Return To Milligan's Island, Part 6

Concluding my coverage of Severin Films' new, much coveted (and now officially OUT OF PRINT) box set, THE DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION...

The remaining important restorations in this comprehensive collection are the infamous double feature of BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS and TORTURE DUNGEON (both 1970), each of which forfeited about a minute's worth of poorly executed gore effects to qualify for R ratings; and LEGEND OF BLOOD (1977), a more competent if less characteristic remake of THE GHASTLY ONES, previously available only in a cropped and emasculated TV version known as LEGACY OF HORROR.

 

Never bend over to pick flowers in an Andy Milligan film. The consequences may be severe!

Lady Jane and Lady Agatha (Patricia Dillon and Donna Whitfield) confer
 in TORTURE DUNGEON.

Filmed under the far less-pungent title MACABRE, TORTURE DUNGEON (1970, 80m 22s) was the first of these three titles to be produced. It was made just prior to Milligan's London sojourn in the late summer of 1968, while BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (made as THE DEMONS, a loose adaptation of the Sweeney Todd story) was one of Milligan's five British productions, filmed (according to Stephen Thrower) over seven days in February/March 1969, with two days of additional shooting back in New York.

Despite its title, TORTURE DUNGEON is a sort of half-comic, sado-masochistic fairy tale rooted in Elizabethan revenge plays like MACBETH and TITUS ANDRONICUS, with Gerald Jacuzzo presiding over the madness as Norman, Duke of Norwich. He is aided by Richard Mason as his adoring hunchbacked helper "Ivan, the Terrible Dwarf," and opposed by the raving Maggie Rogers as "Margaret, the one-eyed Hag." Hal Borske is the royal family idiot Albert, Duke of Aberthy, who is risen to the throne by Machiavellian acts of murder engineered by Norman.

The unabashedly sleazy advertising campaign that trumpeted these two films some 50 years ago, genuine masterpieces of the sleazier side of showmanship, tend to eclipse the reality of the films themselves. I always expect I'll enjoy them more than I do whenever I revisit them. Now that I've finally seen everything these two films have to offer in their most complete form, I can see how their former abundance of blunt splices added to their mystique, raising false hopes; those jumps and zips and thuds in the film stock encouraged unrealistic fantasies, engendering dreams and fantasies far more odious and transgressive than was ever really the case. As these restored versions prove, the gore was haplessly, even predictably executed and the most important footage restored to either film is not of a tongue being torn out but of a tongue being lovingly slipped into Ivan's mouth as he is kissed by the evil Duke of Norwich.

To judge from its advertising, one might expect TORTURE DUNGEON to be a film along the lines of MARAT/SADE but it's closer in execution to a high school drama club's production of SLEEPING BEAUTY. Earlier historical films had been made about the treacherous political and sexual intrigues among the ruling class (Sternberg's THE SCARLET EMPRESS, Gance's LUCREZIA BORGIA and TOWER OF LUST, and the late '40s Orson Welles triumvirate of MACBETH, BLACK MAGIC and PRINCE OF FOXES), but this low-born pageant was at least among the first to take full advantage of the new freedoms available to American films of the late 1960s, incorporating a higher, shriller pitch of sex, violence, and scandal. Though the two films are not remotely in the same league, TORTURE DUNGEON can be seen as at least pointing the way to Ken Russell's THE DEVILS (1971) - and Milligan was likely familiar with John Whiting's play THE DEVILS OF LOUDON, based on Aldous Huxley's historical account, which ran on Broadway for two months between November 1965 and January 1966. As with the other restored Director's Cuts in this set, the image of this film is brighter, more colorful and better composed than any previous release, but the extra minute of restored violence is haphazard and anything but cathartic. The biggest boon of this presentation may be its cleaned-up audio track, which includes some juicy, quotable gems.   

TORTURE DUNGEON is accompanied by an audio commentary by Alex DiSanto, who improvises his talk around notes - only intermittently commenting directly about what is happening or who has walked onscreen. He is so good on certain individual details, like recognizing Ivan's homemade hunchback prosthesis as dating back to Milligan's lost film THE NAKED WITCH, that it's disappointing when he completely overlooks what I was most looking forward to hearing more about: the simply unbelievable, uncredited performance of whoever played Magda, the marriage counselor who suddenly flits into the film like a ghastly human butterfly, holding us as incredulous captives for more than five show-stopping minutes, in which she (?) presumes to advise Susan Cassidy's sluttish Heather about the birds and the bees prior to her wedding to the nose-picking Albert. 

The unbelievable Magda in TORTURE DUNGEON's most WTF moment,
which lasts a full five minutes.

