Patrick vive ancora / Patrick Lives Again

One of the defining features of the Italian popular cinema of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was the filone or tributary approach: Take a successful film, or one that you expected to be successful, and produce an unofficial sequel, remake or reinterpretation hopefully close enough to the original to fool audiences whilst sufficiently different to avoid legal issues.

As its title suggests Patrick Still Lives / Patrick vive ancora is a classic example of the filone principle in action, its specific inspiration being Richard Franklin’s Australian production Patrick.

For those unfamiliar with the original it’s the story of a man named Patrick who is 1) in a coma, 2) has telekinetic powers, and 3) uses these to force his nurse to love him and 4) kill anybody else who gets in his way of his schemes.

Although not a big hit internationally, it must have presumably been a success in Italy; certainly the Italian distributors found it worthwhile enough to replace the original soundtrack with one by Argento associates and soundtrack specialists Goblin.

Director Mario Landi, writer Piero Regnoli and producer Gabriele Crisanti’s film cannot really be considered a sequel to Patrick, however. For English and Italian titles aside, it doesn’t follow on from Franklin’s film but rather takes the first three core elements from Patrick; adds a revenge plot justification to the fourth by way of Ten Little Indians.

Above all, it also ups the sleaze and splatter to levels that are extreme even by the standards of Italian exploitation, if also consistent with such other Crisanti productions as Giallo a venezia and Zombie Nights of Terror / Zombie 3.

Patrick vive ancora begins with Patrick (Gianni Dei) and his father Professor Herschell (Sacha Pitoeff) stuck in the middle of nowhere, their car having broken down. Patrick tries to flag down a passing vehicle for assistance, and gets a bottle in the face for his troubles.

We then cut to an operating theatre as a surgeon operates to save his Patrick’s life. He succeeds after a fashion – Patrick (still) lives (again), but in a comatose state.

Although it is never explained exactly how, Patrick then develops telekinetic powers, further fuelled by some of the other patients Professor Herschell has taken on at his private clinic, the interior and grounds of which should prove familiar to any student of Italian trash and which also feature prominently in Zombie 3.

During this time, the professor has also discovered the identities of six possible bottle throwers, whom he has now invited to spend a few days at the clinic in order that he and his son may extract their revenge...

For now, however, the filmmakers wisely allow for a spot of character development, in order that we know the guests are all hateful bourgeois figures who deserve to die in nasty ways – even if at least five of them are innocent in Patrick’s specific case.

This also affords them the opportunity to have the female cast members parade around in states of nakedness or threw something on and nearly missed-ness, and for everybody to down copious quantities of J&B and bitch at one another.


The obligatory catfight and one of a number of J&B bottles

The first to die is the improbably named Mr Cough, a politician. Going for a night swim, he is boiled alive by Patrick. Cough’s J&B consumption then becomes relevant, as Professor Herschell (Sacha Pitoeff) explains away Cough’s death as having been brought on by his alcoholism; the other guests seem to accept this.


Caused by drinking, apparently.

There’s a certain irony here in that, according to Argento, who worked with Pitoeff on Inferno, the actor was himself something of a drunk at this point in his life and career; brave souls may wish to suggest a double-bill of Patrick vive ancora and Last Year at Marienbad to Pitoeff fans.

Next up is Mr Davis, who gets a hook through his neck as he is hung up over a well.

Davis is soon discovered by Stella Randolph (Mariangela Giordano – Crisanti’s wife and a regular in his films). She flees in terror to the kitchens, where she finds a flayed cat in the fridge (a nice inversion of Giallo a Venezia, where Giordano’s character’s torso was left in a fridge for her cleaner to find) and is then menaced and killed by a long poker which, well, pokes her through the vagina and exits out her mouth.


The flayed cat


The reaction shot


An understandable response to being penetrated by a poker


The result


Another reaction shot

But while the sex-violence-sleaze interface is a constant in Crisanti’s productions, it seems more determined by shock value than anything else; certainly the ridiculousness of the special effects here creates a markedly different impression than the rather more plausible looking impaled woman in Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust.

Professor Herschell informs the other guests that the police have been called and that they will have to stay at the villa until the authorities arrive.

Next we get another bit of character and plot development as Patrick uses his powers to force secretary Lidya to strip and masturbate for him.

This is character and plot development in that it later transpires that Lidya is amongst the suspected bottle throwers, and that her fate is a source of potential conflict between Patrick and his father. Not, of course, that you can expect any exchanges of dialogue between them over this...


Lydia and Patrick, and the purple and green





Before we get to the denouement, however, there are still other suspects for Patrick to remorselessly, relentlessly dispose of: One woman is guillotined by her car windows, while another (again servant rather than a guest) has her throat torn out by her Alsatians.

