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Andy Milligan Double Feature:
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Though Staten Island served as the breeding
ground for his 60s and 70s output, budget horror director Andy Milligan
did cross the Atlantic to shoot five movies in England between 1968 and
1970. He went there at the behest of Leslie Elliot, a theater chain
owner who signed him to a five-contract on the box office strength of
The Ghastly Ones (see
review ).
Andy cranked out two pictures for Elliot's company, Cinemedia - a
vampire/cannibal grinder called The Body Beneath (available
on DVD from
Image
Entertainment and
Something Weird
Video), and Nightbirds, a moody psychosexual
headtrip that hasn't been seen since a single NYC screening in 1970.
However, his contract came to an abrupt end after he punched out Elliot's
father during an argument, and so he reluctantly sought the aid of his
longtime NYC nemesis and producer William Mishkin to buy his ticket
back to the States. Mishkin ponied up for three more films while Andy was
in England - Bloodthirsty Butchers, which put a Milligan
spin on the Sweeney Todd story; The Man With Two Heads,
Andy's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and a werewolf picture
initially titled Curse of the Full Moon, which was redubbed
The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!after Mishkin
insisted on a killer rat subplot to cash in on the popularity of
Willard. All three are the closest Andy ever came to making
"traditional" horror movies, yet each are riddled with his trademark
loathing for women, family, vanilla sex, and humanity as a whole. After a
long stretch in videotape limbo, Butchers and Rats
have returned to pollute more souls in a double disc set from Empire
State newcomers The Video Kart (The Man With Two Heads
is available on VHS only from Something Weird). "Once you give the woman, from then on, you've had it."  The Bloodthirsty Butchers are barber Sweeney Todd (John
Miranda) and baker Mrs. Lovett (Jane Helay), who've
worked out a unique financial plan to keep the ducats flowing in Victorian
London. Though the details are never entirely clear (though when is that
not the case in a Milligan movie?), Todd slits the throats of his
customers, and then delivers the bodies to Mrs. L., who, with the help of
deadhead henchman Tobias (Berwick Kaler), steal their
valuables and chops up their bodies for filling in her pies. The
arrangement has so far netted them 20,000 pounds and 258 corpses
distributed into however many pies for Lovett's unwitting customers, but
this being a Milligan movie, greed and lust must enter the picture to
upset the whole cheese plate. Tobias can't keep his grubby paws off of
Mrs. Lovett's helper Johanna (Annabella Wood), so he and
Sweeney hand out a beatdown to her simpering sailor boyfriend and hide him
the basement with the dismembered corpses; Johanna, in the meantime, is
taking care of Mrs. Lovett's crippled husband Ronald (Jonathan
Holt), who's being slowly bled dry by Tobias and the missus; and
Sweeney, despite looking like Abraham Lincoln in Disney's Hall of
Presidents, has no less than three women on his dance card: Mrs. Lovett,
his crazy-ass drunk of a wife Becky (Ann Arrow, a truly
grating actress) and singer Anna (Susan Cassidy from
Seeds of Sin), who's putting out to her theater manager as well.
Unfortunately, all of them are insane. Toss in Rosie (Linda
Driver), a mouthy blonde whore that's blackmailing Tobias with a
bastard baby and what do you get? A whole lot of unhappy screaming people
who eventually end up on the business end of various kitchen tools.Bloodthirsty Butchers has the makings of an entertaining Milligan picture; nearly every character is cut from the broadest and most gleefully evil cloth, and Andy's dialogue is spectacularly bitchy and soaked with cranky, hate-filled rants (especially in regard to marriage - was Andy smarting over his separation from wife Candy Hammond a few years prior to this, or still kvetching about his horrendous parents?) that would be shocking if they weren't so leaden and heavy-handed. His cast is particularly capable too, especially John Miranda and Jane Helay as the blithely venal Todd and Lovett and Jonathan Holt (despite his ridiculous wig) as the pathetic Mr. Lovett. Unfortunately, whatever visceral impact the film might have packed is severely blunted by some hamfisted editing, which trims out ALL the gore, nudity, cursing and even what appears to be a brief vomiting scene, and obscures large chunks of the plot to boot (most notably, the whole relationship between Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney, who suddenly appear in bed together midway through the film) and thoroughly fucks with the pacing. Although the story of Sweeney Todd has been told in countless movies and even a musical, the film never makes clear how his victims are ending up in Mrs. Lovett's pies. Maybe this is Andy's fault as co-scripter with John (brother of regular Milligan actor Hal) Borske, and maybe it's Mishkin's fault for trimming out all the blood, but either way, it does dampen the film's cache for retro gorehounds and Milligan-ites who are undoubtedly curious to see the man's work after reading Jimmy McDonough's flabbergasting bio The Ghastly One. Video Kart's packaging and an accompanying essay by the label's owner intimate that this print is "outrageously gory," but that's just not the case. Despite that glaring problem, extra points for: Andy's two off-screen vocal cameos, once during Mr. Lovett's blood-letting ("More! More!"), and the second during a street scene in which he imitates a barking dog (!); the actress playing Mrs. Keane, whose extra-wide performance as a snooty patron of Mrs. Lovett seems lifted whole from one of those Three Stooges shorts when the boys invade a 'high society' party (you