Though DiSanto doesn't take Milligan's "ditties" especially seriously, he has obviously spent time in researching them; he mentions watching certain films in the company of John Borske and his wife Patricia Dillon, both of whom worked on this picture, and he was also called upon by Severin Films to assist in the restorations of the "negatives" (16mm camera reversals) of Milligan's uncut materials. Unfortunately what stands out most about his sometimes catty talk are those times when he crosses a couple of lines I wish he hadn't.

About 22 minutes into the commentary, DiSanto prepares us for what is to come by saying that "a lot" of what he's about to say "should probably be taken with a grain of salt" because he'll be passing along information obtained from people who were there, or who say they were there, or maybe heard this from someone who said they were on the set. He then adds that at least he's "being honest" by saying this up front - not like other commentators, who, according to him, just put what they think they know out there as fact. 

The great Maggie Rogers as the Margaret, the One-Eyed Hag. 

DiSanto proceeds to tell some fast-and-loose stories about the late William Mishkin, who produced about a dozen of Milligan's films - that is, enabled them to exist. He initially refers to Mishkin with his full name... then he becomes the informal "Bill"...  and before you know it, he's referring to him as "the fucker" - never mind the fact that DiSanto is here representing a Mishkin production on disc as its official audio commentator. True, Hal Borske's GHASTLY ONES commentary may be even more outrageous, but he has Frank Henenlotter sharing his track with laughter and other feedback that keeps the discussion light, upbeat, ironic, and ridiculous. Besides, Hal was there. He wasn't always paid, even when he got set on fire either. So he's entitled. I found DiSanto's presumption disturbing.

At the same time, in the course of writing about this, I began to think to myself that maybe this voice needs to be here, after all. I'm not proposing that more people adopt DiSanto's approach, but if Milligan discussion is to remain at all realistic, it's got to maintain its connection to its its gay roots, its Off Off Broadway roots, its theatricality, its bitchy braggadoccio, even its seething anger, resentment, and paranoia. As more people fall under the spell of these curiosities and write about them, whether casually or academically, that work is bound to generate ever newer and more personal takes on what these films are, what they mean, and who made them; and in so doing, they will inevitably gain distance from their real point of origin. Regardless of some errors in taste, tact, and decorum, DiSanto probably grounds this film to a more representative spirit than a more correct, responsible commentary would have done.

 

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) at work, censored in earlier releases.

Like TORTURE DUNGEON, BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (1970, 79m 40s) holds a prominent place in Milligan's filmography given its once wide release, but it fails to live up to its ad campaign or reputation, even with a minute's worth of graphic violence (its whole raison d'être in one minute!) restored to it. Still, the picture serves as confirmation that Tod Slaughter was one of Milligan's chief influences and it's impressive how many characters and how much incident is crammed into its meager running time.

To wit: Sweeney Todd's (John Miranda) barber shop provides gristle for the meat pie mill run by his shrewish mistress Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary), who is forced to work with her sneering butcher Tobias (Berwick Kaler) after her husband (Jonathan Holt) has returned from the war an invalid; Tobias is scheming and sleeping with the amoral, foul-mouthed Rose (Ann Arrow) while lusting after the more wholesome shopgirl Johanna Jeffrey (Annabella Wood), who cannot contain her girlish libido upon the homecoming of her her handsome fiancé  Jarvis (Michael Cox). In addition to sleeping with Maggie, Sweeney is two-timing his alcoholic wife Becky (Susan Driver) with Anna (Susan Cassidy), an ambitious, short but huge-legged music hall singer actress who is also in bed with her theater manager (Frank Echols), who has promised her name up in lights; and, in addition to all this, we have the non-stop traffic of Maggie's clientele, who love to gossip and at least one of whom - a gibbering, Renfield sort of person named Mr. Busker (William Barrel) - seems hooked on Maggie's product and seems dementedly aware of their secret recipe. Several of these foregrounded characters come and go in a blur, and even some of the major characters are less involved than you might expect, but one in particular - Corky (George Barry), a fellow music hall performer at Anna's theater who's drenched in sweat and melting drag makeup, interrupts the film and stands center stage for a few minutes in a vivid if non sequitur character sketch that speaks warmly and with feeling to the fraternity of actors who find themselves working in dumps. 

Berwick Kaler as the feral (and sometimes careless) pie maker Tobias.

Frank Echols and Susan Cassidy backstage at the music hall,
 in Anna's cluttered closet of a dressing room.

Sweeney and Anna listen as Corky (George Barry) steals his scene.

Careful with that cutlery in the kitchen!