The hint of a connection to Argento’s Inferno and Suspiria is further reinforced by the neo-expressionist purple and green lighting that signify Patrick’s presence and power within his own chamber and the set-pieces. This is, however, about the only evidence of directorial flair in the film, which is otherwise efficiently and functionally – read cheaply – put together.

Curiously, however, we don’t see what happens to the man who discovers the woman’s severed head.

Does he live or die? Or was he never a suspect, which is possible given that by now we’ve got more potential bottle throwers than we need? Or did the filmmakers just run out of budget and/or ideas as far as presenting another imaginatively gory demise?

Certainly there is a sense of anti-climax to what follows, particularly given that we still don’t know who in fact threw that fateful bottle...

Patrick viva ancora / Patrick Lives Again

Let’s get this out of the way first: I like Patrick Lives Again.

Yes, it’s ultra-trashy and ultra-sleazy.

Yes, it has no real drama or suspense, with a cast of uniformly unpleasant and bitchy characters / victims whom you just want to die, preferably slowly and painfully.

But, it’s also so single minded in delivering the exploitation goods, in terms of gory death scenes, copious nudity and a close-to-hardcore masturbation sequence, that I can’t but warm to it, whatever criticisms may be levelled from a more conventional perspective.

As an in-name and theme only sequel to the Australian Patrick, about a man in a coma who has telekinetic powers, which he uses against those he dislikes – primarily his rivals for a nurse’s love – it’s a prime example of filone production.

For, with the original Patrick hardly setting international box office records, one can only assume that in Italy the film – bolstered by a Goblin soundtrack, in place of the non-Queen Brian May original – did well enough to warrant the unofficial sequel / remake treatment, or that the cost of the film was such that pre-sales, based on its exploitative content and name, were sufficient to cover the initial financial outlay and make Patrick viva ancora all but inevitable.

As it is, the outlay seems somewhat minimal, with one location, the same country house seen in producer Gabriele Crisanti’s Zombie: Nights of Terror; a relatively small, mostly no-name cast, with the ever-enthusiastic Mariangela Giordano probably coming free / cheap on account of being Crisanti’s lover, while Gianni Dei, also seen in the producer's sleaze giallo Giallo a Venezia, as Patrick has exactly one line of dialogue before being confined to a comatose state; and a low effects budget that shows.

The last aspect is also what stops the film, along with like many Italian horror films of the period, from being hard to take. Though one victim is speared through the vagina by a poker which exits out her mouth and another is boiled alive in a swimming pool, the unconvincing nature of the respective aftermaths, with all too obviously plastic heads and bodies, allows for further viewer distance; Cannibal Holocaust it is not.

The charge of unconvincing effects could, admittedly, be levelled at Argento’s Inferno, as another obvious intertext through the presence of Sacha Pitoeff as Patrick’s father, Dr Hershell – one assumes the allegedly alcoholic actor, best known for his work in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, needed the money – the glass guillotining death of another victim, and a neo-expressionist use of colour.

But Argento’s film creates a world of its own in a way that Patrick Lives Again does not, the sickly purple and green of the laboratory in which Patrick and three other patients are held included, precisely because it is such a one-off.

In Inferno every camera movement, every detail, means something.

Here, by contrast, nothing really means anything, except for the gore and nudity it affords.

But, if it’s thereby meaningless it’s also so, so entertaining if you're in the right mood...

Malabimba / Satan's Baby Doll

What we have here are two films made for the same producer, trash-king Gabriele Crisanti, with the same lead actress, Crisanti's then-wife Mariangela Giordano, playing naughty nuns, by two brothers, Andrea and Mario Bianchi.




Many of these names appear in both films' credits

Moreover 1979's Malabimba and 1982's Satan's Baby Doll also utilise the same atmospheric castle exteriors and interiors and tell more or less identical stories of an innocent young woman's possession by a malign, vengeance-seeking spirit; that this innocent is played by different actresses – Katell Laennec in Malabimba, JJacqueline Dupré in Satan's Baby Doll – is perhaps explicable on account of the three-year gap between the productions and the correspondingly limited range of 'barely legal' looking talent the filmmakers could draw upon and then discard.

This 'fresh flesh' aspect, in turn emphasises another aspect that only adds to the viewers' confusion, with both films also existing in softcore and hardcore versions.

Though I viewed the latter versions, released on DVD by Severin, the hardcore footage is hardly essential in either occasion, being very much comprised of obvious inserts where you never see any shots actually attach the sets of genitalia seen in the penetration shots to the name performer like Aldo Sambrell (Baby Doll's drug addicted, wife-murdering paterfamilias) they are supposed to belong and where the money shots that would be foregrounded in a conventional porn production of the period are conspicuously absent.



The bear


The teddy bear...


Attraction and repulsion, sex and violence...

Following from this it's probably fair to say that the softcore versions – which still include plenty of female nudity, masturbation and faux lesbian activity – better represent the filmmakers' intentions, were it not for the fact that their intention was plainly to make as commercial a film as possible.

