Patrick Still Lives / Patrick Is Still Alive / Patrick Vive Ancora (1980) -***½
Patrick, the Australian shocker about the comatose psionic psycho who turns out to be far more aware of his surroundings than most of his caretakers recognize, was a bigger hit in Italy than anywhere else in the world, including even its country of origin. I wish I could offer you some kind of insight into why, but it’s as mysterious to me as any territory-specific success story in the annals of film. If you remember how Zombie happened, though, then you might already see where this is going. When no legitimate Patrick sequel was forthcoming from Down Under, producer Gabriele Crisanti took matters into his own hands by making a phony one just for the Italian market— and I really do mean just. Patrick Still Lives came out so stupid and sleazy as to be essentially unreleasable just about anywhere else. But if you’re the sort of person who enjoys the likes of SS Hell Camp and Strip Nude for Your Killer, then it’s also a must-see now that the boutique home video labels have come through once again by rescuing this pinheaded abomination from its richly deserved place in horror cinema’s trash heap.
I should specify right up front that the Patrick of Patrick Still Lives (Gianni Dei, of Sex, Demons, and Death and The Seventh Grave) is explicitly not the Patrick of Patrick. Instead, he’s the 20-something son of Dr. Herschel (Sacha Pitoëff, from Inferno and The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl), an experimental neurosurgeon. One day while Patrick and his dad are grappling with their broken-down car on a country roadside, a van-load of yahoos drive by, and one of them lobs an empty booze bottle out the window. The bottle conks Patrick right on the noggin, and although Dr. Herschel and one of his colleagues are able to save his life, that’s about all they manage to save of the lad. Unless some miraculous new treatment is developed in the future, Patrick can look forward to spending the rest of his life as a human vegetable.
Some time later, five variously nasty pieces of work arrive at the Herschel House wellness resort— and yes, that is indeed Herschel as in Dr. Herschel. There’s nothing wrong with any of these people that ought to require the services of such a place, but they were each ordered to report to the clinic by a letter from some mysterious blackmailer. Lyndon Kraft (the English subtitles on the Severin Blu-Ray disc bafflingly render his surname as “Cough” instead, but either way, he’s played by Franco Silva, from Spasmo and The Queen of Sheba) is a member of the House of Lords who owes more of his success than he’d care to admit in public to the strategically deployed infidelities of his much younger wife, Cheryl (Carmen Russo, of Girls Will Be Girls and The Porno Killers). David Davis (Paolo Giusti, from Spirits of the Dead and Taboo Island), championship swimmer and son of an important insurance tycoon, once fled the scene of a fatal accident. Stella Randolph (Mariangela Giordano, of Killer Barbys and The Mighty Ursus) is a former prostitute. And Peter Suniak (John Benedy, from The Devil’s Lover) is a thief and a drug dealer. None of them can think of any reason why their shadowy enemy should want them at Herschel House, and only Lyndon Kraft— who suspects Suniak on the grounds that he comes to dinner on their first night at the clinic wearing a pistol under his blazer— can venture even a guess as to who might be behind the strange extortion scheme.
Mind you, Dr. Herschel has something to hide himself, as Davis comes perilously close to discovering immediately upon his arrival, when he tries to enter the building through the wrong door. In a wing of Herschel House where not even the director’s secretary, Lydia Grant (Andrea Belfiore, from The Adventures of Hercules and Killing Striptease), is permitted to go, the doctor maintains a laboratory in which three people lie unconscious and wired up to some manner of electronic equipment, their bodies covered all over with horrid lesions. And in the adjoining room, wired up to a similar but smaller device, and looking altogether healthier into the bargain, is none other than Patrick. Evidently the doc has found, if perhaps not a miracle cure, then at least a tentative workaround for his son’s condition, for although the boy is only slightly more responsive to external stimuli than he was in the depths of his coma, whatever lifeforce or brain energy he’s siphoning from the trio in the other room has given him both a clairvoyant awareness of everything happening in and around the clinic and the psionic wherewithal to act on that awareness far beyond the confines of his sickbed.