Milligan's films usually sport some intelligence and taste in their uses of library music, but BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS scores its many non-horrific, non-suspenseful scenes with music that is cartoonishly romantic, wholesome, or giddy. This can be interpreted as a kind of directorial sarcasm toward the cluelessness of the villagers in general, but it also makes it impossible for the film's true love story, between Jarvis and Johanna, to gain any real traction or for us to take the earnest performances of Annabella Wood and Michael Cox at all seriously. Upon Jarvis' homecoming, the two find a private spot to make love and we feel sorry for the two actors putting themselves in a vulnerable position only to have an aged, flutey, sappy piece of twitterpation tacked on as score. 

 

Milligan's London footage apparently came up short of the requisite running time, obliging him to shoot additional material back in New York. This would have been the backstage scenes at the music hall theater, which feature TORTURE DUNGEON's Susan Cassidy (the heroine who keeps falling out of her loose-fitting Raffiné gown), George Barry as Corky, Frank Echols as theater manager Mr. Fisk, and John Miranda. Miranda was not a member of the British cast but a native of New York City who was active in Off Broadway theater in the years immediately preceding the filming.

* * *

Elaine Boies and Marilee Troncone as the Lennox sisters, caretakers of the Hanley estate.

Made directly after BLOOD (his first film in 35mm) in 1977, LEGACY OF BLOOD (77m 34s) was Milligan's first wholly self-produced feature, based on a rewrite of his breakthrough horror film THE GHASTLY ONES. Until now, this version had never been seen, having been superseded in release by its slightly longer TV version LEGACY OF HORROR (83m 2s). As we learn from Hal Borske's commentary for THE GHASTLY ONES, that film's opening scene featuring his murderous attack on a couple parading under a gaudy parasol was added to the film some time after it was completed, at the insistence of William Miskin who felt it needed more (and earlier) graphic horror. A similar scene does not open LEGACY OF BLOOD, which therefore gives us a sense of how THE GHASTLY ONES must have played  in the version originally presented to Mishkin - that is, without any element of horror whatever for the film's first 48 minutes! The character names are all changed and some new material is also added, such as an early scene in which the troglodytic Carl (Chris Broderick as the analog to the Hal Borske character Colin) is lured by a nasty group of youngsters to an elevated footpath where they toss him over the edge just for kicks - an exposé of cruelty among "normal people" that would grow even more malicious in Milligan's Los Angeles films THE WEIRDO and MONSTROSITY. Milligan also surprises us here with another cameo appearance, this time as a mailman whose outward kindliness masks an appetite for petty theft. 

Carl (Chris Broderick) takes a hard fall.

Andy Milligan's unmilled cameo as a kleptomaniac postman.

The Hanley heiresses and their husbands at the train station.
 Pay no attention to the modern day train behind them!

The arrival on Hannity Island (ignore the plastic goods) in LEGACY OF BLOOD.

In its TV version, there isn't much to admire about this film but its redundancy. However, as presented here, the film is not only the beneficiary of some zestful restored violence but also of its intended 1.78:1 framing, which is a vast pictorial improvement over anything we've previously seen. The film has been given a 2K restoration using its only known 35mm print, held in the collection of producer Ken Lane. The compositions throughout are surprisingly competent and work well toward the telling of a story that actually holds one's attention - which is saying a lot, considering for how long Milligan withholds the juicy incident we're expecting to see. Even the family lawyer (Martin Reymert), a grotesque figure out of a Charles Dickens nightmare in THE GHASTLY ONES, is a normal looking man. As we wait for the murders to kick in, there are still things to raise our chuckles - the horribly cramped foyer used as a restaurant entrance, which leads to an interior with a single dining room table; the scene at Staten Island's Tottenville train station where our cast of characters (in 1920s dress) await their train while huddled tightly together to block our view of a still-somewhat-visible contemporary train car; the man using a candlestick to navigate fairly bright darkness who lowers himself to examine something on the floor - right next to an electrical socket; and the miscasting of ultra-fey Joe Downing as the uber-frisky James Smith, whose sexual appetite for his wife Regina (Dale Hansen) is expressed in several funny ways. When the hooded phantom killer is finally unmasked and embarks on a long origin speech, the soliloquy now takes place right next to a fire on the stairs that's getting out of control - and everyone is so politely listening that no one does anything to put it out. 

For all that, the performances are more than usually competent in a Milligan film and much of the old anger and bile has subsided. Even the Raffiné costumes seem to have discovered a new measure of restraint, and when one character (drunken stage actress Sylvia Cunningham, played by Carla Wentworth) aspires to levels of Maggie Rogers bitchiness, there is no amusing rant-like aspect so that she comes across as more tragic than funny, even when she falls face forward into her dish of fruit cocktail. (Did Andy change medications?) The gore scenes, when they come, are a welcome jolt. LEGACY OF BLOOD may not  have the eerie eccentricity or feverish quality of THE GHASTLY ONES, but it's a personal story now better told.

