Homage is a hard thing to nail.
Take it too far and you’ll find yourself in dangerous rip-off territory. But fail to take it far enough and no-one will even realise you’re trying to tip your hat to your heroes. On that level alone, Tyler MacIntyre’s Patchwork, a gleefully gory riff on the Frankenstein myth, is an unmitigated triumph.
The film is jam-packed with references for horror nerds – the kind of blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em flashes that will have buffs jumping out their seats and shouting at their screens whenever they notice the John Carpenter-esque title font, or the Re-Animator-like goo that’s used to resurrect the main characters in the film’s very first scene.
“While scripting the film, [co-writer] Chris Hill and I pulled in lots of references,” says MacIntyre. “References to films like [Peter Jackson’s] Dead Alive, and Evil Dead II – those older slapstick horror films that we grew up with and really loved. It really took on that tone.”
Certainly the film borrows the kind of distinctly goofy, distinctly American feel that marks out the work of directors like Sam Raimi and Stuart Gordon – filmmakers who prefer the work of The Three Stooges to the pantheon of European art horror films. Indeed, Patchwork is a kind of grand-scale comedy of errors, albeit one dark enough to see the film’s main three leads murdered by a serial killer and stitched up into the one body.
“I had done a short film version of Patchwork which was only two minutes and there was no plan to do a feature-length film,” MacIntyre explains. “But people were interested in the short. I didn’t think it was amazing – but it was super dark.
“[The short] was like a tone test, because the shorts I had done before that were romantic and funny and not at all horror,” MacIntyre continues. “But I was pitching a different feature script that was pretty dark, so Patchwork the short was a tone test for the other film. And when people saw the short they were like, ‘Is there a feature version of this?’”
From there, MacIntyre found the writing of the script fairly easy. “Writing was actually kind of smooth. Once we got going, that is. For me it’s always tough to find the way into the story – as in to find out what it is actually about. Like, what I’m excited about. Usually when I find out what makes the movie tick – what makes me excited about it – then the actual writing of it is a bit simpler. I spend a lot more time outlining than I do writing.”
It’s surprising that MacIntyre encountered so few hiccups, particularly considering the fact that Patchwork’s central conceit is one that requires a fair bit of structural trickery. The trio of heroines spend the majority of the film’s running time communicating while sewn up into one another, a startlingly original plot line that underpins the dark comedy. It is depicted on screen by clever cross-cutting between the lumbering creature that the three have become and scenes in which the characters chat normally as their pre-injury selves – a ‘reality’ only they can see. It’s head-scratching stuff on paper, but in the film it really works.
“That came out of restraint,” MacIntyre says. “We decided that was kind of the best way to do it. We knew it was going to be a very low-budget film. We knew we weren’t going to be able to do the creature effects for the whole time, even though it was going to be the focus of the story. So we came up with this idea so … about [half] of the film takes place with the monster and [half] takes place without the monster.”
Despite its shoestring budget, Patchwork never looks like anything less than a delightfully sadistic delight. Gory effects work rules the day – though MacIntyre says all the film’s yicky tricks were similarly pared-back and restricted. “[The monster] stabs herself in the eye at one point, because we were convinced that make-up effect was going to be simpler because it’s much goopier. So once we figured out what we could afford one way or the other, we wrote backwards … We added in elements as we reverse-engineered the script.”
The real highlight of the film’s make-up work comes in the third act, during a particularly vicious rampage through a frat house that features several bros being gorily defenestrated. Though it will certainly provide the film’s biggest talking point come its screening at Sydney Film Festival – some of the violence will cue those great gasp-out-loud moments that make the festival’s Freak Me Out section what it is – it originally wasn’t going to be in the film at all.
“It’s funny – that was one of my favourite scenes we wrote in the first draft,” MacIntyre says. “The week before production, we had to cut it because it was going to cost more than anything else in the film.
“So we shot all principal photography without that scene in it, and then we started to play it for people and it got really good responses, and the investor came back and was like, ‘How about that scene you loved? Let’s put it back in.’ So that was all shot in pick-ups.’”
It just goes to show – when there’s a window, there’s a way.
Patchwork (dir. Tyler MacIntyre) shows at Event Cinemas George Street onWednesday June 8, andDendy NewtownTuesday June 14,as part of Sydney Film Festival 2016.
