From 1978, the Australian horror-thriller Patrick is recognized as a high point of Ozploitation. Its unofficial, unauthorized, unbelievable sequel, 1980’s Patrick Still Lives, is not. For one thing, it’s made by the Italians. For another, it’s a festival of sleaze — the kind of movie where one character screams to another, “Get away from me before I catch syphilis from you!”
So, yeah, you might just love it.
In the quick-as-an-orgasm prologue, a young man named Patrick (Gianni Dei, reuniting with his Giallo in Venice director, Mario Landi) tends to his stalled automobile when he’s hit in the face by a bottle thrown from a passing car. Cut to: Patrick’s in a coma and under the care of his father, Dr. Herschel (Sacha Pitoeff, Dario Argento’s Inferno), whose unibrow makes him look like the progeny of Buster Poindexter and a Monchhichi.
Dr. Herschel lives in and runs the Herschel Wellness Resort, an inexplicable combination of medical clinic and vacation hot spot, where the unblinking, nostrils-flaring Patrick lies motionless in a private wing. Five people arrive at the doc’s invitation for a leisurely weekend, including an alcoholic member of Parliament (Franco Silva, Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo) who’s more partial to a bottle of J&B, the workingman’s friend, than to his walking hourglass of a wife (Carmen Russo, Lady Football), whose off-the-charts sex appeal decreases only slightly due to her smoker’s teeth.
As becomes apparent, Landi and screenwriter Piero Regnoli (Nightmare City) draw very little from the ’78 Patrick beyond “borrowing” its prostrate protagonist — a concept they wedge into the template of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (but more like half a dozen, given the budget). Before Patrick uses his comatose mind powers to pick off cast members with a boiling swimming pool and rolled-up car window, he uses them to engage in silly parlor tricks like breaking stemware, shaking shrubbery and typing a memo via the hunt-and-peck method.
Had Landi stopped there, we viewers of Patrick Still Lives could say, “Well, that was fun,” and go on with our lives. However, Landi did not stop there. Notoriously, Patrick psychically seduces the doctor’s secretary (Andrea Belfiore, Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules II) into stripping nude, slamming her pubic thatch against his bedpost and masturbating on the couch. Even most notoriously is what Patrick has in store for the character played by Maria Angela Giordan; having her breast bitten off in Burial Ground (shot in the same mansion) is nothing compared to being raped — and then skewered rotisserie-style — by a floating fireplace poker. The effect couldn’t look more fake, yet it shocks nonetheless. —Rod Lott