The Refrigerator (1991)

 

Director: Nicholas Jacobs

Screenplay: Nicholas Jacobs (with Christopher Oldcorn, Nicholas Jacobs and Philip Dolin)

Cast: Julia McNeal as Eileen Bateman; Dave Simonds as Steve Bateman; Phyllis Salaberrios as The Mysterious Tanya; Angel Caban as Juan the Plumber; Nena Segal as Eileen's Mother; Jaime Rojo as Paolo the Paolo's Assistant; Alex Trisano as Hector; Peter Justinus as Mr. Walters

An Abstract Candidate / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #240

 

I am the Waffle Maker!

We can dig through any era, and we can find oddities like this. The concern, however, is always whether you end up with something that, despite its premise, is a dull film which squanders its material, or if something actually weird with virtue exists in those lucky, to which for all its flaws, The Refrigerator is with merit. It if has been made slightly, there would have been more of a risk of getting a work made with more irony, which unfortunately can go hand-in-hand with for poorly produced work, or a lack of engagement with the narrative as it is merely a platform for the ironic take on the material. Here, the genre and tone is difficult to pin down, despite the film being a horror comedy, and it is incredibly rewarding with this in mind.

Noticeably this belongs to the same early nineties era where you would get the likes of The Dark Backwards (1991), lower budget genre films but ones which are truly odd with the additional value of having some production to them and inventive styles. Starting with a simple premise - newlyweds Eileen Bateman (Julia McNeal) and Steve Bateman (Dave Simonds) move into a street in a less than stellar apartment - you do have to accept the premise is about an evil refrigerator that is also a portal to Hell. This is absurd, and makes me wonder it is one of the gates of Hell in the same way they appeared in a Lucio Fulci film, but in probably the cleverest decision the creators could make, they made this a metaphor of the anxieties and fear of permanent domestication of the wife Eileen.

With the opening credits even including classic advertising of refrigerators from the nineteen fifties, usually of content housewives with their sons, Eileen desires to become an actress on Broadway, all whilst becoming alarmed that her husband, brainwashed by the evil kitchen appliance, is acting weird. He is act like the all-perfect husband who talks about having a family, all whilst Eileen is stuck at home, as Juan the plumber (Angel Caban) points out, where one becomes addicted to destructive vices like drinking or daytime TV. Wanting to be alive, Eileen's home is hell, the fridge feeding her nightmares of motherhood and her own complicated childhood, with the absurdity of a person eating hellhole fridge actually becoming a great symbol of the kind of object. Once a new and exciting in nineteen fifties America and the nuclear family, they were an object women were told to like as housewives. Think Douglas Sirk, specifically the scene in All That Heaven Allows (1955) where Jane Wyman's lead is given a television to keep her occupied from her real concerns and desired, but interpreted by a silly, weird b-cinema premise and it works.

To bear in mind, for as much of this is horror, with nightmare sequences and the fridge eating people, only by the final when other appliances come to life and a gore moment Fulci would have shot transpires involving fans transpires does this really get over-the-top. Even if you get a lot of horror imagery - a literal walk through to a gate to Hell, the fridge bleeding or seeping melting red liquid - it is contrasted by off-kilter drama with a dry comedy, with Eileen's husband seeing tiny men in his refrigerator wearing smoking dressing gowns. As they tell him to act as if age old gender roles still actually have importance, and fixate on brownnosing his new boss uselessly, he becomes more detestable and cold as he goes on. In fact, the film, when reflected on, clearly has it the appliance is drawing and using a person's subconscious, so the trajectory of Steve Bateman is even more cynically humorous in that his turn is likely as much his worse side, and fixations of children and cooking waffles, are allowed to come out.

The refrigerator is already suspicious, even without the prologue of it eating the previous apartment owners, when cheese and ice cream miraculously appear it. Enticing as that can be, until you get your hand stuck to the ice cream frozen inside, very early on it is clear this is an insidious creation which toys with people from mind control to inducing hallucinations. Even an aspect which would be problematic within another film, a white couple who move into a mostly non-white community, any concern that it plays to their possible paranoia is not here. Even the one stereotype or two, mostly the young woman who proclaims mystical warnings to Eileen, does not negate that this never gets into any subliminal theme on this barring two people from Ohio moving to New York City and one of them, Eileen, growing whilst the image of suburbia in the fridge is the real threat.

Someone like Juan, a Bolivian immigrant who was a flamenco dancer in his homeland, really adds a weight to a silly premise just in the fact that, instantly likeable, his chemistry with Eileen grows as they bond and talk. Whilst it jars at points for the main plot, least in terms of being over the top even in this plot, her life is depicted as always having been complicated, more so with the (vague but fascinating) aspect of a dominating mother who willing threatens to stab herself to her traumatised young child. That said mother is clearly a damaged woman, whose mental faculties collapsed due to having a child and being a housewife at too young an age, really adds a dark touch to what is mostly a simplistic narrative as well as making a one dimensional stereotype have a moment of sympathetic complexity. Eileen's trajectory, whilst in a less than coordinated film, is still a narrative of her having to deal with the baggage of her life until finding a better one, pretty noble for any film to tackle let alone a weird one.

In terms of style, it is primarily a conventional work, but it is notable how at times the film shows quirks. Some are childish (strategically references squeezing of melons) to a great sense of absurd eeriness, when the camera suddenly moves to make the kitchen alienating or how, when the fridge does move, there is (if funny) a sense of alarm in a giant American refrigerator lunging about. Even the score, which contrasts Latin American music with post glam metal cheesy guitar licks, adds a character to this. Sadly, director Nicholas Jacobs did not make many films. A straight-to-video work, this could have had a cult legacy, but fortune was not kind to this film, left to languor in obscurity. A shame for a film this eccentric is the kind that would benefit from a cult film screening, alongside the material which can be read within this which is inspired.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None