Bog (1979)

I’ve long wondered why so many zero-budget filmmakers botch their attempts at creature features, given that the formula for these pictures is so well-established. Sure, lack of production resources makes it challenging to build convincing onscreen monsters, but inventive people have found ways to convey diverting narratives while minimizing critter footage. But I suppose the answer to this conundrum is obvious—filmmakers with greater aptitude also have greater ambition, meaning the folks who make anemic monster movies often lack the drive to attempt anything else. All of which is a lugubrious path toward discussing Bog, a thoroughly uninteresting horror flick about a supernatural creature issuing from a murky lake to bedevil locals and tourists. Think Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) except set in America and bereft of everything that made Creature from the Black Lagoon exciting. Bog begins with a rural dimwit using dynamite to fish in a remote lake. Naturally, this activity rouses something deadly from down below. As the movie progresses, more people fall victim to the monster until the requisite duo of a policeman and a scientist join forces to tackle the crisis. These drab characters are played by actors late in their long careers, Gloria DeHaven and Aldo Ray, though it’s a stretch to say their participation gives Bog any patina of Hollywood gloss. While the narrative is coherent in an idiotic sort of way, everything about the movie is depressingly awful. The production values are weak, the thrills are nonexistent, and the monster suit is a joke—the costume is crowned by a giant fish head. The only novelty in Bog arises from DeHaven’s presence. Not only does she spew pseudoscientific gobbledygook about the creature’s reproductive habits, but she plays the second role of an aging backwoods mystic who may or may not have enjoyed relations with the creature. I suppose if you’re going to appear in a terrible movie, you might as well commit to the endeavor.

Bog: LAME

The Child (1977)

Horror-flick clichés abound in The Child, a low-budget entry into the creepy-kid genre. Out in the boonies, pretty twentysomething Alicanne (Laurel Barnett) arrives to begin her job as caretaker for Rosalie (Rosalie Cole), the 11-year-old daughter of a nasty old guy who lives in a decaying mansion. (The child’s mother died some time previous, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) Naturally, Alicanne receives warnings about the house (and about the 11-year-old) from a kindly neighbor, and, naturally, she ignores these warnings. All the usual nonsense happens. Strange behavior. Troublesome mysteries. Weird noises. And still Alicanne remains in the house, even as she learns about several recent unsolved murders. Turns out Rosalie has supernatural control over zombie-like creatures, and that she’s guiding her “friends” to murder people whom she feels were complicit in her mother’s death. Inasmuch as it has a steady stream of chase scenes taking place in quasi-atmospheric locations, The Child might have enough shock-cinema mojo to keep undemanding horror addicts entertained. Those who actually want originality, a proper story, or real thrills—not so much. The movie’s shortcomings include distracting dubbing, laughable gore FX, iffy production values, obnoxious music, underwhelming jolts, and weak acting. If only because The Child lacks outright cruelty and misogyny, it’s far from the worst type of ’70s drive-in horror, but that remark should not be misconstrued as praise.

The Child: LAME

Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? (1971)

Apparently this atrocious horror comedy was first released in 1969 as a gay porno titled Does Dracula Really Suck? (later: Dracula and the Boys). Then, in one of cinema history’s most whiplash-inducing transformations, the picture was recast as a PG-rated monster comedy for the drive-in circuit. Some traces of the original incarnation remain visible, because while the PG-rated version of Guess What Happened to Count Dracula? lacks guy-on-guy action, it has a camp sensibility. The acting is deliberately overwrought, the photography is colorful (as in scenes are lit with randomly tinted gels), and the storyline is a (dim-witted) genre spoof. For those who crave sexed-up bloodsucker comedies, even garbage flicks along the lines of Old Dracula (1974) and Nocturna (1979) are preferable to this eyesore, and it’s insulting to mention Love at First Bite (1979) in this context. Anyway, Count Adrian (Dee Roberts) runs a nightclub/restaurant called “Dracula’s Dungeon,” occasionally preying on customers even though he has a stable of concubines. Other elements of the idiotic narrative include a caged gorilla, exotic dancers, and voodoo rituals. Thanks to heinously bad performances and tacky production values, the movie gets boring fast, so it’s immaterial whether the plot is incomprehensible or just uninteresting. Watching eight minutes of this shapeless sludge is painful, much less all 80.

Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?: SQUARE

Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

          Whereas their previous fantasy-film collaborations were UK/US coproductions, the final ridiculous adventure flick directed by Kevin Connor and starring Doug McClure was financed and produced entirely by British entities. Although it’s less widely seen than the previous Connor/McClure movies, Warlords of Atlantis—sometimes known as Warlords of the Deep—is perhaps the most absurdly enjoyable (or enjoyably absurd) film in the whole cycle. Featuring hilariously silly special effects, a gleefully goofy storyline, and some of the most outlandish flourishes in the whole Connor/McClure oeuvre, Warlords of Atlantis is pure Saturday-matinee kitsch. That it’s quite awful when viewed from any rational perspective is beside the point; no kid ever watched an installment of, say, Buck Rogers expecting an edifying experience. Moreover, Warlords of Atlantis is probably the most thoroughly ’70s picture in the cycle, thanks to a head-trip sequence as well as costuming with influences from disco and glam rock. Think Jules Verne crossed with a Yes album cover, and you’re on the right track.

          The story is the usual turn-of-the-century hokum. Inventor Greg (McClure) and scientist Charles (Peter Glimore) venture onto the high seas and descend inside a diving bell, at which point they discover a pathway to the underground kingdom of Atlantis. More specifically, a giant octopus captures the heroes and their crew, dragging them to Atlantis so they can serve local inhabitants as slaves. Naturally, the locals are aliens from another world planning global conquest, and, of course, they’ve spent centuries kidnapping humans and altering the humans’ bodies by installing gills. While Greg rallies slaves for the inevitable revolution against extraterrestrial oppressors, Charles gets strapped into a super-powered helmet that gives him visions of the future because the Atlaneans think his superior intellect makes him an ideal coconspirator in their evil schemes.

          All of this stuff is eventful and zippy, though it’s even dumber than it sounds in this brisk synopsis. What gives Warlords of Atlantis a special kick are the out-there details. The faceless guards serving the Atlaneans look like refugees from a Mad Max theme night at a bondage club; the Altantean king’s outfit suggests a glam-rock bathing costume; and Cyd Charisse, of all people, plays the Atlantean queen. Yet even with all of this nonsense going on, Warlords of Atlantis is all about that gigantic octopus, rendered by sketchy miniature work as well as a full-size head and tentacles that are (barely) animated through puppetry or radio control or some other low-tech methodology. If watching a giant octopus attack a boat in full view of the camera doesn’t stimulate your pleasure centers, your inner child thrills to different types of spectacle than mine does.

Warlords of Atlantis: FUNKY

Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

Like many other exploitation-flick purveyors, actor/producer John Ashley and writer/director Eddie Romero worked in bulk during the ’60s and ’70s, banging out a slew of crappy pictures about monsters, women in prison, and other lurid topics. Some are palatable, but many are like Beast of the Yellow Night, an interminable horror saga about a fellow who turns into a creature at night. This idiotic picture is sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde story, sort of a Satan-worship yarn, and sort of a werewolf tale, but mostly it’s just confusing and dull and silly. Opening in 1946, the film establishes that Ashley’s character (who goes by various names), once made a deal with the devil, as personified by portly Filipino-cinema stalwart Vic Diaz wearing a loincloth. Upon sealing the deal by consuming human flesh, Ashley gained the ability/curse to transport his soul into new bodies over the course of several decades. (In “present-day” scenes, the host body has the same face as the Ashley character’s original body.) Then there’s the whole shape-shifter bit. Nightfall causes Ashley’s character to transform into a were-beast of some kind, though the makeup effects are so shoddy that Ashley looks as if he slathered his face with green-tinted cottage cheese and a bit too much eyeliner. Given the dopey storyline, Ashley and Romero would have been wise to bombard the audience with thrills-and-chills scenes, but instead anemic stalking bits are interspersed with laughably pretentious dialogue exchanges about the nature of existence. There’s a reason people don’t gravitate to Ashley/Romero movies for deep thoughts.

