• EDITOR’S NOTE: Patrick was on the CBS Late Movie on August 26, 1983 and March 2 and August 9, 1984.

Directed by Richard Franklin (Psycho II, Road Games) and written by Everett De Roche (Race for the Yankee Zephyr, Harlequin), Patrick opened the world to the genre of Ozploitation. While the Australian score was by Brian May, the Italian cut was scored by Goblin. In fact, it did better internationally than in Australia, even if the U.S. version dubbed over all of the accents.

Patrick (Robert Thompson) hasn’t left his hospital bed or closed his eyes in three years. After killing his parents, he’s been in a coma in a private hospital, never keeping the same nurse for long. Now, Kathy Jacquard (Susan Penhaligon) has taken the job, hoping that it will help her finally divorce her husband Ed (Rod Mullinar).

According to Dr. Roget (Robert Helpmann), Patrick is being kept in his care to explore life and death. Never mind that other patients have seen him fly out of his window. He can also kill people from afar, like when he tries to drown Dr. Brian Wright (Bruce Barry) when he tires to pick up Kathy, who he has been communicating with via spitting and spirit typewriting. Strangely, her only ally end up being Matron Cassidy (Julia Blake), the same woman who was tough on her at the beginning of the movie.

Yes, Quentin Tarantino admits that he took the paralyzed in bed spitting scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 from this movie. He has also said that “Hitchcock was overrated but you know who was better? Richard Franklin.” and stated that Road Games is his favorite Australian movie.

Soon, Patrick is showing her that he can still feel — his erection is how he does it — and that the hospital is trying to kill him with electroshock therapy. By the end of the movie, he’s making her choose between her ex-husband or him as she injects him with potassium chloride and is linked to his mind as he passes on.

Maybe not. After all, he leaps from the bed while dead — a scene that the filmmakers started with and worked backward from, unlike the modern horror movie creators who have no idea how to close their stories — and his eyes reopen after his death.

Two years after this, the Italians made Patrick Still Lives, a truly baffling sequel that took the basic ideas of this movie — the same story, I can admit it — and infused it with near pornographic levels of sex and violence. It’s just as incredible as that sentence makes it sound. There was a remake in 2013 that I need to see but what I wish was filmed was Franklin and De Rouche’s sequel idea, Patrick II: The Man Who Wasn’t There. A religious cult would dig up Patrick and he would be in a coma, at which point he’d start being obsessed about another young lady.

The poster has a great tagline: ”I saw a man upon the stair, I looked again, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.”