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.”
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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