Plot- and character-wise there's not a lot to be said: the basic rule is that all the male characters are unpleasant and the females sex-crazed, either in their own right or through possession, with the narratives in both cases progressing through a succession of sexual and/or supernatural encounters that frequently precipitate the deaths of those involved – including, in both films, by blow-job and plunge from a height.

There are however a few moments amid the zoom and close-up dominated mise en scène in both films that hint at a aspiration to do a touch more than get the film in the can.




The female voyeur; no doubt we could also talk about the barred signifier here...


In Malambima, for instance, one of the sex scenes with Webley takes place on a bearskin rug which the camera zooms in on. It seems odd at first, but then allows for a neat connection to be made with the following sequence in which the confused Bimba, who had been secretly observing her aunt, indulges in a spot of frottage with her teddy bear – before taking a knife to it.

It's the kind of thing which recalls Jess Franco at his best, where the bold improvisation and experimentation lead further into the kind of psychosexual territory than most filmmakers would be willing to venture.

The séance is also well presented, though the lowest common denominator aspect again inevitably comes through when one of the presence's first manifestations is to make Webley's breasts fall out of her dress – not that they needed much help, since her costumes admittedly tend to be of the threw something on and nearly missed varietal...




The agony and the ecstasy as Sister Sofia is assaulted by the presence...

Satan's Baby Doll is the more atmospheric and effective of the films on the whole, in large part because its score is both better suited to the material and more stylistically coherent and consistent, with gentle Beyond-style piano and vocal pieces that build to harder rocking crescendos as required. Malabimba by contrast uses a less well matched selection of cues plainly culled from the library, with several familiar from other (Andrea) Bianchi entries including Strip Nude for Your Killer and Zombie: Nights of Terror.


An image that incorporates lesbianism, necrophilia and satanism...

The most consistently impressive aspects of both Malabimba and Satan's Baby Doll are Giordano's performances. It's not just the evident commitment and lack of inhibition with which she strips off and gets down to business, but also the sense of distress and despair that pervades her delivery, gestures and expressions. She really makes you believe that she knows she shouldn't be doing these things but just cannot help herself – a state of mind perhaps curiously reminiscent of that of the Eurotrash fan himself, who knows that these films aren't great art by any means, but nevertheless can't help falling under their spell...

Giallo a Venezia / Thrilling in Venice

Widely acknowledged as one of the sleaziest and nastiest films of its type, producer Gabriele Crisanti and director Mario Landi's Giallo a Venezia / Thrilling in Venice lives up to its billing, conjuring up visions of the city as a place of decaying buildings and stinking canals rather than as the home of romantic idylls.

The police, led by the perpetually boiled-egg eating Inspector De Pol (Jeff Blynn, who looks like a Miami Vice prototype and now seems to run a restaurant in Italy) are called in when the bodies of a couple are found and the higher-ups become concerned that it might not be good for the city's image.

The cadavers soon prove the least of the tourist board's worries, however, as De Pol's convoluted investigations reveal a case involving drug addiction; sexual humiliation; blackmail and obsession and – worse - precipitate a chain of gruesome murders as the killer attempts to cover their tracks and tie up any loose ends.

A prostitute is repeatedly stabbed in the groin with a pair of scissors, while one acquaintance of the deceased couple is burned alive and another (Mariangela Giordano) has her leg sawn off.

Curiously, there is perhaps an affinity with the structure of the film and the similarly genre referencing La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pjyama Girl Case in this regard - even if Flavio Mogherini's film is an an entirely different level of dramatic accomplishment.

For while Landi manages the occasional nice visual touch, like reflecting the action in the killers' mirrored subglasses at one point, his handling is uninspired for the most part, the emphasis squarely on delivering as much softcore sex and hardcore violence as could be gotten away with – although with the sex scenes having potential for inserts, in both senses of that term, one would not be surprised if there was an alternate cut that inverted this emphasis out there somewhere.

Unfortunately the effectiveness of the pice as both porn and splatter is also compromised by the overall attractiveness of the participants and less than convincing splatter effects, especially when compared with the more (in)famous likes of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper.

On the plus side Berto Pisano's score, which sounds as though it has been appropriated for another production, is enjoyably inappropriate even as the syrupy romantic and breezy big band lounge themes contribute still more to the “need a shower now" ambience of the whole.

The same can perhaps be said of the grainy, scratchy, pan and scan version I watched, which adds to the illicit aura in a way that a remastered, restored DVD would not. Nevertheless, if any enterprising DVD companies are listening, one would nevertheless be nice, so long as it is not at the expense of the dozens of more worthy titles out there - there is something wrong with the marketing and licensing situation when it is easier to get good quality discs of “Crisanti trash" like Zombie: Nights of Terror and Patrick viva ancora than most of Riccardo Freda's output.