 

                  The killer marks every intended victim with an X, for reasons never explained.

LEGACY OF BLOOD takes a sudden turn toward horror in its last 30 minutes.

Milligan's trusty prongless pitchfork takes another curtain bow.

Severin has included the TV version LEGACY OF HORROR as a bonus attraction, but it was sourced from a VHS tape and looks quite poor in comparison to the main feature. 

The disc also includes new interviews with LEGACY producer Ken Lane (16m 3s) and actor Chris Broderick (10m 35s), both conducted by Keith Crocker. These are both very informative and entertaining peeks behind the curtain of Milligan film production, though the Lane interview is pushed a little too far by questions about Andy's marriage to Candy Hammond; he tries his best to provide an answer but he wasn't there and can only repeat what he has heard or read. Identified as a "TV Spot" is what appears to be a trailer created for the film to be used on other MPI Home Video releases; it has video-burn titles and runs 1m 11s. 

* * *

I haven't covered everything included in the DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION, and I can't continue as I have other pressing work that must be addressed before the end of the month. I regret that I've not yet been able to give more than a cursory look at Stephen Thrower's 128-page booklet ANDY MILLIGAN'S VENOM, but the passages I've read certainly seem authoritative and sometimes include interviews with participants like Jackie Skarvellis, leading me to think that he's dipped into his work on the next NIGHTMARE USA book for material. Also included in the set are the early short VAPORS and FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET (these are the only 4K restorations, both performed by Vinegar Syndrome), as well as the previously released SEEDS, BLOOD and CARNAGE (making its first appearance on Blu-ray in a transfer from its 35mm camera negative), as well as TOGA PARTY (filmed as PELVIS, 1977), a sex-comedy produced by Lew Mishkin for which Milligan was hired to write and direct the wrap-around toga material, allowing the film to exploit the success of the unrelated ANIMAL HOUSE. SEEDS and BLOOD are two of the most purely entertaining films preserved in this box and I look forward to enjoying them again when time allows.

In announcing and talking about this release in social media, I've been surprised by the sheer volume of raw negativity these films attract. They seem to strike a very negative nerve with a lot of people who resent them as if they were direct challenges of their point of view, or to their pride as cult movie connoisseurs ready to cross any line in search of marginal art. I don't deny that these films, any one of them, are not quite right; they are weirdly old-fashioned and coy, even as they show people's abdomens being bared and eviscerated. They don’t play by the rules of other movies; they do not evoke dark fantasy worlds we can escape into or from. The off-kilter performances and photography, the half-heard dialogue, the clumsy camera spin transitions, the weird theatricality, the unfunny jokes that the characters onscreen find oh so delightfully amusing, the mildewed sounds of old library tracks - all of these I find add to the general feverishness and make me feel I am caught up in someone else's nightmares, someone who doesn't play by the usual rules. Yes, they can be amateurish, even incoherent, but there are creepy elements in some of them that, to me at least, exert a very peculiar and inexplicable power I haven't found anywhere else. The moment after the beheading in GURU THE MAD MONK, for example, when the set has been cleared of all the detritus and Olga (Jacqueline Webb) steps out from behind a curtain and kneels to lap the blood left on the chopping block - just as a jagged edit catapults us into the next scene. There is something about that scene - not just its content but the way it forbids us to look closer, the minimal means by which it was created, also the fact that neither the action or the character is sexualized as it would be in, say, a Hammer film - that makes me feel I'm witnessing a fantasy that is truly raw, dangerous, and unsupervised. I feel in the grip of a mad power that is not in control. 

Was he a great filmmaker? A genius? Obviously not. But committed? Yes. Also fascinating, weirdly unique, amusing, uproarious, intermittently inspired, a control freak, spread way too thin in all departments, and basically stubborn as hell. I feel like I wrote every paragraph in this six-part “review” at least ten times trying to be as precisely honest and truthful as I could be, even when I was of mixed mind about certain things, but I suppose the point could still be missed. Put it this way: I’d take him over Ed Wood any day.

In rendering finally perfect such an array of disturbing (and sometimes amusing) imperfections, THE DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION stands out as one of home video's great triumphs of art (or crap, if you must) over censorship - and a knighthood for Andy Milligan as one of the fantastic cinema's most maligned - and malignant - originals.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Return To Milligan's Island, Part 5

Continuing my coverage of Severin Films' new and much coveted box set, THE DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION...