Beast of the Yellow Night: LAME

1980 Week: Without Warning

Schlockmeister Greydon Clark strikes again with this dull alien-invasion picture, which was made so cheaply that only one alien is featured. The picture mostly comprises interminable scenes of teenagers running from danger, so Without Warning is more akin to the slasher movies of the late ’70s and early ’80s than to other space-monster movies of the same period. It’s worth nothing that cinematographer Dean Cundey also shot Halloween (1978), because Clark apes that picture’s style quite shamelessly with heavy shadows and long Steadicam shots. In the opening sequence, a hunter and his son get killed by flying discs that look like fried eggs with tentacles growing out of them, so viewers learn quickly not to expect much. Later, two young couples hop into a van and head for the woods, encountering the requisite creepy old people on the way there. Word to the wise: When the proprietor of a general store filled with taxidermy says don’t go in the woods, maybe don’t go in the woods. Anyway, the flying egg things kill two of the teenagers, forcing survivors Greg (Christopher T. Nelson) and Sandy (Tarah Nutter) to seek help from the aforementioned creepy old people. The gas-station guy (Jack Palance) offers assistance, but a crazed ex-soldier (Martin Landau) makes things worse by slipping into a Vietnam flashback. Landau and Palance enliven their scenes, but the most enjoyable bits of Without Warning are unintentionally funny, as when Greg and Sandy defeat a horrific outer-space monster that’s attacking their car—by knocking it off the car with their windshield wipers. Consider yourselves warned about Without Warning.

Without Warning: LAME

The Bat People (1974)

          The problem with The Bat People isn’t that the premise of a man turning into a bat is ridiculous, because creature-feature history is filled with outlandish transformation stories. The problem is that The Bat People is dull. Structurally, the picture follows the familiar template. Protagonist Dr. John Beck (Stewart Moss) receives the wound triggering his change very early in the movie’s running time. Thereafter, he suffers seizures around the same time that mysterious killings occur, causing John to fear that he’s become a killer. His long-suffering wife, Cathy (Marianne McAndrew), seeks help from a friendly physician, Dr. Kipling (Paul Carr). Meanwhile, grotesque cop Sgt. Ward (Michael Pataki) identifies John as a suspect. Et cetera. Of such slender thread countless werewolf and vampire tales have been spun. Yet in those other creature features, the creature gets featured. In The Bat People, viewers don’t see the monster—represented as an early makeup creation by the revered artist Stan Winston—until nearly the end of the story.

          Accordingly, the murder scenes involve generic POV shots, making The Bat People feel like some random serial-killer saga. Worse, almost everything that happens between the murders is drab and repetitive, such as the myriad vignettes of John staggering while his eyes roll over white. There’s not nearly enough weird stuff along the lines of John grabbing a mannequin from a store window and pummeling the mannequin’s head against pavement. Leading man Moss is a poor man’s Bradford Dillman (let that simmer in your brainpan), and leading lady McAndrew renders passable work at best. This means the heavy lifting falls to exploitation-flick regular Pataki, who puts as much oomph as he can into a clichéd role. Some viewers might find a few scenes in The Bat People creepy, such as the one depicting the final fate of Pataki’s character, but getting to these mildly rewarding moments requires trudging through a whole lot of guano.

The Bat People: FUNKY

Creature from Black Lake (1976)

          Another swampy story about a backwoods monster with similarities to Sasquatch, Creature from Black Lake plods through a simplistic and somewhat uneventful storyline until climaxing with a passable action/suspense sequence. For devotees of Bigfoot cinema, one decent vignette of a hairy biped laying siege to a college student in a panel van might be worth the price of admission, especially since the sequence, which is set at night, has a measure of creepy atmosphere. For other viewers, watching the rest of the movie just to enjoy a few low-grade thrills won’t seem like a fair trade. In other words, proceed with caution. The picture begins well, with Joe Canton (Jack Elam) and his redneck buddy steering a canoe through a swamp until they glimpse a bizarre creature and flee, only to have the creature emerge suddenly from the water and pull Joe’s buddy below the surface. Then things slow down. In Chicago, students Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) and Rives (John David Carson) hear rumors about the monster menacing a community in Louisiana, so they embark on a research trip.

