A friend, I use the term loosely now gave me a copy of the movie Oral Fixation to watch, his vivid descriptions told me I needed to see this movie. A quick scan of the Internet led my down a path I never expected, and as a result forced me to see the movie as soon as I could.
Oral Fixation might not deliver what some people expected to see, nothing to do with sex the oral fixation of the movies title revolves around a woman called Rachel Marks who has become obsessed with her dentist Paul. Having potentially seen him once (legitimately perhaps), Rachel then starts mutilating her mouth in order to get emergency dental treatment and to spend more time with Paul. Suffering a strange impairment Rachel feels no pain so can both mutilate her mouth, and have surgery without anaesthetic, in fact she seems to receive sexual stimulation from it. Paul seemingly has a bit of infidelity in his past so when the wacky Rachel starts making bogus accusations about there relationship all believe he is up to his old tricks. While the world turns on Paul, its only he who sees how dangerous she truly could be.
Now you could be fooled into thinking that my brief synopsis has the ability to make the movie very good, you could almost compare it to Fatal Attraction. Oral Fixation however is right at the bottom end of the spectrum, as the first twenty minutes of the movie slip by the movie suddenly transforms into a story of genetic science gone wrong, where a sadistic parent alters the internal organs of his daughter and messing with her head. Chuck in the mix a private investigator who actually turns out to be the previous victim of Rachel when she lived under a different name and you have a recipe for disaster.
I have had to sit and watch a lot of bad movies this year, but without a doubt Oral Fixation is the worst. The story veers out of control very quickly after its begun, nudged on by some of the most awful acting performances I have ever seen. Having been dragged down by the movies actors its then finished off by the writer/directors inability to work with one idea at a time, the movie ends far differently to how it began, and the movies title turns out to be a shambles when the “Oral Fixation” element is completely abandoned within minutes of the movies opening. Time would have been far better spent showing the slow progression of Rachel’s insanity as she moves from patient to stalker, to killer rather than making the movie transform into a tale of a scientific experiment gone terribly wrong.
Actress Emily Parker (I use the term actress loosely also) is the most disturbing aspect of the movie, she is just awful and her terrible performance from the offset turns the movie from potentially intriguing thriller to diabolical comedy. Her depiction of someone mentally ill has a very realistic ring about it, not from the performance point of view; I actually believe the actress herself could have a few issues.
Now the movie is clearly a low budget offering, but there is low budget and then there is low budget, and its difficult to actually figure out how many dollars it took to put this together, the answer presumably would equal less than a thousand dollars. The actors of the movie clearly have no real training, the director Jake Cashill apparently I well respected, but I suspect that these are fictionalised accreditations as he too clearly has no decent training in direction or screenwriting, he certainly does not have a clue how to lead his cast into a believable performance.
Where Oral Fixation however gets interesting is on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). Amazingly the movie scores (at the time of writing) a score of 3.9, and I found this difficult to believe because some big budget blockbusters score nowhere near this score. Then there are the reviews from supposed film fans, stating how amazing the movie is, how convincing the performers. Now I know, for a certainty that my views on this movie are nothing down to personal taste, this movie truly is awful, and I do not believe that anyone could watch this and find anything more positive than I have said about the film, I think I have been fairly decent to this atrocity. In the forums the truth probably lies, that friends, family and those that worked on the movie have written bogus reviews to raise the potential viewers expectations of the film. Then finally the nail in the coffin a statement from the writer/director Jake Cashill who claims that the version available at present was released by a professional rival (why anyone would align themselves to be a rival with this), Cashill then goes on to write that the version available illegally, is a very rough cut and the proper release will be out very soon. Cashill is fooling himself if he thinks people believe this, rough cuts do happen but would you honestly do a complete re-cut of the entire movie? Because that’s what Oral Fixation needs. I would be more inclined to believe that Cashill himself released a screener and it met with such fierce criticism that he has decided to withdraw the work, but the pirates got to the screener first and is being downloaded by people who never researched the movie instead going from its title. Whichever the case may be, I think on the credibility from Cashill will find it very difficult to recover from this, and I’d not be surprised if this transpires to be his final feature.
