The Ghastly Ones, Andy Milligan's first feature-length film, is a wild ride that pretty much forces the viewer into either the "this guy is an idiot savant genius" or "this guy's the worst director ever" category—or possibly both—inside the first half-hour. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see this spectacle on a big screen on 42nd St. sometime in the late '60s or early '70s. With it's jarring, dizzying hand-held camera work, haphazard—if not illogical—editing, poorly recorded sound and overall vibe of complete chaos, I immediately loved the complete rawness of this movie and became a Milligan fan straight away. (In all fairness, I saw Legacy Of Blood without knowing it was a Milligan flick—and obviously I didn't pay attention to the credits.) The movie tells the story of three sisters, all reunited for a reading of their late father's will. There are some weird stipulations in the document, the centerpiece of which is that all three, and their husbands, must spend a weekend in the house and each display love and affection to their respective partner. So, if we look up this plotline in our handy-dandy horror movie plot book, this means they're all gonna die. Actually, only one sister and all three husbands die, along with some servants and a hapless rabbit. They're all getting killed off (with the exception of the rabbit) because the inheritance gets split up fewer and fewer ways, depending on who's left alive to claim it. There are plenty of twists and turns, both classically horror-inspired and completely off-the-wall and non-sensical (a Milligan hallmark), but the director actually succeeds in keeping the identity of the killer a secret almost right up until the end. (Maybe I've been watching too many giallos as of late but I give him some credit for that, despite all the technical naiveté.) This is a period piece set, in the late 1800s on a private island near Manhattan. In truth, Milligan shot the movie, along with a few others, in an old mansion on the grounds of an estate he bought in the mid-'60s on Staten Island. As with so many of his other films, Milligan kept the budgets sub-zero by making the costumes himself and, in this instance, his bizarre sense of period style come shining through. Milligan loved himself a costume flick and went back to the Victorian era many times, even revisiting variations of this very storyline on more than one occasion. This is a movie that must be experienced first-hand because any description can't possibly come close to encompassing the overall cinematic insanity your eyes will soak in. I'm still almost dumbfounded from watching this movie a couple weeks ago. Although I'm still not sure if that's for the right or wrong reasons. I'd still recommend this to fans of no-budget horror because it's so utterly insane.
—The Kommandant

It is a little known fact - unless I've mentioned this fact in one of these columns or on the site previously, in which case it's only a slightly less little known fact - that my appreciation of non-mainstream cinema can be directly traced to my somewhat unusual high school job. (I was a tech in an amateur theater company housed in the local Y where my mother taught nursery school.) Since this statement requires some explanation, I will try to explain it. As is the case with any theater company - even one housed in a Y in Northeast Philadelphia - there are always a ton of weirdoes hanging around and, trust me, as a high school freshman spending a lot of time with people who were considerably older than me, I met some weirdoes in my day. But that is a story for another time and place. Fortunately twice a year we had "teen" shows which, for reasons unknown to us all, encompassed anyone between the ages of 16 and 24, so I also met a lot of people that were closer to my age. A main segment of these portions of my work year was spent attending cast parties, which are essentially the same as regular high school / college parties except, since ours were "work related," it had a slight hint of legitimacy to it in the eyes of our parents. (Which usually allowed for a slackening of the normal house rules.) Anywhoo, at these parties aside from experimenting with assorted illegal substances (well, the alcohol was only illegal for those of us in the 16-20 category) and our sexuality, we would sometimes watch whatever weird movies people would turn up - generally speaking stuff by John Waters, Ed Wood and Andy Warhol and things like Reefer Madness. We would also occasionally make trips downtown, to the TLA on South Street (then a movie theater with awesome programming), to watch these types of films and I fully believe this is what planted the seeds of a lifelong love affair with movies most people hate. And for that matter, a hatred of films most people love. I bring all of this up actually to tell another story that is slightly more relevant to the film I'm supposed to be reviewing here. (I swear I will try to get to that part in a minute.) One of my best friends from this era was a girl named Bridget, and she was always trying to get the powers that be to branch out and do plays that were slightly less "traditional." Two of her favorite offerings, that were always summarily dismissed, were Jesus Christ Superstar (it was a Jewish Y so that was never going to happen) and Sweeny Todd. They never quite gave us a reason why that one wasn't up to par with good ol' standards like Bye Bye Birdie; although, truthfully, I was secretly glad they nixed the JCS idea. I hate that shit. Surely our version of Sweeny Todd would have been absolutely nothing like what the story turned into under the dark lens of Andy Milligan but honestly, even with our somewhat degenerate but not yet fully degenerated minds, we could have never thought up a version as weird and perverse as this. And we were a pretty open minded bunch! In some ways this movie kind of seems like a play, one that could have been produced by an amateur theater group (certainly there are sections where it feels like you're sitting in the back corner of a room with no amplification and lousy acoustics), albeit one of the more Grand Guignol variety. Bloodthirsty Butchers is truly a film that needs to be seen to be believed - as in it's the type of movie you need to see for yourself in order to believe someone actually made a movie like this. Oddly enough, once taken into context as part of Milligan's collective work, it's one that seems to oddly make sense. Even though the film itself makes no sense.
