Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 21, 2003, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Despite what the title and cover tagline might have you believe, Oliver Twisted has nothing to do with Charles Dickens, though the story of its creation has a similar up-by-your-bootstraps vibe to some of his fiction. The movie was the creation of Florida Film Investment, a filmmakers’ consortium in which the crew bought shares in the project to build up the budget for this completely independent feature. It would be nice to report that their literal and figurative investment resulted in a unique and/or scary showcase for their abilities—but it’s unfortunately telling that, as one of the supplements reveals, Oliver was shot nearly seven years ago, and it ultimately fell to FFI to release the movie itself on DVD last fall.
The premise certainly has possibilities: Oliver (Jason McMahan) is a longtime coma patient taken in by his aunt and young cousins after years in an institution. A prologue establishes that Oliver gets murderously cranky if he ever wakes up, and once he has arrived at his new home, his aunt (Karen Black) goes out of town on a business trip, his college-aged cousin Livvy (Signé Kiesel) inexplicably starts adding her headache medicine to his IV drip, Oliver begins showing twitchy signs of life, a bunch of her school buddies show up…and you can guess the rest. Dumb youth hijinx, sporadic gory murders, occasional appearances by Oliver’s doctor (Erik Estrada) and a clumsily telegraphed climactic plot twist ensue.
For all the effort the creative team put into Oliver Twisted, the disc presentation is surprisingly lackluster. The 1.66:1 transfer is just OK; colors are soft and there’s quite a bit of grain and artifacting in the darker scenes, with the unidentified mono sound afflicted by frequent static. It scores better in the supplements department, leading off with an on-set report produced by a local cable station, which applies a hometown-boy-makes-good approach to its coverage of makeup FX artist-turned-director Dean Gates (who insists that Oliver’s script explores “what it means to be human”). Another segment takes a look at the movie’s own FX creator, Barry Anderson, and his work, and a “Behind the Scenes” featurette contains a number of entertaining moments, including a glimpse of Kiesel doing her lipstick using McMahan’s faux head plate as a mirror and a loopy interview with Black.
The packaging promises a “Master Class on Low Budget Filmmaking” with veteran Florida filmmaker William Grefé—who served as Oliver’s “special creative and production consultant”—and Gates. This turns out to actually be an audio commentary by the pair, and here, as on the discs of his own Sting of Death and other films (see reviews here), Grefé proves to be a great raconteur of low-budget tales. He takes every opportunity to relate Oliver production stories to experiences on his own movies, and drops choice anecdotes like the time he turned down fledgling actor Arnold Schwarzenegger for the lead in his Whiskey Mountain. Gates (who assisted Grefé early in his own career) also digresses to cover his past credits, while telling the occasional fun story about Oliver’s production (Estrada’s character’s desk was messy so the actor could hide his script pages there).
Yet paradoxically, the talk winds up being less interesting when it’s dealing with the movie at hand. Still, fans of Grefé and independent productions in general might consider this disc worth checking out.