          While trying to find the much-discussed Joe Canton, the boys clash with a sheriff who doesn’t want his citizens riled up by rumors. Later, they hook up with two local girls and go camping with the girls in the hopes of getting lucky—only to endure an attack by the very monster they’re researching. Lest this give the impression the storyline is picking up speed, however, the whole business with the panel van happens during a subsequent confrontation. Although Creature from Black Lake is mostly drab from a cinematic perspective, cinematographer Dean Cundey—later to break big with Halloween (1978)—lends moodiness to nighttime scenes. The picture also benefits from the presence of familiar character actors Elam and Dub Taylor. Elam gets the meatiest bits, including a monologue about encountering boars slain by the creature, but there’s only so much one can do with dialogue along these lines: ‘If I hadn’t been drinkin’, I’d have blown his butt off!” Taylor does his usual angry-old-coot routine. As for the leads, they’re competent but milquetoast. All in all, this isn’t the worst guy-in-a-suit creature feature you’ll ever encounter, but it’s far from the best.

Creature from Black Lake: FUNKY

The Twilight People (1972)

A cheesy ripoff of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, this action/horror flick was wrought by the dubious brain trust of actor/producer Josh Ashley and director Eddie Romero, who made a number of lurid productions together in the Philippines, Romero’s native country. Like their many women-in-prison pictures, The Twilight People burns screen time on travelogue shots featuring people moving through jungles. The picture also bears the Ashley/Romero hallmarks of catfights, torture scenes, underground dungeons, and villains prone to grandiose monologues. In some of their other projects, Ashley and Romero hit the exploitation-movie sweet spot, conjuring just enough vivid sleaze to sustain 90 minutes of lizard-brain interest. Not so here. The Twilight People is episodic, goofy, and slow. Worse, the makeup FX for the story’s animal/human hybrids are pathetic—anyone who can’t deliver on the promise of the opening-credits phrase “Pam Grier as the Panther Woman” has some explaining to do. Ashley, all tight-lipped cynicism and tough-guy posturing, stars as Matt, a diver kidnapped by minions of Dr. Gordon (Charles Macaulay). He’s a loon who wants to help man evolve for life underwater and in outer space, hence the Panther Woman, the Antelope Man, the Bat Man, and so on. Matt was stolen for his ideal combination of intellect and physicality, because Dr. Gordon wants to use Matt’s DNA as an ingredient for his experiments. Matt tries to escape, improbably receiving help from Dr. Gordon’s hot daughter, Neva (Pat Woodell), so before long, the jungle chase begins. The only element of The Twilight People that works is the tension between Matt and Dr. Gordon’s hired gun, repressed homosexual Steinman (Jan Merlin), but it’s hard to take that trope, or anything about The Twilight People, seriously once Romero unleashes unintentionally hilarious shots of the Bat Man “flying” through the jungle.

The Twilight People: LAME

Wolfman (1979)

I like to believe that Earl Owensby had an absolute blast during the ’70s, building a production facility in North Carolina so he could generate a string of low-budget movies in which he starred, despite having negligible acting skills. Most of his flicks were redneck-themed action pictures, but every so often he threw a curveball with something like Wolfman. As the unimaginative title suggests, this on-the-cheap creature feature delivers a bland lycanthropy tale owing a great deal to The Wolf Man (1941). Owensby’s Wolfman is a terrible movie, thanks to anemic acting and sluggish pacing, but it’s almost endearingly bad because one gets a sense it was fun to make. After all, what movie fan wouldn’t get a kick out of building Gothic sets, drenching them with artificial moonlight, and shooting scenes with hands popping out from graves, monsters crashing through windows, and supernatural zealots wielding silver daggers? Plus, by casting himself in the title role, Owensby got to emulate Lon Chaney Jr. by sitting still while makeup applications and overlapping dissolves create the unconvincing (but charmingly old-fashioned) illusion that he’s becoming a hirsute horror. Not that it matters, but the plot, which is set in the early 1900s, goes like this: After his father dies, Colin (Owensby) returns to the family estate, where conniving relatives make him the latest victim of family’s werewolf curse. There’s other stuff—forged legal papers and romance with the girl next door, et cetera—but that’s all background noise. The “pleasure” of experiencing Wolfman involves watching a doughy dude with a drawl and his down-home pals shuffling their way through what amounts to a Halloween-themed costume party.

