1967-1979, Severin Films, $64.95
Severin Films’ new three-disc GUTTER AUTEUR box set (which takes its primary name from Rob Craig’s Andy Milligan critical biography of 2012), is the sort of compendium that we normally dare not dream could be realized. It augments Severin’s previous, near-exhaustive Milligan retrospective (the nine-disc DUNGEON OF ANDY MILLIGAN COLLECTION set) with a literally incredible line-up of previously-thought-lost and/or unreleased titles, none of which has ever been released before on disc.
The main contents are THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025), a new documentary about the cinematic scourge of Staten Island, featuring interviews with several of his past friends and collaborators, and then the newly unearthed and recovered treasures: THE DEGENERATES (1967), Milligan’s second feature and first horror piece; COMPASS ROSE (1967), an abandoned NYC art scene spoof bedevilled with audio problems; KISS ME! KISS ME! KISS ME! (1968), a Milligan work-for-hire adapted from a story by exploitation producer William Mishkin; and his never-completed Southern “epic” HOUSE OF SEVEN BELLES (1979), the ambitious-if-tattered curtain call on his initial body of East Coast work.
THE DEGENERATES
1967, 63:40
While THE DEGENERATES (1962) could never be called a major film, it is nevertheless a major recovery. Three young men from different military outfits - the blunt tool Frank (David Haine), the more sensitive Jim (Robert Burgos), and the misfit GoGo (Vernon Newman), each sent out in search of after-the-bomb survivors - find each other and wander through a no-budget post-apocalyptic landscape, comparing JFK-like stories of where they were when the world ended, when they happen to stumble upon the secluded homestead of five adult sisters.
Perhaps with Charles Baudelaire's LE FLEURS DE MAL at the back of his mind, Milligan names them all after flowers: Violet (Bryarly Lee), Daisy (Ann Linden), Lily (Laura Weiss), Iris (Marcia Haufrecht), Rose (Susan Howard) and another, Ivy (VAPORS author Hope Stansbury), who has fled the sick atmosphere of the family farmhouse (which inexplicably retains running water and electricity) for the great outdoors and a diet of scraps and offal. The eldest of the sisters, the well-named Violet, has set herself up as the family drill sergeant; her violent mood swings regularly turn the others’ home lives into a domestic hell. The introduction of men into this scenario, with not enough of them to go around, ratchets up the tensions among the siblings, especially Vi, who is not only a violent schizophrenic but a closet lesbian who’s up for an incestuous lifestyle and will commit any crime known to posterity not to lose the love of her sisters. By the time she has her breakdown and gets her comeuppance, the moral of the story is one of Milligan's perennials: that everyone is fundamentally vile - naming them after flowers isn't going to change the fact that people basically stink.
Though it is generally as reckless as Milligan’s later one-man-band work, THE DEGENERATES (originally titled SIN SISTERS 2000 and co-written by Milligan with VAPORS star Gerald Jacuzzo) is an important find that finds the still-novice filmmaker taking some unusual care in a number of departments. First of all, armed with no more than $11,000 and an abandoned property in Woodstock, New York, Milligan had the chutzpah to tell a post-apocalyptic science fiction story with ideas rather than special effects. In telling a futuristic story with next to no means, THE DEGENERATES shares barracks with such adventurous films as Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE (1963) and Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE (1965), while looking forward to Lynn Littman’s TESTAMENT (1983), though it feels like a closer relative to such threadbare productions as Ronnie Ashcroft’s THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER or Bruno ve Sota’s THE BRAIN EATERS (both 1958), though even these featured some crude form of special effects.
Contrary to Milligan’s later works, THE DEGENERATES - despite its exploitative title - is unusual in its willingness to express tenderness, and for including love scenes that aren’t exclusively driven by lust or the requirements of exploitation. Here, characters say things like “I love you” or “I need you,” actually taking care as to which transitive verb they say. Remarkably for a film shot on a 16mm hand-held Auricon camera, Milligan (usually the least careful of cameramen) succeeds in managing a surprising number of well-composed shots, indicating the possibility that storyboards may have been done or that he was simply still interested in putting his best foot forward. There are also moments of actual tenderness in the compositions, as in the instance when Milligan moves away from the faces of two lovers speaking to focus on the entwining of their hands; or when a harmonica-playing male characters is killed, the focus lingering behind on the harmonica left in the grass as his body is dragged off-camera; or when Vi is shown spying on a lovers’ tryst from an upstairs window, wistful and envious, only to change as the focus pulls back from outside the window screen to the inside as her hand grabs a knife and stabs the sill repeatedly. The performances are also of a higher-than-usual standard for this filmmaker, especially those of the women. In the first of her many roles for Milligan, Hope Stansbury is outstanding as the feral Ivy, and Bryarly Lee’s unpredictable turns as Violet make the viewer all the more hopeful that her earlier lead role in Milligan’s still-lost THE NAKED WITCH (1967) will someday be recovered.
