Patrick

Patrick, a remake of the 1978 Ozploitation horror flick by the same name, has been transformed from a Hitchcock-style thriller into a blood and gore affair.

The remake is faithful to the tale of Patrick, a supposedly brain-dead patient who takes a liking to a kind nurse and proceeds to take over the hospital using telekinesis. Yet scrapping the subtly creepy direction in Richard Franklin's 1978 original, new director Mark Hartley takes liberal cues from slasher films and Gothic horrors – shrouding the settings in mist, thunder and lightning.

The cast is brilliantly aware of Hartley's modern approach to the Ozploitation genre. Leading lady Sharni Vinson – who is proving to be Australia's newest horror darling, having been in the 2011 shark thriller Bait and recent home invasion horror You're Next – plays nurse Kathy Jacquard as a feisty heroine. Meanwhile, Rachel Griffiths' icy Matron Cassidy is suitably deadpan and gloomy.

The film makes no pretenses of being a subtle horror. Almost every scene is jam-packed with jumpy sound effects, and right from the beginning shots are framed perfectly for macabre weirdos to come jumping at poor Nurse Kathy. But in a film that already has all the makings of an exploitation classic – an mad doctor, crazy science experiments and pretty nurses dying horribly – audiences will have suspended any disbelief mere minutes into the film.

Sure, it's corny, and it's certainly no Wolf Creek, but it's hard to believe Hartley intended Patrick to be anything other than an entertaining, wonderfully pulpy piece of mayhem.