half expect to see Shemp aiming a pie at her in the corner of the frame); Corky, the burly longshoreman type in a dress and clown makeup who appears out of nowhere to break up a fight between Anna, Sweeney and the theater manager and then proceeds to bring the film to a screeching halt with his "thoughtful" routine; Sweeney's marriage advice to Jarvis ("Women can't stand happiness for more than three days at a time"); Mr. Busker (crew member William Barrel), a twitching necro-goon who wants a pie with a special part in it; the berserk ending, in which the entire cast goes mano-a-mano in a massive free-for-all that's rendered completely unwatchable by the edits; and the film's birdbrained piece-de-resistance, the discovery of a severed boob in a pie. No points subtracted. Video Kart's DVD includes a homemade trailer. __________________________________________________________________________ "We're all impossible! That's part of the Mooney charm."  The
Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! starts off on a
familiar Milligan touchstone - a dismally dysfunctional family reunion - but
from there devolves into an 40s-style "curse upon this house" story, rife with stock characters:
The Mad Brother Locked Away in a Hidden
Room; The Scientist Father Who Paid the Ultimate Price for Tampering in
God's Domain; a pair of Weird Sisters with Unnatural Tastes and an
Upstanding Brother Who Humbly Accepts His Family's Burden; and of
course, The Charming Youngest Daughter who returns home with her Handsome
and Naive Husband. Here it's Diana Mooney (the hot Jackie Skarvellis
from The Body Beneath, who looks like '70s UK fantasy queen
Caroline Munro) who returns from medical school in Scotland with new
husband Gerald (Ian Innes, who seems very medicated) in tow. Of course,
the marriage shocks the Mooney clan, especially patriarch Papa Mooney
(Douglas Pfair), who declares that the marriage must be annulled due to
the Mooney family curse. Lots of yelling about which sibling is Papa's
favorite and why Diana should have never brought Gerald here follows, but
once it's announced that Diana is pregnant, Papa lets down his guard and
gives his new son-in-law the straight dope: the Mooneys are werewolves; so
hey, welcome to the family! This revelation happens to occur on the night
of the full moon, so Gerald gets an up-close-and-personal look at his new
in-laws under what some might call extreme circumstances. So what about the rats, you ask? Well, there's a couple of scenes involving the craziest sister, Monica (Hope Stansbury, who wrote Andy's first film, Vapors), visiting the disfigured Mr. Micawber (Andy Milligan himself under layers of terrible makeup) who sells her flesh-eating rats. (said rats once gnawed off Micawber's arm and part of his face, but somehow this didn't deter him from offering them at rock-bottom prices). After getting bitten by a rubber mousie (standing in for her pet "Ben” - sheesh), Monica takes the rats back to Micawber and sets the whole place on fire. Huh, you say? And you're right. These two scenes were shot at the behest of producer Mishkin in New York a year after Andy had returned to the States, and they are stumbling blocks; the murky cinematography and endless, pointless dialogue are exactly what's wrong with the picture as a whole. No one ever shuts up in any of Andy' movies, but here, the characters' diarrhea of the mouth seems almost uncontrollable; the same talking points are rehashed over and over again, and no one seems able to say one sentence when they can say twenty on a single subject. To make matters worse, the violence is again trimmed from these prints - Monica lops off her chatty-cathy friend's hand with a cleaver and then takes a pitchfork to her, but this is all snipped out. However, we do get a horrific take in which a real mouse is tortured with hot wax and a knife before a nail is driven through it. It's not a trade that most viewers will be happy about. It's too bad that Rats is a bore, because the performances are again pretty good, especially Skarvellis and Joan Ogden as oldest daughter Phoebe. Milligan also makes good use of the spooky Hampstead Heath estate, which also served as the location for The Body Beneath, although it's often too dark and echoey to make out all the details. Oh well. Extra points for: Andy's second cameo as a lonely gun salesmen (though his monologue nearly stops the movie dead); whoever dubs the squawking chicken that's ripped apart by the Mooney kids, and whoever was offscreen and tossing the chickens around in crazy brother Malcolm's (Berwick Kaler, dressed like the Geek in The Girl and the Geek) cell; and Gerald's speech about his childhood which, with his child rapist father and a stint in an orphanage with abusive nuns, makes the Mooney family curse seem like a bad case of acne in retrospective. Points subtracted for that repulsive mouse scene. Video Kart's DVD includes another homemade trailer (odd, considering that a theatrical trailer exists and is in wide circulation) and the aforementioned essay. Want more Milligan (and you know you do)? Retromedia offers a DVD of Guru, The Mad Monk, while Something Weird has his medieval monsterpiece Torture Dungeon on VHS. Meanwhile, Video Kart has just released one of Andy's rarest titles, Monstrosity, which also happens to be his last film before his death in 1991. It's paired in a two-disc set with Graverobbers, a homemade oddity from occasional associate Straw Weisman (who wrote the race-riot grossout Fight For Your Life, now on DVD from Blue Underground). Psychotronic's Michael Weldon once famously wrote that if you're an Andy Milligan fan, there's no hope for you. All I can say is, welcome to the club. --Paul "The Weirdo" Gaita __________________________________________________________________________ |
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