By DR. BENNY GRAVES
Starring Sacha Pitoëff, Gianni Dei and Mariangela Giordano
Written by Piero Rignoli
Directed by Mario Landi
Severin Films
Welcome home, my horror cretins…
My name is Dr. Benny Graves and I have an insatiable appetite… for schlock. My bread is a scarred castle ruin and my butter is a fog-drenched mausoleum. For my main course, I prefer a hearty helping of undead ghouls, grave robbers, telepathic perverts, and rubber-faced extraterrestrials. Musical accompaniment for the night should shred hard and fast with blasphemous lyrics and shock rock theatrics. It would be a shame not to share such delightfully bad taste and that is where the Analog Abattoir comes in. Join me as I give you the choice cuts of gothic chillers, low-brow gorefests and foreign frights. When it’s all said and done, you may even want to try some head cheese… My brother makes it real good. Eat up!
Back in the early 2000s, I used to frequent my local Best Buy for a very specific reason. Now I don’t know who the horrorhound stocking the shelves was, but I raise the horns to their cinematic sensibilities. Still a burgeoning horror fan, I found myself face to face with a treasure trove of DVDs, a good percentage of them Italian horror. The best (and sometimes worst) showings of Fulci, Argento and Mattei, all neatly stacked next to the new releases of the day. My eager gaze ended up falling upon a compilation by the now-defunct distributor Shriek Show called The Zombie Pack 2. It was love at first fright. Back at home, I zeroed in on one of the three flicks called Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror. By the time the credits rolled, my fertile mind had experienced the sheer insanity of Andrea Bianchi’s zombie horror opus. His vision included (but was not limited to) gratuitous nudity, decapitations by scythe-wielding ghouls, dialogue that borders on farce and the brain-melting performance of one Peter Bark. In the aftermath, I thought that there could be no Italian celluloid transgression that could top Burial Ground. It was decades later that PATRICK STILL LIVES graced my eyeballs and asked me to hold its beer.
The original Patrick was a sci-fi horror nightmare, focusing on the unrelenting evil of a telepathic murderer wreaking havoc despite his comatose state.
Credit should be given to Goblin, whose soundtrack only amplified the chilling mood of the film. Mario Landi’s unauthorized sequel takes the framework of the original in the loosest way (In this version Patrick is rendered comatose after a roadside accident) and then turns the amp to eleven before snapping off the knob. PATRICK STILL LIVES provides a prologue showing Patrick’s accident before jumping to the present where five strangers arrive by invitation to the expansive mansion of one Dr. Herschell. A clinic for wellness, the grounds of the house (coincidentally the same location where Burial Ground was shot!) provide a perfect playground for the debaucherous guests, while their private rooms provide a place for them to reveal they all have some type of unsavory past. However, Patrick’s telepathic malice and some clearly hormonal urges are anything but private, as he unleashes hell on everyone at the clinic, and we discover the sinister truth behind Dr Herschell’s hospitality.
I had the opportunity to see PATRICK STILL LIVES for the first time at the historic Colonial Theater during the 14th 24 Hour Horrothon presented by Exhumed Films, and it truly brought the house down. After that brain-melting experience, I made it a point to purchase the beautiful Blu-ray release by Severin Films. The attraction of PATRICK STILL LIVES is the same appeal one gets from insane-looking bootleg toys or the now well-known hand-painted horror movie posters from Ghana. This film uses the very understandable plot of the first Patrick film and takes it to lurid, bizarre, and hyper-violent levels that the original would never consider. More conservative viewers may call it bad taste, but I call it exploitation gold. Patrick’s telepathy is presented on screen as two eyes overlaid on a slime-tinted background as scenes of gruesome mutilations and hyper-sexual trance-states are perpetrated by his deranged mind. The insanity culminates with the type of non-ending you will be very familiar with even if you’ve seen only a few Italian schlock horror movies. Invite some friends over, grab a strong pour of J&B and I promise you a raucous night and at least one moment that will leave your jaw lying firmly on the floor.
Death to false horror,
Dr. Benny Graves
