My review was written in July 1987 after watching the movie on USA video cassette.
"The Oracle" covers familiar horror ground with a supernatural tale of a dead spirit contacting the living to enact posthumous revenge. Pic was made in New York in 1984, released regionally last year and now in video stores.
Plotline is similar to the subsequent hit "Witchboard": heroine Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) finds an old crate containing a planchette (generic form of a Ouija board, made of a sculpted hand and quill pen). At a Christmas dinner party she and husband Ray (Roger Neil) plus another couple try out the instruments, but no one except Jennifer believes the resulting spirit messages it traces. The ghost is businessman William Graham, murdered bu covered up by his wife Dorothy (Victoria Dryden) as a suicide. Jennifer starts "seeing" the actual muder and when she contacts Dorothy she is trgeted as the nex hushup victim.
Though the monster and gore effects are unsatisfactory in this low-budgeter, it sports one neat twist: Dorohty's chief henchman turns out to be a large, chubby woman. As portrayed by Pam LaTesta, this thug i filmmaker Roberta Findlays' main point of interest, styled mannishly (an updated version of the late Madame Spivy), she is androgynous for the first few reels, picking up a prostitute whom she bloodily slashes when mocked for being unable (natch) to "perform". It turns out to be a fresh approach to the slasher cliche and the horror genre's fondness for transvestite villains. Rest of the cast is unimpressive.
"The Oracle" covers familiar horror ground with a supernatural tale of a dead spirit contacting the living to enact posthumous revenge. Pic was made in New York in 1984, released regionally last year and now in video stores.
Plotline is similar to the subsequent hit "Witchboard": heroine Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) finds an old crate containing a planchette (generic form of a Ouija board, made of a sculpted hand and quill pen). At a Christmas dinner party she and husband Ray (Roger Neil) plus another couple try out the instruments, but no one except Jennifer believes the resulting spirit messages it traces. The ghost is businessman William Graham, murdered bu covered up by his wife Dorothy (Victoria Dryden) as a suicide. Jennifer starts "seeing" the actual muder and when she contacts Dorothy she is trgeted as the nex hushup victim.
Though the monster and gore effects are unsatisfactory in this low-budgeter, it sports one neat twist: Dorohty's chief henchman turns out to be a large, chubby woman. As portrayed by Pam LaTesta, this thug i filmmaker Roberta Findlays' main point of interest, styled mannishly (an updated version of the late Madame Spivy), she is androgynous for the first few reels, picking up a prostitute whom she bloodily slashes when mocked for being unable (natch) to "perform". It turns out to be a fresh approach to the slasher cliche and the horror genre's fondness for transvestite villains. Rest of the cast is unimpressive.