—Bunny

If one was to judge this "book" by it's cover, one may infer that The Body Beneath is some sort of horror film - based on it's appropriately red tipped and ominous artwork; it's tagline: "sexually rampant ghouls, depraved souls... and blood-red roses"; and the fact that it was "filmed in the graveyards of England." In "bone-chilling color" no less. If one was to actually turn it over and judge by what you can read on the DVD's back cover though, one would learn this horror movie is of the vampire variety which, in itself, is not that unusual. A lot of people have made vampire movies. However if we take this theoretical, disjointed path one step further and one is to actually put the disc in their machine and push play, they will discover - literally from the first frame - they're about to see something a bit different from your standard vampire happening. Or any happening of any variety. Because what is standard for an Andy Milligan movie is anything but standard in the rest of the world, movie making or otherwise. (Suffice it to say, as unique as Mr. Milligan's style of movie making is, his work as a costume designer is even more mind boggling. And, again, I used to work for a theater troupe based in a Jewish Y in Northeast Philly.) If I may veer slightly off topic, one thing you gotta love about the vampire movie, as a theme, is that it's so ubiquitous, yet so open to interpretation. Therefore even the most non-traditional filmmaker you can think of manages to think up a vampire movie of their own; to veer back on topic, Milligan is definitely one of the most non-traditional filmmakers I can think of, for the purposes of this review and in general. One thing is for sure, The Body Beneath is not the kind of movie where you can explain the plot simply because the plot and dialogue just aren't that simple. (Shit, I couldn't even hear some of the dialogue with the volume on full, let alone understand it.) The story does encompass many of the themes explored in his other films - lust, greed, familial disharmony, people being forced to spend nights together in creepy run down mansions, boobs in pies... oh wait, that was a different movie. This one does include a sinister plan by the evil head of a vampire clan to impregnate the most attractive and well dressed member of his family's descendants in order to ensure his bloodline's future ability to drain others of their blood so I guess that kind of makes up for it. (She's pretty hot - especially for a chick in one of these films - plus she has awesome, long lustrous hair and an abundance of eyelashes so who can blame him for choosing her.) Also, the vampire babes in this movie look like a cross between girls you'd see at the local Renaissance Fair, the zombie chicks in Die You Zombie Bastards and Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black / Kembra Phaler's "back-up dancers," and that is pretty awesome.
—Bunny

To sum up The Man With 2 Heads as simply as possible, it is Andy Milligan's take on Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde. I find it interesting that all three of the films that wound up in my review pile are based on pieces of literature; I'm not really sure what my specific thoughts are on that but I do think it's interesting. (Did he have a passion for the classics; or was it a lack of ideas?) What I have learned from viewing his collected works is that it's best not to think too much when you're watching an example. Because it will distract you and then you'll REALLY never know what the fuck is going on. Anywhoo, as you may imagine, in the hands of Milligan the oft read story of the fated doctor who develops a homicidal split personality is rather dissimilar from what Robert Louis Stevenson's imagination conjured up. Unless RLS was secretly a total sadistic weirdo which, I suppose, is entirely possible. Of course, things start out innocently enough. At first, the young doctor and his trusty sidekick / student (aka the ever-present guy with the dirty blond hair who is present in every one of Andy's films; this time in a curiously non-deformed role) just want to remove the brain of a local hooker killing maniac—who died from a self-inflicted hanging sometime between the part where we see the girl get stabbed and the two guys show up at the police station—for purely scientific reasons. Their game plan, if I understand things correctly, is to inject the brain of the recently deceased with some sort of serum that will make the evil part of his brain glow an evil green, thus proving... umm... well, I'm not sure what it proves exactly. That he's evil? I figured that out when he slashed the girl repeatedly in and around the sternum area and pulled out some stringy goo. But, as I learned from many years of working in a library frequented by doctors and doctors-to-be, doctors and doctors-to-be are often very stupid, and unintelligent. (Yes, there is a difference.) Then what happens is, the doctor has to have dinner with his fiancee's parents, who hate him - which is totally irrelevant to anything but they make a point of making a point of it so I figured I would as well - and during this dinner, somehow his trusty sidekick / student splashes the serum recipe with something that blurs the ink, forcing him to rewrite the formula based on his memory. Which isn't that good. I guess he wasn't forced so much as he just volunteered by the way but, that's what happened. After that, the proverbial shit hits the fan when the doctor whips up a batch of the serum from his sidekick / student's bastardized instructions and drinks it, causing him to turn into a bushy eyebrowed super freak who gets off on verbally degrading and physically abusing unattractive saloon girls. Or, actually, just one unattractive saloon girl. This doesn't happen straight away but once he gets to that point, he stays a while so you might wanna keep the remote control handy. From there the proceedings get even freakier, if you can imagine that. (And since the "orgy" scene is pretty hard to see, imagining is what you'll have to do.) Eventually things will come to their inevitable climax, which may or may not result in closure on this anecdote but by that time you'll just be glad it's over. This one is actually quite a bit rough around the edges in comparison to the other films of his we've reviewed, and that is saying something.
