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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Hope Stansbury, Ian Innnes, and Jackie Skarvellis. |
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| 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).
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| Mayhem! |
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| Absolute... |
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| 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."
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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.
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