Crew
Director – Roberta Findlay, Screenplay – R. Allen Leider, Producer – Walter E. Sear, Music – Michael Litovsky & Walter E. Sear, Special Effects – HorrorEFX. Production Company – Laurel Films Inc.
Cast
Caroline Capers Powers (Jennifer Jorgens), Roger Neil (Ray Jorgens), Pam La Testa (Farkas), Victoria Dryden (Dorothy Graham), Stacey Graves (Cindy Travis), G. Gordon Cronce (Ben Travis), Chris Maria de Koron (Pappas), Dan Lutzky (Tom Varney), Ethel Mark (Dr. Ryker), Einar O. Peterson (Occult Store Owner), Alexandra Blade (Tammy), Joan Leonard (Waitress), Irma St. Paule (Mrs Malatesta)
Plot
Husband and wife Ray and Jennifer Jorgens move into an apartment in New York City after the death of the previous owner Mrs Malatesta. Among the old lady’s things, Jennifer finds an ouija board that has a ceramic hand that conducts automatic writing. After trying it out at a party, Jennifer becomes insistent that the hand is alive but Ray ridicules this. The board however terrorises Jennifer and causes deaths of those around them. She realises that is communicating with the spirit of the late Walter Graham and that his recent death was a murder. However, when Graham’s killer Farkas realises that Jennifer knows this, she decides Jennifer must be eliminated.
The Oracle is one of the films of Roberta Findlay, a legendary figure in what people seem to want to refer to as grindhouse cinema. For much of the latter half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Roberta worked alongside her husband Michael Findlay as a cinematographer on numerous porn films where she frequently operated under male pseudonyms. Within genre material, she photographed and Michael directed Slaughter (1971), which was later reedited as Snuff (1976) and became arguably the world’s first Found Footage film, as well as his Bigfoot film Shriek of the Mutilated (1974). Michael was beheaded in a freak helicopter accident in 1977 and since then she carried on on her own. Roberta directed more than thirty porn films herself since 1966. Into the 1980s, she began to embrace the video revolution and left adult material to direct several low-budget horror films with Tenement (1985), Blood Sisters (1987), Lurkers (1987), Prime Evil (1988) and Banned (1989). By 1990, she appears to have retired from the film industry.
The Oracle was made not long after the new urban horrors of the 1980s created by Poltergeist (1982) and prefigures the use of the ouija board by Witchboard (1986). At this point, Parker Brothers owned the copyright on the ouija board and would not grant licence to filmmakers and so Findlay comes up with the cumbersome idea of a ceramic hand holding a giant feathered quill pen that writes on paper. Three decades on, Blumhouse would make Ouija (2014) and open the floodgates to a whole host of low-budget ouija-titled films where apparently Parker Brothers were not so stringent about copyright.
What makes The Oracle entertaining is the over-the-top Splatter and Makeup Effects. In the opening scenes, big overweight Pam La Testa picks up a hooker (Alexandra Blade) who is shocked upon reaching into Pam’s pants to find she is a chick rather than the dude she thought, whereupon Pam bloodily stabs her to death. As with most of other death set-pieces throughout, this has no relevance to much of anything else that occurs throughout.
In one of the more entertaining sequences, Caroline Capers Powers tries to throw the hand in the trash and is pursued through the living room of her apartment by a supernatural wind that throws all loose items, including books and a Christmas tree, at her and drags her backwards across the floor. This is capped a few minutes later by a scene where handyman Chris Maria de Koron takes the box to the basement and opens it, only to be attacked by crab-like things that ooze green goo and climb all over his skin, which he stabs at only to find that he is repeatedly stabbing himself.
There are assorted other equally deranged scenes – Pam La Testa turns up at the New Year’s party thrown by Caroline Capers Powers and husband and tries to kill Caroline in the kitchen as everyone else parties on oblivious, before Caroline pours the coffee pot in her face and batters her with a saucepan. Or where husband Roger Neil throws the box in the incinerator only for a pair of hands to appear up the chute and drag him inside. The climactic scenes involve Pam La Testa pursuing Caroline through a warehouse and being melted down after the murdered man’s ghost tempts her to puncture a can of toxic waste, and of Victoria Dryden being trapped in a car with the ghost of her husband.
Trailer here