—Bunny

I'm not sure if Andy Milligan saw Spider Baby but, at least in my mind, The Rats bears an eerie kinship to the Jack Hill classic. Needless to say, Milligan keeps thing well enough within his own milieu that the film is clearly his and no one else's. Once again revisiting his favorite period (Victorian), and one of his favorite themes (a family loaded with secrets, strife and internal conflict), The Rats is like Gothic horror on bad acid. This time around, the family in question is the Mooneys. Pa Mooney has been holding the entire clan together for decades under virtual lock and key, making efforts to preserve and protect the family bloodline as well as try to rid it of it's curse. Gradually it's revealed that, of the five Mooney siblings, only the youngest is considered to be the hope for the family. She's from Pa's second wife, you see, so they think her blood might be less polluted than the others. She returns from four years at med school in Scotland (where Pa sent her she could learn how to help with his "experiments") with a new husband, who Pa refuses to even see because his blood hasn't been tested and approved. The other siblings are up in arms about this new stranger as well but for varying reasons. As this truly bizarre flick unfolds we learn that the middle daughter is a sadistic psycho, the eldest son is a total milquetoast and the eldest daughter (who's the oldest of them all) is actually the mother of the almost feral younger brother. (His inbrededness is "a punishment" for her affair with Pa.) And that's just the bare-bones basics! The rats from the title really play a minor role, other than padding the picture's running time by about ten minutes, but the werewolves are a different story altogether. You see, lycanthropy is the Mooney's curse. Pa has managed to stay alive for an astounding 199 years through what amounts to a Tour De France-like level of continuous blood doping and the aforementioned experiments but time is catching up with him and he needs to finally achieve a cure before he dies as his old bones can no longer handle the monthly man-to-wolf transformation. Unfortunately, once he finally agrees to see his daughter's husband—only after finding out she's pregnant—it's full moon time and he changes right before the husband's eyes, but is too weak from the transformation and dies. We are then treated to an apocalyptic family meltdown where everyone wolfs out and slaughters each other, except for the youngest daughter and her husband. (Her blood is different so she doesn't change.) After all the craziness dies down, we get one final surprise that wraps everything up rather nicely in a typical '70s horror/grindhouse fashion that's actually one of Milligan's best-executed endings. On a technical level, The Rats is actually slightly less adept than The Ghastly Ones (which is strange in that it was shot three or four years later; you'd think—or at least hope—he would have polished his skills a bit) so you can be sure to expect lots of shaky hand-held camera work, editing that is beyond sloppy, lots of poorly lit (if not totally dark) scenes, and poorly recorded dialogue that was obviously never overdubbed in post-production. (I think it's also worth mentioning that the werewolf makeup makes everyone look more like Jo-Jo The Dog Faced Boy than a werewolf, but this is Andy Milligan we're talking about.) Nonetheless, if you're on the Milligan train already, these stumbling blocks are to be expected and you're probably already used to them. If this is your starting point in Milliganification (and for some people it might be, considering this is the only one of his films I've seen continuously available in stores for years), I recommend an adult beverage - maybe two - to soften your sensibilities. As they will be tested.
—The Kommandant