Patrick

Australian director Richard Franklin obviously has a thing about matricide. After this deeply disturbing picture, which opens with a son electrocuting his mother and her lover in the bath, he went on to make Psycho II, about mother's boy without parallel, Norman Bates. Although it rather loses its way, this Gothic grotesque benefits from the creepy atmosphere Franklin generates in the hospital ward, where the comatose Patrick develops a passion for nurse Susan Penhaligon that acts as a catalyst for a series of increasingly malevolent telekinetic happenings. Amid the mayhem, there is a delicious performance from ballet maestro Robert Helpmann (who famously brought the Child catcher to life in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) as a sadistic doctor.