The source for this 2K restoration Blu-ray release is the only 35mm print known to still exist, which was located at Cinematek in Brussels, the Royal film archive of Belgium. Alas, this means that both French and Belgian subtitles are burned into the 1.37:1 image when the characters speak. Considering the film’s singular rarity, this is certainly no deal-breaker; it’s sometimes interesting to see how the subtitles vary from the actual soundtrack. (Ivy’s name is inexplicably changed to Irène, and sometimes meaning and nuance are scuttled for the sake of brevity.) There are some unfortunate anomalies in the original source, like a recurring hair in the gate, and the print admittedly has some choppy passages, with the opening and ending of the film only ragged steps away from absentia. Nevertheless, the restoration of what survives is as fine as one could possibly expect.
Because the running time is about 10 minutes shorter than promised by the film’s pressbook, there has been some speculation that scenes involving sex and nudity have been cut. While commentator Alex DiSanto has the testimony of actor Robert Burgos that at least one such scene was filmed involving him and Ann Linden in the chicken coop (which had to be reshot because the first attempt was overexposed), I’m skeptical that such content was ever actually used, given the way Milligan fades to black in-camera whenever scenes begin to heat up - and then fades up in-camera on separate takes of the mornings after. Given the stories told in the documentary, I suspect that Andy was looking for excuses to see Burgos naked, as he apparently asked him (not Linden) to play the scene fully nude, which the actor refused to do. Furthermore, there are instances of near-nudity, mild cursing, Grand Guignol-type gore, and also a scene involving lesbianism and incest, more than enough to have consigned the film strictly to adult theaters. All of the actresses perform in amusing cave girl-like outfits split up the sides, which reveals that they’re all wearing 1960s flowered panties with pantyhose underneath, which raises reasonable questions about how long such accessories might hold up under post-nuclear conditions.
Extras include a full commentary by Alex DiSanto, a lengthy talk about the film by Stephen Thrower, an interview with actress Laura Cunningham, a lobby card gallery, and footage of Jimmy McDonough's introductions of the two recovered features at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.
COMPASS ROSE
1968, 73:00
Sharing the disc with THE DEGENERATES is COMPASS ROSE, a relentlessly shrill, only intermittently effective satire of the Off-Off-Broadway scene. It focuses on Dewey (Anthony Moscini), a NYC hustler who is making most of his cash from Miss Gloria (supposedly Anne Linden, but I doubt it - more later), a former movie star who is not especially old but has receded into private life where she is regularly administered with blood transfusions and “pounds of morphine” by Dr. Feist (Hal Borske) and two vampiric sidekicks. Dewey’s closest friends seem to be Allen (Gerald Jacuzzo, giving a BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS-worthy performance), an alleged playwright whose chemical self-abuse knows no bounds; Olive (Candy Hammond), an infantile, chronic nudist who fauns over him; and another of his idolators, Asa (played by an anonymous Sally Kellerman type), who lives to take acid. The near-plotless film follows a date night for Dewey and Miss Gloria, which consists of a night of Off-Off-Broadway theater-hopping while, back at Dewey's apartment, Olive decides to commit suicide in his empty bed. (So he can look forward to that after the night he’s going to have, though we don’t get that far.) The date starts out at a German cabaret-themed joint presided over by Maggie Rogers in Nazi regalia, which is presenting the drag playlet “The Death of Linda Darnell,” then moves over for a compassionately brief visit to another room specializing in “psychedelia, the young thing”, and finally a literal trip to a club called The Orifice, which is actually the basement where two murder scenes in THE GHASTLY ONES were filmed, where a pie fight turns into a vast orgy which climaxes with a spectacle of projectile blood-vomiting and death erupting in the midst of it all.
Of all of Milligan’s available films, COMPASS ROSE is the closest to something that might have come out of the Andy Warhol Factory, yet it fails at achieving the heights of Paul Morrissey’s work because it’s all so one-note, so blinded by disdain for the scene he’s satirizing that he comes up empty when a competent, responsible playwright would show some compassion for the failures in his story. Still, one imagines that - had Milligan made more films such as this (and maybe he did with the still-lost DEPRAVED, THE FILTHY FIVE and GUTTER TRASH) - he might have been taken more seriously by others in the NYC art scene. But seeing how he felt about them, this was likely not his goal. One gets the impression that Milligan may have been much more interested in filming Moscini in his underwear through most of the film than giving him actual work to do. Moscini, who looks like a young David Johansen in a Beatle Paul wig, does a decent job and there are other noteworthy performances from Asa and Miss Gloria. Speaking of Miss Gloria, she is often identified as early Milligan regular Anne Linden but clearly is not; this woman’s eyes are dark, she has a nobbier nose, a rounder jaw, and much deeper grin lines. Something that I did not notice about her until they reach the Nazi theater is that she's also wearing some kind of cosmetic spackle to superficially cover an unsightly skin problem around the sides of her mouth and the skin of her upper throat.
