PATRICK STILL LIVES! *** Italy 1980 Dir: Mario Landi 92 mins
A notoriously bizarre and debauched Italian “sequel” to the popular – but frankly boring – Australian chiller PATRICK, with a beguilingly sleazy build-up (“Screaming women make me nervous!”) paying off with astonishing second half. Professor Sacha Pitoeff (the best monobrow in the business!) invites the people responsible for his son’s vegetative state to his private villa and, while the miserable bunch (a hooker, an MP and his busty trophy wife) bitch about each other, the wide-eyed bed-ridden Patrick (Gianni Dei) graduates from telekinetically lifting the skirt of a pretty housekeeper to overheating the pool so a guest’s skin falls off.
The dialogue is reliably hilarious (sample: “It is clear Mr Gough’s death was due to a fatality…”) and, along with gratuitous cat-fights, helps fill time before characters find disembowelled animals in the fridge and get hung on meat hooks. Landi delivers one of the more extreme moments of sexual violence in the early 80’s Italian cycle: the sluttiest character is vaginally penetrated by a supernaturally controlled sword that exits from her mouth in a possible ode to CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. All the film’s female characters (and one male) have full nude scenes, though the highlight for flesh fans has Patrick commanding the lovely, albeit hairy-beavered, Andrea Belfiore to strip, strum herself silly and gyrate around his bed. Another leering set piece for deviants everywhere, with further beaver shots, has a naked woman savaged by German Shepherds, and there’s a show-stopping car-window beheading.
Review by Steven West