It’ll be a while before any of this comes fully into focus (indeed, saying that it ever comes fully into focus is a major exaggeration), but there’s an intimate connection between the shady shit going on in the secret lab and the extortion plot against the Herschel House guests. Dr. Herschel himself is his ostensible customers’ unseen blackmailer, and whatever the text of those letters he sent might imply, his objective was merely to get the recipients together under his roof. That’s because he’s somehow convinced that one or another of them was the van-riding yahoo who threw the bottle that incapacitated Patrick. And because every last one of the suspects is some manner of enormous asshole on top of that, anyway, Herschel feels himself under no obligation to narrow down the lineup any further. Like Agatha Christie’s U.N. Owen, he’s summoned them all to die, in a setting where he can control how and when that happens. And the instrument of their deaths, aptly enough, will be Patrick himself, who has gained from his father’s experiments the power to do anything with his mind from boiling a swimming pool to inducing a feeding frenzy among the clinic’s guard dogs. There’s one rather important T that the vengeful doctor has neglected to cross, however. Naturally he can’t have witnesses to the goings on at Herschel House this weekend, so the plan was for Patrick to turn his deadly brain on the staff as well as the guests, eliminating assistants, orderlies, secretary, and even Meg the housekeeper (Blow Job’s Anna Bruna Gazzato). But Patrick has grown rather sweet on Lydia Grant since acquiring the ability to mentally eavesdrop anywhere in the clinic, and the only way he wants to use his powers on her is by planting salacious thoughts in her head or undressing her via telekinesis. If Dad thinks the girl is an acceptable collateral casualty of his revenge plot, he’s got another thing coming!
Even amid the output of a national film industry justly infamous for over-the-top portrayals of sexual violence, Patrick Still Lives stands out. Patrick Herschel is one horny and perverted motherfucker, and while all of the killings in this movie are extraordinarily cruel, the fates of the women are on an altogether higher plane of viciousness. I won’t go into detail, because you all deserve a chance to be as flabbergasted as I was, but between Patrick Still Lives and Burial Ground, Mariangela Giordano’s erogenous zones had a rough 1980! That surely wasn’t a coincidence, either, because the two films were sister productions of a sort. Although Burial Ground director Andrea Bianchi is nowhere to be found here, Gabriele Cristani produced both pictures, and Piero Regnoli wrote both scripts. (For that matter, much of Herschel House will look familiar to fans of Bianchi’s notorious zombie stinker, since the Villa Parisi, in the Roman suburb of Frascati, was that movie’s main shooting location as well.) And once again, Regnoli seems to have hoped that by making the violence as shockingly sleazy as possible, he could distract the audience from the utter nonsense of his plotting and characterization.
Nevertheless, I do have to give Regnoli just a tiny bit of credit, because the last thing I ever expected from a fake Patrick sequel was a fantastical riff on And Then There Were None. Furthermore, given the magnitude of Regnoli’s anti-talent, I can’t honestly claim, either, that I’d have liked it better if Patrick Still Lives had developed that premise in ways displaying the faintest semblance of plausibility. For instance, it’s never explained on what basis Dr. Herschel fingered his five guests as likely culprits in the Bottle-Tossing Incident, and it’s frankly impossible to imagine any set of circumstances that would make all of these people equally credible suspects. Looking at it from the other end, meanwhile, we never do learn what kind of blackmail Herschel was using on his targets, which makes it increasingly hard to swallow their willingness to keep hanging around a surely expensive private sanatorium while one after another of them succumbs to luridly inexplicable death. I mean, it isn’t as though Herschel House is located on an inaccessible island with no link to the mainland until the next boat arrives on Monday morning. At any point after the first victim boils alive in the swimming pool, the others could simply climb back into their cars and split! Nor is it obvious that the filmmakers recognized what a bunch of complete fuckers all the characters are apart from Lydia and perhaps Meg. Indeed, there are a handful of scenes, especially those in which David spars erotically with Stella, that make me think Regnoli and/or director Mario Landi expected us to find the man’s sneering misogyny relatable.
The most amusing failure of Patrick Still Lives, however, is Patrick himself. Strange as it is to say this about a pair of actors in roles that require them never to do anything, Gianni Dei is simply no Robert Thompson. In Patrick, Thompson was a genuinely uncanny presence, his unchanging, unfocused glare seeming at once totally mindless and infinitely malign. In Patrick Still Lives, Dei just looks like he wishes everyone would leave him alone to finish his nap. Also, Dei has absolutely the wrong face for this part. With his boyish cheeks, girlish lips, and flaxen blond hair, he already looks every inch the D-list pop singer that he’d become later in the decade. Compare that to the brutal angularity of Thompson’s features, and I think you’ll see why casting Dei would have been a mistake even if he were better at the paradoxical business of acting without moving. Then Landi makes it even worse with his chosen gimmick to indicate the exercise of Patrick’s powers in faraway parts of the clinic, superimposing Dei’s eyes over the action much as the Halperin brothers did with Bela Lugosi’s eyes in White Zombie. Dei, as if this needed to be said, is no more a fit substitute for Bela Lugosi than he is for Robert Thompson. Heavy-lidded and long-lashed, his are the eyes of a male Luciana Paluzzi, and if there’s any gaze less scary to see peering out at you from the darkness, I can’t imagine whose it could be.
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