This disc presentation has two advantages over the tapes which have been circulating among fans since sometime at the turn of the century, one of which originated from a VHS shared with me by Hal Borske. It originates from the only surviving film element - a 16mm answer print - and has been subtitled, which is a big help toward following the challenging soundtrack, though it doesn’t get everything quite right. One of the story's several alleged playwrights, Morris (John Borske), is subtitled as “Kvares,”while a Sergei becomes “Sergay,” Dr. Feist becomes “Dr. Faust”, and a dead silent passage is described as “unintelligible,” all of which should give you an idea of what the transcriber had to deal with.
The only extra for COMPASS ROSE is a healthy half-hour of Stephen Thrower discussing it, and he does a good job of discussing its origins, its historical value as the only filmed record of the Caffé Cino, and assessing what is and isn’t there.
KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME
1968, 78:28
Named after a song heard in the film (composed by Harry Huret and performed by The Facts of Life, and which sounds somewhat loosely modeled on “Ain’t Misbehavin’”), this is hybrid, almost work-for-hire Milligan film though very much still imbued with his personality. Most unusually, the script by Josef Bush was based on an original story by exploitation producer William Mishkin, which could pass for something ghost-written by Hubert Selby Jr.. Natalie Rogers stars as Jean Pernofsky (perhaps not the way it’s spelled but definitely not Novak, as claimed on the IMDb), a ditsy and probably schizophrenic wife and mother whose narcissistic whirlwind ways pull the viewer aboard for one hell of a ride.
Living with her husband Stan (Don Williams) and four-year-old son Jimmy (Sean Martin), Jean’s self-obsession allows for daytime drinking and flirtation with other men but has no time for cleaning her claustrophobic, cock-a-roach-infested efficiency apartment or providing a positive role model for her off-the-rails kid, whom she appears to feed only candy. She complains to Stan (whose mother is dying) about not living in a “nice” place, shifting the blame from herself, and gets reinforcement from her nearly-as-crazy bestie Lurlene (Angela Peters) for her alcoholism and duty-dodging. The main crux of the story's first act involves Jean’s determination to seduce Stan’s best friend Eddie (Peter Ratray), who has come over for dinner and a few rounds of gin on an evening when Stan has had to bail to look after his mother. When the clothes start to come off, to the tune of the title theme (a cocktail club sung by Peter Ratray’s wife Ann Willis, also heard to no end in a squawky instrumental rock cover throughout the picture), we cut to the New Jersey home where Stan and his nurse sister Ellen (Joy Martin) are on death watch. There, life is just as batshit-crazy, with the makeup-wizened mother receiving bedside ministrations from a questionable, Grady Sutton-like doctor. The old lady has managed to save $4,000 and wants Stan to promise it will be divvied up between Stan, fed-up brother Ray (Gerald Jacuzzo) and particularly the saintly Ellen, but when the idea is floated of having Ellen move into Stan and Jean’s hell-closet until the day she finds a husband - well, Jean accepts for purely mercenary reasons, while Stan’s suppressed incestuous feelings for his sister begin bubbling under the surface.
While it’s recognizably Milligan’s work, his attitude toward the material (which I imagine he tweaked a bit) is noticeably neat and respectable; it’s like "Andy-wears-a-tie-to-work" day. As always, he photographs and directs, and his 16mm handheld work is surprisingly competent within the tight confines of the apartment - which is then replaced, in the second act, to a larger apartment following Ellen’s arrival. He even shows a room being furnished in a series of time-lapse exposures. The second act focuses on Jean’s attempts to get Ellen hooked-up with Eddie, in a purely selfish effort to get him back into her own bed, and Stan’s resistance to this idea for his own reasons. The nagging rock theme holds together a very lengthy dating montage, in which Eddie manages to court Ellen with lame French and phony-sounding “aint’s”, until his sexual insistence threatens a good thing. In some ways, the film is a showcase for Natalie Rogers' performance, which annoys its way into one’s heart. She breaks any number of boundaries (even breaking the fourth wall and asking “What are you looking at?” when she alienates everyone else onscreen) in a mad rampage to avoid any and all Mother of the Year awards.
KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME is one of Milligan’s most coherent pictures (like FLESHPOT ON 42nd STREET) because it manages to document a form of madness without entirely succumbing to madness itself. After what threatens to become an orgiastic finale, it lets off some steam with an outstandingly calm, sane dialogue scene involving Ellen and Lurlene before dealing its last melodramatic blows, with Stan finally turning on Jean with the memorable line, “It’s about time I put you in the hospital!” Obviously, this can be very amusing to watch, in the manner of a John Waters hoot, and the fact that it’s amusing to watch (not unlike WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?) makes the viewer feel complicit in the dark turns it takes near the end. It's tempting to count among Milligan’s best pictures, though it’s a definite a hybrid among his usual hothouse flowers. I can't help but wonder, though, if a making-of documentary showing how he managed to shoot the thing in such constraining quarters wouldn't have been more entertaining.
The extras for this title include an audio interview with Milligan, conducted by French journalist Stéphane Bourgoin in October 1995, which runs just over 50 minutes under KISS ME x 3 and is surprising. Milligan has a very listenable voice and doesn't sound at all chaotic or angry. Along the way, he reminisces about his different films, points out which are his favorites, and offers some very canny contract advice for filmmakers who want to hang onto their rights or sell their product outright. He also reveals that the crazy families in his various film are sometimes thinly-veiled portraits of his various producers. Also on the disc are video interviews with Natalie Rogers (15:13) and Peter Ratray (17:12, both interesting and illuminating), an informed mini-lecture on the film by Alex DiSanto (14:09), and a longer and meatier one by Stephen Thrower (32:16), who is eloquent and tongue-in-cheek about the picture and has done his research into the production and its peculiar, delayed release with all due diligence. There is also a trailer (3:55, promising “An Orgy Like You’ve Never Seen Before EVER!”).
HOUSE OF SEVEN BELLES
1979-1981?, 92:45
We read about it in Jimmy McDonough’s biography THE GHASTLY ONE, Nicolas Winding Refn acquired it for his BYNWR website, and at last we finally have it on disc. What is it? It’s a feature-length bounty of not-necessarily-properly-edited material from Milligan's long-aborning, unfinished project, HOUSE OF SEVEN BELLES. Set in the months following the Civil War (because he felt that period films were less likely to date than contemporary ones), it haphazardly documents the ways of the LeFleur family - demented by pride, probable inbreeding, and feeling forced into premature decline by those damn Yankees. Making their situation worse is the family's longtime feud with the Lawsons (“They shoulda named them all after weeds!”), a similarly once-powerful and influential family who are actively conspiring to either acquire Transfloria (the LeFleur ancestral manor) or otherwise benefit from its coming destruction as a national railway line plans to run a railroad right through it. But this is an Andy Milligan film, where everyone is either crazy, dangerous, stupid, or “just one big hate,” and the feud goes up a notch when one character is suddenly decapitated off-camera and has their severed head bowled into the middle of a gossipy henfest plotting a bake sale.
Since what we have here is feature length, one feels a critical assessment of what’s here should be possible, but there is both too much film here, and not enough. Hard as I tried, I never could get a fix on how many family members were in the Lefleurs; I counted two in the end credits I’d never heard mentioned in the movie, and found at least a couple I remembered who were missing. An hour passes between the first and second murders, the bulk of which are then squeezed in quick succession into the last 15-20 minutes. While almost all the murders are left to the gloved hands of a hands-on killer, one of them is left to Hekebah, a cackling old witch who smokes a pipe and spends most of her time in a rocking chair on her front porch, who uses magic to levitate death-dealing props and do away with someone in a manner anticipating Milligan’s own less-interesting poltergeist movie CARNAGE (1984). Ultimately, the film has far too many characters, some of whom are barely touched on, like the youngest LeFleur, Daisy-May, who dotes on dead animals and seems to live in the wild - not unlike Ivy in THE DEGENERATES. Meanwhile, there are scads of others who lend nothing but an anecdotal presence to the story, or perhaps a handy corpse, as when it ventures outside Transfloria to take in the local color at a tavern called The Cracker Hole, like Milligan regular Hal Borske as Judd, who stutters around a word until he changes it, like Porky Pig. Very often, the pointless scenes are where the film becomes most entertaining, as it does outside a local church (the same one seen in GURU THE MAD MONK, 1970), where a dozen women in cumbersome dresses with billowing petticoats get into a street brawl. Stephen Thrower (who contributes the sole extra here, a rewarding 29:46 talk) estimates that the film features no less than 59 different Civil War-era dresses and undergarments, all designed and made by Milligan’s longtime alter ego, Raffiné (!).
