patrick

Alfred Hitchcock never officially groomed a successor. But there were plenty of applicants eager to take over the title of “Master of Suspense” by the time his last film, Family Plot, ran through projectors in 1976. That same year, Brian De Palma’s Carrie used Hitchcock’s technique as a springboard to launch a stylistic assault of operatic pretensions. This amplified experience became De Palma’s cinematic signature, creating a Hitchcock highlight reel that only used the most grandiose and elaborate camera set-ups.

Meanwhile, Australian director Richard Franklin launched his own bid to take over the master’s title with Patrick (1978), a film that steals just as much from Hitchcock’s bag of tricks, but on a more fundamental level. If Carrie co-opted the showy ingenuity of Vertigo, Patrick embodies the more down-and-dirty aesthetic of Psycho, filtering its thrills through cleverly defined characters and audience manipulation.

Comatose for the last three years, Patrick (Robert Thompson) is kept alive by a bevy of medical machinery and a round-the-clock team of nurses, one of whom, Kathy (Susan Penhaligon), suspects he’s more aware of his surroundings than the head physician believes. Initially, the communication is limited to a “yes” or “no” spit reflex, blamed on a nervous reaction. But as their relationship develops, Patrick’s newly developed sixth sense allows him to express himself on an electric typewriter, swearing Kathy to secrecy while at the same time psychically “stalking” her ex-husband and new lover.

The film begins with its one concession to Hitchcock’s visual flair: an elegant camera move that begins with a couple making love, their reflection presented in the ball of a bedpost then dollying into the next room where Patrick listens to the “thump-thump” of their sexual activity. The woman is Patrick’s mother, whom he promptly kills. Just the first of many Psycho references, including the hospital itself (which is a dead ringer for the Bates domicile) right down to the Saul Bass-inspired Patrick title treatment.

But because Franklin’s inspirations are more structural than overtly cinematic, Patrick seems like a much more original creation than the work of De Palma. De Roche’s script is impressively ambitious, dealing with the same surface-level psychic phenomena but adding in euthanasia argument that weaves itself naturally into the story. In fact, that’s the most impressive aspect of Franklin’s film, which makes the entire situation – including Patrick’s long-range psychic shenanigans – seem compelling and believable. The characters and relationships are a cut above the usual exploitation fare and even the “shock” ending, lifted straight from Carrie’s graveside jump scare, works in context.

Patrick had a previous special edition DVD courtesy of Synapse Films. Some of those same extra features (including the Richard Franklin commentary) are carried over in the new Severin Films blu-ray, which bumps up the color and resolution and adds 50-minutes of interview outtakes from Mark Hartley’s 2008 Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood (whose Patrick remake is out right now), plus a classic 25-minute profile of Franklin, trailer and TV spots. Even more unexpected, the Italian language track contains an entirely new score from the Brian May original by frequent Argento collaborators, Goblin, the first time its been released in the U.S.