Wolfman: LAME

Beast of Blood (1970)

After unleashing gory sci-fi mayhem in The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968), director Eddie Romero and star Josh Ashley reteamed for this sequel, which is also known as Return to the Horrors of Blood Island, among many other titles. The picture begins with Dr. Bill Foster (Ashley) heading back to civilization after his adventures in the first picture. Alas, one of evil Dr. Lorca’s creatures is on the same boat trip, leading to a slaughter and an explosion. Bill survives and resolves to visit Dr. Lorca’s chamber-of-horrors island once more. Tagging along is leggy reporter Myra Russell (Celeste Yarnall). The purpose of the return visit is somewhat murky, though it presumably has to do with Bill proving he didn’t invent the story of what happened to him. In any event, the outcome is predictable. Upon returning to the island, Bill receives a chilly welcome from native inhabitants who don’t want anything to do with Dr. Lorca and his grotesque experiments. Bill’s arrival prompts attacks by mercenaries and monsters, leaving many natives dead. Yet Bill presses on, again for reasons that are never particularly clear, although he finds time to have sex with Myra and to rebuff the advances of a busty native guide. The real weirdness happens in Dr. Lorca’s lab, where he keeps a man’s body and head alive separately. The head, resting in a jar and connected to wires but made up to resemble a vampire that’s been badly burned, taunts Dr. Lorca. Suffice to say that’s more interesting to watch than the sequence of Bill leading an expedition into a haunted mansion, where Myra falls through a trapdoor into a small chamber occupied by an irritable cobra. Boring and stupid, except for a few fleeting moments when it’s insane and stupid, Beast of Blood is shoddy even by the low standards of the many Filipino shockers that Ashley and Romero made together.

Beast of Blood: LAME

The Milpitas Monster (1976)

Judged by the standards of real movies, no-budget creature feature The Milpitas Monster is an unwatchable trainwreck. Appraised in the proper context, however, it’s mildly endearing. Made by a group of high-school students and featuring contributions by citizens throughout the small town of Milpitas, California, the picture is best viewed as an offbeat community project. The acting is abysmal, the camerawork is poor, the special effects are amateurish, and the storytelling is wretched, but one gets a sense of folks having a great time working together on a whimsical endeavor. The narrative concerns a small town under siege by a 50-foot critter that feeds on garbage, so the film delivers an unsubtle message about the environmental impacts of conspicuous consumption. Following the usual creature-feature formula, the movie depicts military mobilizations, scientific efforts to create a weapon useable against the monster, and townsfolk running and screaming whenever the beastie appears. While not persuasive, the illusions the young filmmakers created are resourceful. Effects include a full-sized monster hand, matte shots featuring an actor in a monster suit, and stop-motion animation for scenes in which the creature flies. As for the titular terror, it walks like a mammal but seems more like an insect, with compound eyes and gossamer wings. (Presumably a fly buzzing around waste was the desired analogy.) In any event, the behind-the-scenes story of The Milpitas Monster is infinitely more interesting than the film’s actual content.

The Milpitas Monster: LAME

Eaten Alive (1976)