The more films based on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde template I see, the more confirmed I become in thinking that it is actually Stevenson's novella, not Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula, that is the most endlessly interesting, malleable and personal ur-text of the fantastic cinema. Whether it's brought to the screen by John S. Robertson, Rouben Mamoulian, Terence Fisher, Jerry Lewis, or Walerian Borowczyk, Stevenson's moral tale offers the most yielding text I know for a directorial footprint to assert itself, unique and uniquely fascinating. Supporting this notion is Andy Milligan's THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS (1970, 88:38 - originally titled DR. JEKYLL AND MR. BLOOD), "based on a story by Robert Louis Stephenson" (sic) which gives us a surprisingly traditional main text (or Jekyll text) with - now that we can fully hear and understand it - has an unusual eloquence that would not be out of place at Hammer, while at the same time branching off into all the weirdness expected from Milligan (a Hyde text), encompassing a somewhat antiquated setting, a sudden dramatic enlargement of theatricality, shortnesses of temper, bossy and predatory women, furtive males, intimacies leading to emotional and physical violence, and even a secret-knock club where Hyde discovers an entire London sub-culture of his own kind, a room-sized Caffé Cino replete with homoerotic sideshows amid the human braying and indoor smoke.

Dennis De Marne as Dr. Jekyll - William Jekyll in this one - dedicated man of science.

The theatrical version of THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS has always seemed the most ambitious of Milligan's horror films, yet also one of the most frustrating because the aforementioned "secret knock club" sequence offered tantalizing but highly fragmented glimpses of what was taking place inside, cut down to score a GP rating. A couple of years ago, Scorpion Releasing's initial Milligan Blu-ray of the film presented it in 1.78:1 widescreen, which was proved by the extras (presented open aperture) to crop significant visual content out of view; just opening the images up was revelatory. But here we get quite a bit more of the over all film (more than eight minutes more!) - and, alas, a bit less so far as the orgy is concerned. The sad truth is that, while the earlier expurgated version of the orgy room sequence hinted at things that made one's imagination run riot, Milligan had actually been ordered by William Mishkin to make it less sexual and more violent - and the uncut version of the sequence in Severin's new release gives us more tame material (there's literally nothing stronger than a brief glimpse of a bare-assed man roped to a wall), with none of the horrors we might expect to see elaborated upon. The stronger if less coherent sequence is offered as a separate bonus, but it cannot be viewed in context.

Dennis De Marne with Julia Stratton.

Dennis De Marne gives quite an acceptable set of lead performances, sometimes looking a bit like TOOLBOX MURDERS-era Cameron Mitchell in his evil makeup, and overall the acting is generally not bad at all, with Julia Stratton a standout as the beleaguered barmaid and entertainer April Connors (how she is also billed for her performance). Berwick Kaler, who appears in most of Milligan's London pictures, is here docked after his lead role in NIGHTBIRDS to Jekyll's right-hand associate, a thankless and somewhat inconspicuous role owing more to the way it was written than anything to do with his performance. Adding to the film's charm and peculiarity is Milligan's enthusiasm over his new toy, a fog machine, which he uses to obscure the moments of transformation and also to lend a bit (often more than a bit) of London fog, but which more often than not implies that Jekyll's alter ego (here called Danny, supposedly Danny Blood given the film's original title) is giving off a tremendous schvitz of stench. Despite the title change by Mishkin, no one actually grows two heads, but the suggestion allows for an interesting train of thought about THE MANSTER's possible status as another keenly delirious Jekyll and Hyde adaptation.

A glimpse of the peacock blue tiles found in Debenham House, one of the principal locations.

Another benefit of the film's newfound clarity is being able to appreciate that Milligan somehow managed to avail himself of at least one or two rooms inside Debenham House, with its lustrous peacock blue tiles and mosaic walls, where Joseph Losey filmed SECRET CEREMONY with Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow a couple of years earlier. I was startled to recognize the place, having recently done a commentary for the Losey film and spent a good deal of time looking at it, and I'm pleased to see that Stephen Thrower not only included this information in his booklet but even offers a plausible strategy of how the location may have come to Andy's attention. The 2K restoration now makes it easier than ever to notice that various rooms in the story - Jekyll's classroom, Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll's bedroom, and April's apartment as well - were all shot with the camera facing the same wall, which bears a calendar-like configuration of dates scribbled in chalk - perhaps a production schedule?

Classroom wall. Note the wall markings.

Laboratory - same wall markings.

Jekyll's bedroom - same wall markings.

THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS shares a disc with another of his more generally available horror titles, GURU THE MAD MONK (1970, 56m 13s) - his first film shot in 35mm. As with THE BODY BENEATH, I will pass over critical discussion here but it must be noted that Severin's 2K restoration from a 35mm print held at the American Genre Film Archive the same cut version prepared for the film's GP-rated release that has previously been in circulation - which is minus at least one beheading and a tongue-ripping scene. That said, what is here looks better than ever and Severin goes the extra mile by including both 1.33:1 (full aperture) and 1.85:1 (theatrical matted) aspect ratio options. Here are some image grabs of Neil Flanagan and company from GURU:

 

The sixth and final installment in this series will appear on Monday, with notes on BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS, TORTURE DUNGEON, and LEGACY OF BLOOD.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Return To Milligan's Island, Part 4

The bluish denizens of Highgate Cemetery from THE BODY BENEATH.

Continuing my coverage of Severin Films' new and much coveted box set, THE DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION...

To some considerable extent, the second disc in the MILLIGAN set reproduces and upgrades the BFI's Flipside label release of NIGHTBIRDS on Blu-ray and DVD back in May 2012. As with that earlier edition, Milligan's British vampire opus THE BODY BENEATH (1970, 82m 11s) is included here as co-feature, along with an interview (with its elliptic presentation, it's not really the audio commentary promised) with Berwick Kaler, a cast member of both productions, moderated by Stephen Thrower, along with trailers for both pictures. Still of interest in regard to the earlier release, I hope, is the illustrated booklet containing writings by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, Milligan biographer Jimmy McDonough, Stephen Thrower and me, Tim Lucas. 

Reverend Ford (Gavin Reed) crucifies the hunchbacked Spool (Berwick Kaler).

NIGHTBIRDS and THE BODY BENEATH were the first two of an eventual five pictures that Andy Milligan made during a residence in London, where - according to Stephen Thrower's research - he lived and worked from September 1968 to August 1969. Unlike the majority of these pictures, which were for William Mishkin, the first two were produced by Leonard Elliott, a Briton whose company Cinemedia Films, Inc. is credited onscreen as impersonal producer.

I've already written in depth about the bulk of Milligan's work in a three-part series for VIDEO WATCHDOG (see #s 52-54), I am here paying attention mainly to the DUNGEON set's new discoveries and upgrades; therefore, other than to note that it was shot in several of the same rooms as THE CURSE OF THE FULL MOON and compares well to some other British horrors of the same period (I'm looking at you, CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR), I'm going to pass over any deeper discussion of THE BODY BENEATH. It has always been one of Milligan's most available titles, most notably as a Something Weird Video DVD distributed through Image Entertainment, but Severin's 2K restoration is a complete and seamlessly organic full-aperture presentation that finally renders obsolete all previous Frankensteinian assemblages of different elements and different gauges. New to the Severin release is an audio commentary by William Fowler and Vic Pratt, authors of the book THE BODIES BENEATH (Strange Attractor Press), which I look forward to enjoying at a less hectic time.

Julie Shaw and Berwick Kaler of NIGHTBIRDS, Milligan's bid for arthouse cred.

However, I've not previously written about NIGHTBIRDS (1970, 77m 49s), which is neither a horror film nor terribly much like Milligan's bitchfest cult and sexploitation titles; it's also one of his relatively few titles that take place in a contemporary setting and his last movie in black-and-white. If anything, it's a throwback to his early short VAPORS (1965, included elsewhere in this set), which was a more or less straightforward dramatic piece documenting the interactions of the gay clientele at a New York public baths house. Though shot on short ends and running on the short side of feature length, NIGHTBIRDS finds Milligan stretching himself, aspiring to higher achievement, but to no discernible end except perhaps to earn a even passing consideration as this kind of filmmaker. 

A meandering yet intermittently sweet and sour boy-meets-girl story, NIGHTBIRDS is of greatest interest as a time capsule of Swinging London's seldom-explored decline and as a dramatic workshop for its two leads and a couple of older female characters met along the way. It begins with a young, somewhat haunted-looking man named Dink (Berwick Kaler) stumbling around the streets, vomiting and generally acting like he's been poisoned. He is approached by Dee (Julie Shaw), a too-good-to-be-true young woman who essentially comes to his rescue. When Dink admits he has no place to go, sleep, or stay, Dee takes him back to her apartment (where we learn she, too, is barely surviving and paying her rent with sexual favors) and nurses him back to surprisingly quick health with a cup of tea. Both characters are fundamentally uptight, for reasons to do with their past and background, but they soon enough let their defenses down and embark on trust and intimacy with one another. Gradually, the viewer begins to see through their respective masks, the more dissolute man revealed as a virginal innocent while the outgoing, resourceful woman is revealed as the more mentally unbalanced. 

See what I mean?

