The Five Weirdest Forgotten Classics Of Australian Cinema
When we do weird, we do pretty bloody weird.
Patrick, Richard Franklin (1978)
Before Patrick was a victim of the film industry’s mania for remakes in 2013 (it got the full makeover with a leading Neighbours actress and everything), it was a sick, schlocky piece of kitsch. It takes guts to ripoff Hitchcock’s Psycho, but the original Patrick film did it without shame.
The premise is straight-up glorious: Patrick is a young, handsome, comatose vegetable who uses telekinesis to wreck havoc and control the new hot nurse he has a thing for at his hospital. As his backstory unravels, the whole thing gets increasingly, wonderfully sick and strange.
It’s tough not to be completely on board with a horror film in which a bunch of zombie-like elderly coma patients quietly intone, “Patrick wants a hand-job! Patrick wants a hand-job!” Yep, Patrick goes there. There’s weird nudity, freaky sex and shitloads of fake blood. There’s incest. And there’s an evil doctor who cruelly submits Patrick to electroshock. Just to top it off, it’s one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite Australian films. In the original script for Kill Bill Volume 1, The Bride’s eyes were wide open while she lay comatose just like Patrick, until Uma Thurman — who of course had no knowledge of Patrick and couldn’t understand the reference — said it was too weird and made no sense.
A shame. We need more horror and action films with a winking sense of humour about themselves. Patrick lays the template for that kind of lo-fi, unabashed trashy fun genre film.
WATCH IT: On secondhand DVD via Amazon.