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

Get it at Amazon.

The damned thing is that Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing has the nerve to call itself an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story. In that 1894 tale, a group of men in a cabin hear a chilling account of the death of a man by an unseen force in the forest that ripped him to shreds. In this hourlong film … well, at least someone gets ripped to shreds. Similarities, you end there.

This Thing opens 24 years ago, when – shortly after black goo drips from the ceiling – a dad goes nuts, shoots his wife dead and almost kills his son, too, but he gets eviscerated and does whirly-loops as his guts spill out on the ground.

Surviving Kid grows up to be a small-town sheriff with a permanent limp, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (TV’s The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), and his obsession with events of the past have driven off his button-cute wife (Marisa Coughlan of Freddy Got Fingered) and their only child. At least he has a right to be, because with the anniversary of That Night coming up, the people around town are starting to act crazy.

How crazy? Oh, like kill-yourself-with-repeated-blows-of-a-hammer crazy.

With a script by Richard Christian Matheson (Nightmare Cinema), The Damned Thing errs in many ways, including trying to find a credible explanation for the monster. Bierce’s was ingenious, revealing only that it exists in a plane of color human eyes cannot see, but this show leaves nothing to the imagination, giving us a Sandman-style petroleum-based beast.

Director Tobe Hooper — responsible for two certifiable scare classics (Poltergeist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, of course) and flicks on the other end of the quality spectrum – is not at the top his game here, although production values are strong. His camera forever swirls about, scenes go on too long and – worst of all – it isn’t the least bit frightening. He gets off a couple of good gross-outs – the aforementioned toolbox murder and an encounter with a car-crash victim – but that’s about it.

Bierce’s story would be challenging for anyone to adapt without going into it knowing it’s all in the suggestion. But the Masters of Horror team has made so many alterations, the title no longer fits. Even if it weren’t based on a pre-existing piece of literature, the Thing has little life to it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” not Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”? When it’s Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat, of course. Nary a soul should be startled by that, given the director’s history with others’ intellectual property. (This is where you Google “cozzilla.”) However, with Poe’s bibliography residing whole-hog in the public domain, anyone can make a Poe adaptation or — as Cozzi has done here, following in AIP’s financially viable footsteps — just slap Poe’s name on a movie simply for salability’s sake.

Hey, at least Cozzi includes a black cat!

Filmmaker Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini of Lamberto Bava’s Demons) has written a sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria centering on the witch Levana. And who better to play the goop-drooling, pustule-faced “mother of madness” than his own actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin of Jess Franco’s Faceless)?

Almost immediately, Anne starts encountering visions of Levana, starting with that butt-ugly witch — whose bumpy-lumpy face looks like a sweeps-week stunt for Dr. Pimple Popper — leaping through a mirror. Frightening as that brush with delusion may be, Anne returns to that deep dark truthful mirror night after night. More creepy crap happens around her, from a refrigerator’s produce sparking with electric jolts to a professor’s stomach exploding.

Being set in the world of making movies, The Black Cat is a movie that makes references to other movies. The most overt is when Marc’s screenwriting partner (the Gene Siskel-esque Maurizio Fardo of Enzo G. Castellari’s Escape from the Bronx) name-checks Suspiria, to which Anne replies, “That title rings a bell” as Goblin’s spooky, bell-ridden theme gets needle-dropped on the soundtrack.

Cozzi goes crazy with the saturated color gels of Argento and Mario Bava, but if there’s one director he’s ripped off more, it’s himself! It appears he’s recycled the box of Christmas-ornament spacescapes from his Hercules twofer and/or Starcrash, not to mention the latter’s leading lady (Caroline Munro, sexy as ever) and, finally, Contamination’s alien eggs for Levana’s Oxy 10-ready, pox-a-poppin’ skin. Mind you, these are all welcome elements of cut-rate creativity; and with The Black Cat and Paganini Horror arriving the same year, Cozzi clearly was on a roll — hopefully garlic-buttered. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.