          The best horror filmmakers realize there’s a lot more to disturbing audiences than gore—fictional worlds populated by weird characters often make viewers more uncomfortable than onscreen bloodshed. Consider a pair of early Tobe Hooper movies. His breakout hit, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), imagines a remote pocket of the Lone Star State where insane cannibals prey upon innocent visitors. His follow-up, Eaten Alive, presents a rural hotel where the proprietor is a psychopath who kidnaps people, slaughters them with scythes and other instruments, and feeds their bodies to the gigantic alligator he keeps in a pond behind the hotel. Whereas many horror pictures frighten viewers by inserting a chaos agent into the normal world, these Hooper films drag normal people into chaos.
          That said, there’s a massive difference between these two pictures. Shot on location and featuring a no-name cast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an immersive nightmare. Shot on soundstages and featuring several Hollywood actors, Eaten Alive is fake on every level, and therefore much less effective. Other problems include a slow-moving script, threadbare characters, and the vulgar intrusion of gratuitous nudity. Nonetheless, there’s a certain compelling derangement to Eaten Alive. After all, the first scene features a pre-Freddy Kreuger Robert Englund as a redneck who introduces himself to a prostitute by saying, “Name’s Buck—I’m rarin’ to fuck.” Later, the movie includes a woman stripped to her lingerie and bound and gagged for days; a young girl trapped in the crawlspace beneath the hotel, with the psychopath coming at her from one direction and the alligator coming at her from the other; and various persons impaled, stabbed, and swallowed in grisly death scenes.
          Nihilism hovers over this flick like a dark cloud.

          Yet it’s the bizarre throwaway scenes that make Eaten Alive unsettling, more so than the ho-hum creature-feature moments. In one bit, a weirdo played by William Finley, known for his work with Brian De Palma, engages in a masochistic conversation with his wife. (“Why don’t you just take that cigarette and grind it out in my eye?”) In another scene, the hotel proprietor tries on various pairs of glasses while reading porno mags and ignoring the pet monkey that’s dying in a nearby cage. The strangeness extends to the actual filmmaking. Hooper often bathes his sets in garish red light, so characters seem as if they’re in hell, and the editing lingers on lurid images—the dying monkey, a nubile young woman stripping—so the whole movie has the air of deranged voyeurism.

          Neville Brand’s leading performance is obvious and silly, but his character is so grotesque that Brand’s work gains a sort of unpleasant power, and onetime Addams Family star Carolyn Jones adds a peculiar quality with her small role as an alternately courtly and cross madam who wears men’s clothes. The performances are hardly the point, though. As a straight-through narrative, Eaten Alive—which was inspired by the crimes of a real-life killer—is a dud, too campy and episodic to maintain real suspense. As a journey into an otherworldly headspace, it’s fairly effective.

Eaten Alive: FREAKY

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)

Original movies directed by Al Adamson are bad enough, but his hodgepodge flicks, assembled from pieces of films for which Adamson bought the rights, are even worse. Sci-fi/horror embarrassment Horror of the Blood Monsters demonstrates why. To repurpose scenes from a black-and-white Filipino movie about cavemen fighting supernatural monsters, Adamson shot some new material and contrived an incoherent story about Earth sending a space vessel to a distant planet as a means of combating extraterrestrial vampires, or something like that. The picture opens with a lame vampire attack shot in a soundstage, then transitions to ground-control scenes featuring black curtains as backdrops, and eventually to spaceship sequences with the production values (and performance quality) of a high school musical. To mask the monochromatic nature of the Filipino footage, Adamson provides dialogue about mysterious radiation that changes the color spectrum, and the black-and-white stuff appears tinted green or red or whatever. The monsters in the recycled scenes are ridiculous, flying bat-winged little people, real lizards photographed in forced perspective, underwater crab creatures, and vampires whose fangs look like pieces of chalk. Adamson’s new scenes aren’t any better. John Carradine spews pointless exposition, a buxom blonde looks confused while, thanks to iffy dubbing, another actress’ voice emanates from her mouth, and so on. At one point, the technicians at ground control stop supervising the emergency space mission so they can make out and play with a color-spectrum gun, resulting in yet more tinted shots. Alternate titles for this crapfest include Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, The Flesh Creatures, and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet.

