NFSA SAR FELLOWSHIP
Title No: 42718
W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
PATRICK (1978)
Umbrella DVD (region 4) / Synergy DVD (region 1)
d. Richard Franklin; pr. Antony I. Ginnane, Richard Franklin; scr. Everett DeRoche; ph. Donald McAlpine; m. Brian May; ed. Edward McQueen-Mason; cast. Susan Penhalingon, Robert Helpmann, Robert Thompson, Rod Mullinar, Julia Blake (108 mins)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
DVD COVER ART
The Debut of Australia's Answer to Alfred Hitchcock
Director Richard Franklin’s film Patrick is the first to evidence his over-riding interest in the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho in particular.
PREVIEW EXTRACT
Indeed, it was on the basis of screening Patrick to the executives at Universal that Franklin was entrusted with the highly-prized direction of Psycho 2, the film which launched his Hollywood career. Indeed, Patrick remains a popular cult film amongst worldwide fans of horror and thriller and until the hidden genius of Australian exploitation was unveiled in the documentary Not Quite Hollywood it was through Patrick that this audience found a doorway into the burgeoning horror scene in Australia, pioneered first by Terry Bourke.
Made primarily on sets at a time when most Australian film was either outdoors or on location, Patrick concerns a comatose patient in a private hospital who develops telekinetic abilities through which he begins to control and torment the staff assigned to his care, including new nurse Susan Penhalingon and veteran doctor Robert Helpmann. Patrick is a self-consciously Hitchcockian homage, director Franklin having studied the master director and worked under him. Suspense and mood are increasingly ominous in this evocation of extra-sensory means of communication.
____________________________________________
Disability, Pathology & Malevolence influence the Incipient Aussie Thriller
Director Franklin seizes on the euthanasia analogy’s faith-based controversy to assess what constitutes sentience: Patrick is malevolent, his disability seen as a physical restriction that has honed his malevolence into a psychically destructive energy.
What propels the film is the sexual pathology of this malevolence. Introduced in a calm and deliberate act of matricide, the now comatose Patrick finds himself attracted to Penhalingon. Patrick’s energies thus reflect his desirous and homicidal intentions, the unspoken tele-kinetic communication between Penhaligon and Robert Thompson (as Patrick) confirmed for Penhalingon by her interest in Patrick’s seemingly unconscious erection.
Taboo, telekinetic malevolent sexuality makes for a perverse undercurrent to the thrills in Patrick. As both imitation and pastiche of Hitchcock, Patrick stops short of embracing the complete self-referentiality of post-modernism. It is a tense and engaging film with an undercurrent of repression and medical authority malevolence. Flashes of nudity, violence and some sexual situations make Patrick provocative entertainment for adults but the equation between disability and malevolence undercutting the pathology makes Patrick a rather fearful speculation on telekinetic sentience. More suspenseful than gory, Patrick was one of the most successful of Australian exploitation films internationally, being a huge hit in Italy in particular (where the film was remade during the Italian exploitation horror boom).
________________________________________________
DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION:
Patrick
AMAZON.COM DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Patrick
AMAZON.CO.UK DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Patrick [DVD] [1978]
RECOMMENDED AUSTRALIAN VIEWING SELECTIONS