Shot in 35mm color, which has slightly faded, the cinematography was shot from a tripod, making it look steady and more skilled than in Milligan’s early hand-held, “swirl camera” days. Even the uneaten food shown on a buffet table looks edible - not his usual thrown-together raw chicken and rhubarb shafts. The soundtrack sometimes falls silent during transitions, and some of it features cross-talk or indistinct dialogue, so (as with COMPASS ROSE) I found it helpful to watch with the subtitles activated. This also led me to discover some discrepancies; for example, one character’s historically plausible use of the N-word gets diffused to the word “negro” in the subtitles.
Though it can’t be held to the same standards as completed work, this work-in-progress is pure, demented pleasure and how lucky we are that Severin Films were able to include it. It’s food for thought - reason to mourn what it never became, and to appreciate for how much it still takes after its father.
Overall, GUTTER AUTEUR is a one-in-a-thousand release, in terms of the rarity and revelations of its contents. While none of the contents exceed what I have found most embraceable about Milligan’s other work, they add considerably to my own understanding and appreciation of those other films - I can now see the ghosts of Caffé Cino in the orgiastic nightmare of THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS, and the loud face of Andy's mother is now firmly superimposed over much of the pain I find in his collected works - which is why I consider this an essential purchase. My only problem with the set is that, as seriously as the scholarly contributors take their research, there seems to be an unspoken consensus among them that the films themselves are little more than reckless, entertaining lunacy, and the extras tend to approach the subject as opportunities for anecdotes, speculations, and sly gossip. While there is also acknowledgement of their novelty as gay-coded work, no attempt is really made to examine Milligan’s output in terms of what it says, or to take it at all seriously or analytically, or to trace it back to which films and filmmakers (or theatrical work) inspired his particular cocktail of extremism. It’s true that this particular grouping of films is mostly (though not entirely) non-horror, which leaves out the more obvious inspirations behind that group of films, but to discuss any group of films solely from the circumstances of their filming, how little they cost, and how the people involved met and got along, is to leave the films themselves out in the cold. But, fortunately, there is still one more film in the package.
THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN
2025, 101:42
This documentary by Grayson Tyler Johnson and Josh Johnson (no relation) is the first disc in the set, and I took this as a suggestion of where to begin. I have to say I felt somewhat disappointed by my first viewing, but far more satisfying on second viewing, after absorbing all of the newly-uncovered Milligan films supporting it. It is “narrated”, to an extent, by the same Milligan audio interview included in its entirety (and with less distortion) elsewhere in the set, and held together with photographs, film excerpts, NYC and Staten Island location visits and especially on-camera reminiscences of numerous friends and collaborators, including his biographer Jimmy McDonough.
It’s here that we finally get the real emotional dividends tied-up in this filmography, as well as personal testimonies to dig into the matter of Andy’s mental health and volatile temper, which consensus tells us took a sharp, hateful turn after the making of LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME and its handling by William Mishkin, which resulted in the picture’s apparent suppression for the better part of two years. Hope Stansbury shares some personal mementos, Sam Sherman reminisces about the role he played in creating campaigns and new titles for THE DEGENERATES and THE GHASTLY ONES (“There were ones and they were ghastly,” he explains), Stephen Thrower and Alex diSanto offer historical details and occasional critical comments, and McDonough brings his first-hand observations to the latter Los Angeles years and films, concerning their collaborative adventures as well as more personal memories, such as the dinner date to see Cathy Rigby in PETER PAN when Andy first confided to Jimmy that he’d contracted AIDS. He and BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS alumnus John Miranda became his caregivers during his last days.
By far the most valuable contributor is Gerald “Jerry” Jacuzzo - Andy’s longtime friend, roommate, companion, co-writer and actor - who comes forth with the open heart and insights necessary to the success of any documentary. As the garbled soundtrack of COMPASS ROSE declares, “pain is the compass rose” of life, and by extension this is also true of his roiling, railing filmography. This is the primary reason why my hackles are raised when people are drawn to this body of work mostly to mock it, to condescend, to make sport of its technical incompetence, which pours salt into those wounds Milligan sought to exorcize. Of course, there's no overlooking the outlandish melodrama of it all, or the deliberate humorousness and overplayed inhumanity of the characters and caricatures he intended to mock; but what has always fascinated me about his work - chaotic and convulsive as it is - is its accidental/autodidactic modus operandi, which only achieves true mediocrity after the move to California, which says something important about the singularity of the earlier work. Despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary, Andy Milligan was an artist and the existence of this release indicates that his infamous marginality may be diminishing, whether he would like that or not.