Horror of the Blood Monsters: SQUARE

Claws (1977)

Less than a year after the release of Jaws (1975), William Girdler’s wonderfully silly Grizzly (1976) imposed the killer-shark formula onto the story of a killer bear—though another movie released the following year snagged the low-hanging fruit of the obvious ripoff title Claws. Produced on a sketchy budget and weighed down by a clumsy structure involving repetitive flashbacks, Claws should be pure cheesetastic fun, but it lacks the gonzo energy that makes Grizzly so enjoyable. So even though Claws hits many of the cartoonish notes one might expect, such as an attack on a campsite and a wizened Native American character, the picture is schlocky and sluggish. After a violent prologue during which a bear is wounded by lawbreaking hunters in the Alaskan wilderness, the picture cuts ahead five years, when new attacks suggest the infamous “Satan Bear” has returned. This pointless time jump fragments the storyline and forces the filmmakers to employ flashbacks as a means of delivering backstories for various one-dimensional human characters. All of this narrative housekeeping dulls the impact of the bear-attack scenes. Eventually, the story focuses on frontiersman Jason Monroe (Jason Evers), who was mauled by the “Satan Bear” in the past and now wants revenge. This prompts melodrama involving his wife and child, who resent the way Jason devotes all his energy to his obsession. The picture also has the requisite college kids conducting a research survey, pitting those who want to capture the killer grizzly against those who want the animal destroyed. Things pick up toward the end, but it’s a case of too little, too late. Furthermore, the distracting shoddiness of the filmmaking is epitomized by this head-scratcher of a dialogue exchange. Park commissioner to hippie: “Are you sure it was a bear?” Hippie: “Hey, man, I’m a rock singer, not Walt Disney.” Huh? Claws is hardly the worst low-budget creature feature ever made, but Grizzly scratches the exact same itch in a much more satisfying way.

Claws: LAME

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) & Torture Dungeon (1970) & The Body Beneath (1970) & Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) & The Man With Two Heads (1972, US) & The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) & Blood (1973)

A prolific independent filmmaker and theater professional best known for the low-budget exploitation movies he made from the late ’60s to the late ’80s, Andy Milligan was spectacularly devoid of cinematic talent. His shameless use of excessive gore ensured that he found outlets for much of his work on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, his microscopic budgets kept him productive, and, in the years following his ’70s heyday, he developed a small cult following. A colorful and tragic life story contributes to his current infamous status, because the openly gay director enjoyed S&M, lived for a while in England, spent much of his working life operating out of grungy locations throughout Manhattan, and was a pauper at the time he died from AIDS. Viewed in the abstract, he’s a fascinating subject for further study.

Viewed up close, at least through the prism of his ’70s movies, not so much. Taken as camp, the features Milligan released from 1970 to 1978 might pass muster for purely ironic consumption. Taken at face value, they’re as bad as first-year student films, with dopey dialogue, incoherent storylines, pathetic production values, stilted acting, and terrible camerawork. Editing is a special problem, because scenes start and stop abruptly, continuity and screen direction are chaotic, and Milligan was consistently incapable of generating proper logic, momentum, and pacing. Yet perhaps Milligan’s most egregious cinematic offense is padding his movies with interminable melodrama. Characters in these flicks talk and talk and talk, bombarding each other with repetitious lines that exist on a level below the worst soap-opera chatter. Whenever someone gets a cleaver to the head—a favorite mode of killing in Milligan’s movies—it’s a relief because it means at least one character will shut the fuck up.

So why do some people find Milligan fascinating? According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan—as well as countless online tributes—Milligan was artist in extremis, using independent filmmaking as a form of therapy to work out psychosexual problems. The idea is that watching the incessant deviance, hatred, and violence in Milligan’s movies provides a window into a troubled soul. Fair enough. But since most of us will never find the time to watch all the films made by skilled filmmakers whose work sprang from complex psyches, why waste time parsing the output of someone without talent? Oh, well. To each their own.

After getting his movie career going with releases including The Degenerates (1967), The Filthy Five (1968), and Gutter Trash (1969)—one senses a theme—Milligan entered a new decade at full throttle, releasing five movies in 1970. The pace of his releases gives a good indication of the quality control, or lack thereof, defining Milligan’s output. Bloodthirsty Butchers offers a scuzzy take on the familiar story of Sweeney Todd, a fictional horror character whose exploits are set in Victorian England. As always, the so-called “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” kills customers, then gives the body parts to a baker who uses the human remains as ingredients in pies. Actors ranging from awful to merely mediocre recite florid dialogue in ugly locations amid garish lighting. Something nasty happens every so often, but the FX makeup is laughable. Attentive viewers may detect traces of Milligan’s S&M interests, though even the sex scenes suffer from amateurism; actors seem as if they’re giving each other airport-security pat-downs instead of heavy petting. The film’s most amusing moment involves someone peeling the crust off a pie and discovering a woman’s dismembered breast inside, nipple inexplicably erect.

