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...

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.