever it should be ruthless that they don't have much of an effect at all. Which wouldn't be much of a problem if it were a sign of subtlety or class, but Tenement is the sort of film that succeeds or fails on pure meanness alone - if it doesn't make its viewers uncomfortable, it won't do much else than bore them.

It doesn't help at all that most of the film consists of scenes and scenes and scenes of the gang destroying furniture and banging against heaters or the tenants sitting around and not saying anything of import (character arcs are right out anyway), not activities I'd usually connect with tension or suspense.

The whole film just never really comes together, leaving what should be shocking and exhilarating just kind of boring and dispiriting.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,roberta findlay,in short

In short: Lurkers (1988)

Cathy (Dana Nardelli) has a fucked-up childhood in a brownstone somewhere in New York. When she is not enduring nightly visits by a bunch of ugly ghost or is abused by her mother with an iron, she's followed by a weird child (Lauren Ruane) who uses mind control hoodoo to bring people to kill her. Sometimes, an equally weird woman (Eva Baumann) gets into a staring contest with the ghost child and saves Cathy from the dangers of skipping rope strangulation. The poor girl's problems end with her mother murdering her father and then trying to kill her. Somehow, the nasty woman ends up with the knife in her chest herself.

Fifteen years later things seem to have turned around for the now grown-up Cathy (Christine Moore). She works as an enthusiastic if not successful cellist and is eloped to the photographer Don (Gary Warner). It all looks perfect, so why have the bad dreams about her childhood started again? And what exactly are the strange things Don is doing behind Cathy's back about? Is he "just" sleeping around as is his duty as a sleazebag photographer or is something more sinister going on?

These questions will actually be answered when Don drags Cathy to a party his business partner Monica (Marina Taylor) is giving in a building that turns out to be the same brownstone our heroine grew up in.

You can read a lot about how bad the horror films with which exploitation and sex film specialist Roberta Findlay ended her directing career are supposed to be, but Lurkers at least isn't half bad. The film does have some of the hallmarks of on the cheap filmmaking - especially a sloppy script in need of tightening up, a terrible synthie soundtrack and rather broad acting, but the film's crudeness of affect actually works to its advantage.

I found some scenes like Cathy's strange short odyssey through an artificial nightmare New York of Westside Story remnants and sledgehammer killers effectively disturbing in a way the memory of old childhood fears are disturbing. You know it's all bullshit, yet you still have a small, discomforting feeling somewhere in your stomach. While much of it consists of ideas cobbled together from more accomplished movies (Sergio Martino's All The Colours Of The Dark for example), Lurkers uses these ideas with workable blunt force by giving them a frisson of urban paranoia. The film's themes aren't all that well thought through, but they are potent nonetheless, and they possibly feel a little more dangerous because they aren't calculated too well.

What also bears mention is that Roberta Findlay was a hell of a photographer and editor, obviously hampered by low budgets and bad production conditions, yet still doing the best with the things she had, arriving at a nearly documentary feel, a naturalistic look on New York that can suddenly dissolve into a backyard version of surrealism.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,horror,roberta findlay