'PATCHWORK'..........WE LEFT HER IN STITCHES.......

Patchwork (2015)   Not many fledgling filmmakers attempt what we call Outlaw Horror.......horror movies so off-the-charts insane, they defy rational description......and dare an audience to sit through them.......

              There's a reason for this.....Outlaw Horror demands total commitment from its creators, or to put it in the more genteel, British manner, "in for a penny, in for a pound".  You either throw sanity and caution to the winds.......or forget about it, just make another 'campers go into the woods and meet psycho hillbillies' movie......

               The people who made "Patchwork" simply aren't wacky enough to go completely down the rabbit hole with their way out premise. They're slumming......they have higher aspirations (you can tell by the clever faux Elfman/Herrmann music over the cartoonish main titles)......and they probably consider themselves too skillful and clever to make an all-out nutso splatterfest that would only unspool after midnight at film festivals.

                But in this film, they at least have themselves a calling card when it comes time to scrape together financing for a better movie.....

                 The premise sounds like a joke you'd read in an old issue of 'Playboy'......three babes walk into a bar. Shortly afterwards, (without revealing any plot details), they're all dead, but awaken anyway......on an autopsy slab, with their various body parts stitched together Frankenstein-style and their three minds stuck in the same crudely cobbled head.....

                  Naturally, this movie doesn't want to give you the time to contemplate that the mad young doctor who accomplished this feat would need the surgical skill and genius of a 1000 Nobel prize winners.  You have take the movie's word for it.......this looney-tune somehow pulled it off.

                  At this point, the film becomes a dazzling showcase for actress Tory Stolper, who inherits the role of the three-in-one Patchwork girl......a funny, physical tour de force of a twitching, convulsing body housing three warring personalities........(the movie accomplishes the creature's busy internal monologues by cross-cutting scenes that feature all three intact actresses arguing with each other.....clever as that may seem, it's still not as strikingly funny as Stolper's demented-marionette slapstick....)

                Gore gushes freely as a rightly vengeful  Stolper pounds any number of people into pulpy jello, but by that time, the filmmakers run out of ideas and the movie runs out of gas. Like we said.....you either jump off the cliff when you make a movie like this......or don't make it all....

               We'll stitch together 2 & 1/2 stars for Patchwork (**1/2)......the half-star comes from the story's rather neat twist as to who actually instigated all the mayhem......but overall it's a horror film that comes out a little less than the sum of its surgically welded parts.......