Movies
‘Not Quite Hollywood’ Director to Remake Aussie Thriller ‘Patrick’
For those of you who caught Mark Hartley’s Aussie doc Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story Of Ozploitation!, which highlighted Aussie genre cinema of the 70s and early 80s, one of the highlighted films was Richard Franklin’s 1978 thriller Patrick, which follows a comatose hospital patient that harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis. In a new interview, Hartley reveals that he’s been developing a remake with plans to shoot this year.
“After we finished NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, I had discussed this with PATRICK’s producer, Tony Ginnane, and we decided we’d take a crack at reinventing it,” Hartley told the Fango blog. “So Justin King and I wrote a treatment and Justin’s working on the script at the moment, and hopefully, as soon as MACHETE MAIDENS is finished, we’ll get right into it.”
“We’re sort of giving it a creepier, Gothic flavor, very much in a similar style to THE ORPHANAGE,” he continues. “There’s much more of a backstory for Dr. Roget, and Patrick has dream sequences and flashbacks where he’s out of the bed. We don’t want to turn Patrick into Freddy Kreuger; we like to think of it as a love story with a body count. The great thing about the original was the fact that here’s a guy with unlimited powers, but all he wants to do is use them to manipulate the events in that nurse’s life to make her fall in love with him. So we’ve kept that central premise and really upped the ante.”
One major plan is to take the story outside of the hospital room, something that didn’t really happen in the origina.
“The first PATRICK, as much as it’s a really interesting film, is very much of its time. It’s predominantly set in one hospital room, and we’re trying to open it up. To be honest–and I’ve said this to Tony–it’s not that scary when you watch it now, and we’re all about giving it those jolts. Obviously, I’m a fan of PATRICK, and I want people who’ve seen the original to appreciate the remake, so we’re certainly putting nods to the first one throughout the film, but we’re not doing a Gus Van Sant PSYCHO.”
Movies
R-Rated ‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe’ Director’s Cut Gets New Title and Streaming Premiere Date
After a slight delay, Disney has finally announced a new streaming date for the R-Rated director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe. According to Gizmodo, it’ll also come with a new title.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn begins streaming on Hulu on August 14.
The new cut was first teased in an interview with director Chris Carter on the Fail Better With David Duchovny podcast from last year, where he teased a much scarier movie he intended.
“Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make,” Carter explained last year. “It’s not just doing a Director’s Cut to do a Director’s Cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.“
The director’s cut of the film was initially set to arrive on Disney+ in June, but quietly disappeared from the schedule without a word. Polygon reported the delay was “due to some last-minute adjustments being made to the film.”
The release’s new “Vrach Frankenshteyn” title certainly suggests those adjustments have been made, likely referring to a Frankensteining of bonus footage.
In the film, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been out of the FBI for several years, with Mulder living in isolation and Scully having become a doctor at a Catholic hospital, where she has formed a bond with a critically ill child patient.
When an FBI agent is mysteriously kidnapped, and a former Catholic priest who has been convicted of pedophilia claims to be experiencing psychic visions of the endangered agent, Scully is asked to bring Mulder back to the bureau to consult on the case because of his work with psychics.
The brand new R-rated cut will “faithfully restore the filmmaker’s original vision.”
Look for it on Hulu next month.