Ultimately, NIGHTBIRDS manages only a weak tea level of the anger or delirium roiling in Milligan's most personal work; it embodies a vague idea of what other people might want to see and appreciate as art rather than a place of genuine feeling and disclosure. It presents itself as filmed dramatic theater as filtered through the 1960s trends of gestalt and encounter group therapy and is primarily of interest for presenting the male lead Kaler - a sometimes feral, unnerving presence in Milligan's subsequent British horror pictures - in a more troubled, vulnerable, sensitive mode. Both Kaler and Julie Shaw, making their first onscreen appearances, manage to make something somewhat more of their thinly-sketched roles. In an accompanying interview (not really a "commentary") with Kaler, moderated by a very patient Stephen Thrower, the actor admits to being mystified by his and Shaw's visible ease and comfort in relation to the camera and can only credit this to Milligan's handling of them. In relation to this, he also reveals that (at least from the point of view of his own involvement) Milligan spent more time on NIGHTBIRDS than on the horror movies he also made during this London period - as much as a couple of weeks, including rehearsal time. 

Though it's easy to accept that Milligan spent more time on this ambitious project than his others in pre-production, the script nevertheless feels hastily dashed-off before he caught his transatlantic flight; it's a rough draft rushed before the camera rather than a fully realized text. To take just one point of illustration, Milligan wastes an entire minute of screen time with Dee offering Dink a cup of tea, which he at first turns down and begins to explain why, but finally, gratefully accepts. Ultimately neither fish nor fowl, NIGHTBIRDS cannot really be called one of Milligan's better films - just one of his more normal (read: less abnormal) ones. It's what people politely call "a character study," in that neither its story nor pay-off are particularly profound yet something about the actors and the ill-defined tension of the situation keeps us watching, hoping something will happen to galvanize all the loose ends. It would be preposterous flattery to file it among the more notable outlier views of the weird side of London, such as Roman Polanski's REPULSION (1965) or Jerzy Skolimowski's DEEP END (1970). If it has any message at all, it's the same one we get in much more entertaining Milligan pictures: that other people are no damn good and those who survive, survive alone.

Knowing what we've heard of Milligan's production methods, it's tempting to suspect that NIGHTBIRDS was made with meager money diverted from his budget for THE BODY BENEATH, which is definitely Poverty Row but positively rich-looking compared to this. However, Stephen Thrower's VENOM booklet includes testimony from producer Leonard Elliott confirming his knowledge of the picture under its original title (PIGEONS) and his plans to release a whole spate of Milligan pictures had the first two done well. As it is, aside from a rumored three-day booking at New York City's Cameo Theater in 1970, there is no evidence that the film was ever properly released anywhere in the world until the BFI home video release in May 2012.

The Kaler interview also reveals, in a disclosure reminding us of the mouse torture episode in the subsequent THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE!, that Julie Shaw and Andy Milligan had a temporary falling out when she refused her director's order to twist the head off a live pigeon that serves as the couple's vaguely metaphorical family pet through most of the proceedings. Andy eventually did the dirty deed himself, with Shaw then made to gingerly carry its headless carcass to a resting place on the ledge of her apartment's rooftop. This would seem to challenge what Hal Borske said in defense of Milligan in his VIDEO WATCHDOG interview, when he claimed that Andy was a lover of animals and that the mouse episode only happened because William Mishkin's office insisted.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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RIP Monte Hellman (1929-2021)

I am so sorry to hear of Monte Hellman's passing earlier today. He was a great American filmmaker, and he made arresting films right out of the box with BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE (1959). His RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND, THE SHOOTING, TWO LANE BLACKTOP and COCKFIGHTER are all masterpieces, and he may well have made others I haven't seen. He was one of the many directors on THE TERROR with Boris Karloff. He produced RESERVOIR DOGS for Quentin Tarantino, he shot additional footage for Roger Corman's THE INTRUDER and Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, he edited THE WILD ANGELS for Roger Corman (which wins him a guest spot on my script and novel THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES), and he tried to make a movie of Alain Robbe-Grillet's LA MAISON DE RENDEZVOUS. It's also said he had a hand in cutting Bob Rafelson's Monkees film HEAD. All this, plus he was once married to Barboura Morris, the delicious beat girl from A BUCKET OF BLOOD.

I can't post this without reproducing this frame from THE SHOOTING (1966), photographed by Gregory Sandor, which I consider one of the most stunning natural images in motion picture history:

RIP Maestro - and my deepest condolences to my friends Brad Stevens (who wrote a terrific book about him) and Kier-La Janisse (who has been preparing a COCKFIGHTER monograph for years) and anyone else reading this who knew Monte and cared for him.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Return To Milligan's Island, Part 3

Blink and you might miss them, but the werewolves are here!

