PATCHWORK: Excellent Re-Animator-Meets-Frankenstein B-movie

The resources of the human imagination for creating supernatural beings have been exhausted. There is no need even to review horror films from the last fifty years; it is enough to check the list of ghosts and monsters that Scooby-Doo had to face to realize that everything has already been done. Fortunately, this does not discourage everyone, and for some it actually motivates them to create surprising variations on perfectly familiar themes such as Patchwork.

Patchwork was born in the mind of Tyler MacIntyre in 2014 and initially took the form of a short film. The idea, however, absorbed the director to such an extent that he continued to work on it laboriously through all 2015. In the heyday of B-movie cinema, such a practice would have been unacceptable.

Low-budget productions are usually associated with the pace of work in which Roger Corman specialized, that is, literally a few shooting days, quick editing, and the release of the finished material. Today the priorities are completely different; the creators of similar films do not want a product made in a hurry, but devote themselves to a passion that usually has its source in their first, youthful encounters with horror.

One such enthusiast is MacIntyre, and the time spent on Patchwork paid off in the form of a decently made film, equipped with very good special effects and surprisingly well acted (the only recognizable name in the cast is James Phelps, that is Fred Weasley from the Harry Potter film series), a tribute to Re-Animator and to all varieties of stories about Frankenstein’s Monster.

The story of three dismembered women joined into a single body may look terrifying on paper, but Patchwork is, from the first to the last minute, a black comedy that gradually becomes more and more absurd and bloody. MacIntyre, together with screenwriter Chris Lee Hill, managed to go beyond the usual patterns—the heroines they created have more character than Marvel’s Black Widow or, in general, the vast majority of female characters from mainstream productions.

An excellent solution is also the constant shift of narration from a single monster to Jennifer, Ellie, and Madeleine as three separate individuals; and the absolute masterstroke is the struggle between the heroines and, at the same time, with themselves, evoking associations with Ash Williams’s duels in The Evil Dead.

The best awaits us in the second half of the film. The mad revenge of the main heroine/main heroines and the bedroom scene are among the strongest moments of Patchwork, ones that will linger in the memory even of the most genre-savvy fan of B-movie cinema. The plot is not merely a pretext for realizing the initial concept (as, for instance, in the similar Frankenhooker).

The screenplay has a good rhythm; successive, achronologically presented threads draw us into the story, and the plot twist at the end genuinely surprises. What is more, in the background there even appears a subtle moralizing element, warning against obsessive striving for physical perfection.

Release the owl-cat—if only for these words and for this one-hundred-percent trashy, intentionally kitschy scene from the final minutes, Patchwork is worth seeing. If I wanted to nitpick at all costs, I would complain about the shortage of splattering blood and scattered limbs—after all, such a subject practically begs for a large dose of gore—but it is really hard to level any accusations at MacIntyre’s several years of work.

A low-budget film cannot be made any better. The special effects, the screenplay, the cast—every single aspect of Patchwork provides fantastic entertainment, and the actions of the author of this work should be followed by every fan of bad films.