Severin Films' DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION doesn't arrange its contents in chronological order and this invites the consumer to approach the discs inside according to one's own curiosity and passion. Speaking for myself, I couldn't resist jumping ahead to the disc featuring THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! (1972, 92m) and the heretofore mythic movie it originally set out to be: THE CURSE OF THE FULL MOON (1970, 73m 7s). The latter title has always held for me the fascination of a truly lost film - not just lost, but never really completed and therefore far less likely to be recovered than any picture that actually enjoyed theatrical release. All of the original unreleased versions included in this set share this status, and there are several. Just learning that they still existed somewhere would have been tremendously exciting, but to own them is literally incredible. In particular, CURSE was a case in which Milligan's original work was not just toned down for release but thoroughly revised and rewritten over a period of years under the orders of its producer, William Mishkin. 

It's become a legendary story how Andy turned in his London-made feature THE CURSE OF THE FULL MOON - about the Mooneys, a wealthy English family afflicted with by a mysterious ailment which turns out to be lycanthropy, leading to a final reel in which all the eccentric, cranky, or downright bitchy family members finally wolf-out and lunge at each other's throats. It sat on the shelf for two years, until Mishkin told Milligan to shoot some additional scenes to bring killer rats into it (by then, WILLARD was big at the box office). The result was THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE!, a title that spilled the beans in advance about the Mooney family's curse and made the film's dancing around the secret at least ten times more tedious. The version released to theaters also contained a truly miserable scene of a live mouse being nailed to a window sill, which made it harder to accept the film as harmless fun.

Joan Ogden and Douglas Phair as Phoebe and Papa Mooney.

Seen in its original form and relieved of the revision's sick cruelty, THE CURSE OF THE FULL MOON is revealed as a distant cousin of James Whale's THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932). It was made in London for only $15,000. Given the benefit of a 2K restoration from the original 16mm camera reversal, the image is brighter and more colorful than was possible in earlier releases taken from interpositive or murky 35mm blow-ups, and the soundtrack is also noticeably brightened and more understandable; one only now wishes that Milligan had lingered longer on the werewolf makeup so we could get a better look at it. (It's like a special circle of Hell trying to frame-grab them; one feels especially sorry for the poor actors, who must have spent hours in makeup just to be photographed for a few precious frames, or from behind!) The performances are all very good by Milligan standards, with Douglas Phair and Hope Stansbury outstanding as the family patriarch and problem child (!), and Milligan himself turns up in a sweet bit as an aging, neglected gunsmith eager for kindly company.

Hope Stansbury, Ian Innnes, and Jackie Skarvellis.

Jackie Skarvellis (in mind boggling Raffiné finery) and her director in an unbilled performance.

In what may be the most important production choice in the entire set, Severin makes this version of the film available with two audio tracks, one containing the raw dialogue as preserved without music or sound effects on the actual camera reversal, and the other carefully (I would even say flawlessly) matching the footage to the corresponding finished soundtrack from THE RATS ARE COMING!, with its eerie and delightfully familiar Roger Roger cues from the Valentino Music Library (also heard in THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE among other films, as well as Attilio Mineo's 1962 album MAN IN SPACE WITH SOUNDS). 

Mayhem!

Absolute...

Mayhem!

The CURSE disc also includes the theatrical RATS ARE COMING cut (92m), maintaining the camera reversal as its main source while the added footage is sourced from a 35mm blow-up interpositive. A couple of the additional scenes, including the pathetic and grueling mouse torture footage (which occurs around the 38m mark), look bluish and overexposed, but Monica's visit to the rat salesman - always overly dark and sometimes incomprehensible in prior releases - now shows a remarkable enhancement in detail. Again, the audio track on both versions is a huge improvement over all previous releases, including theatrical. Both versions of the film are also subtitled for the first time on home video, though the RATS version fails to catch the Dickensian reference of rat salesman Mr. Micawber's name, subtitling it as "Mr. McCarver." 

Hope Stansbury with Chris Shore (aka Eric Conklin) as the bizarre Mr. Micawber in the 1972 RATS reshoot.

There is also a home video trailer for the film (not the original 35mm theatrical trailer, alas), as well as the locations documentary featurette "The World of Andy Milligan" (15m 10s). Chris Poggiali's locations tour covers spots used by Milligan in New York, London, and Los Angeles from his earliest stage productions through his last three features. It is a very informative featurette, with now-and-then comparisons of various locations, including shots of one NYC grindhouse theater where Andy worked for five days - as it looked then, and how it looked when two Milligan films were displayed on the marquee.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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