Torture Dungeon finds Milligan loosely adapting Shakespeare, because the story is a riff on Richard III, with an English nobleman killing people ahead of him in line for the crown. Although he’s playing a duke, leading man Gerald Jacuzzo gives a performance best described as queeny, all bulging eyes, flamboyant gestures, and sing-song vocalizations. The following rant, uttered by the duke in a reflective moment, should suffice as a demonstration of Milligan’s problematic dialogue style. “Let me explain something to you, my dear. I live for pleasure. Only second to power, of course. And I’ll try anything. I’m not a homosexual. I’m not a heterosexual. I’m not asexual. I’m try-sexual. Yes, that’s it. I’ll try anything for pleasure.” Clumsy verbiage aside, you begin to see why some folks perceive deeper meanings in Milligan’s work, but it’s difficult to justify close readings of a 77-minute trash opus with people getting decapitated and impaled at regular intervals.

The Body Beneath is one of myriad vampire pictures in the Milligan oeuvre. (It’s also one of many flicks in which he brazenly steals elements from Bram Stoker, since the estate where most of the action takes place is called Carfax Abbey.) Compared to the director’s other pictures, The Body Beneath is relatively coherent and slick, telling the story of an undead priest who rules a family of vampires that procreates through incest and the use of love slaves. As the flick grinds through quasi-softcore sex scenes and the usual amateurish gore, two elements stand out, but not in a good way. The priest’s vampire brides often appear in ghoulish makeup, but the makeup is so cheap as to be silly rather than sinister—lots of blue gunk slathered across women’s faces. Milligan also goes wild with the old-timey effect of smearing Vaseline across a filter over the camera lens, thereby blurring the edges of the frame. That gets old fast. While The Body Beneath may be Milligan’s best ’70s flick, that’s not saying much.

            Presumably, Guru, The Mad Monk was inspired by movies including Witchfinder General (1968), the disturbing Vincent Price thriller about a monstrous man tasked with rooting out occultists. Like that picture, Guru, the Mad Monk concerns an evil official who uses his position for personal advantage. Specifically, the plot involves prison guard Carl, who falls for Nadja, a peasant woman unjustly accused of murder. Carl enlists the help of Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) and a witch named Olga, who contrives potions that allow Nadja to simulate death and thus escape imprisonment. For her part, Olga wants the prison guard to let her seize blood from freshly executed prisoners because she uses blood in rituals. Meanwhile, Father Guru wants political power of some sort. (The script is so inept that it’s not worth parsing.) In laughable scenes, Father Guru looks into mirrors and talks to himself, turning his head whenever the “voice” of an alternate personality takes control. Predictably, the movie’s gore is goofy. To suggest that someone’s eyes were impaled, Milligan cuts to props that look like ping-pong balls fused with chopsticks and slathered with ketchup. Oy.

            Milligan’s final 1970 release was the X-rated melodrama Nightbirds, a black-and-white picture about counterculture angst featuring lots of explicit sex (putting it beyond the scope of this survey). After disappearing from the marketplace for many years, Nightbirds resurfaced in the 2010s when hip Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn purchased and distributed an old 16mm print. His online remarks to the effect that family members and friends think he’s mad to champion Milligan make for interesting reading.

            Despite hitting screens just months after American-International’s The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971), Milligan’s first 1972 flick, The Man With Two Heads, does not depict a character with dual craniums. Rather, it’s a deranged take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” After about 20 minutes of dull chitty-chat, Dr. Jekyll (Denis DeMarne) finally transforms into “Danny Blood,” a De Sade-quoting brute who gets his kicks torturing a prostitute named April (Julia Stratton). In the film’s longest and most unpleasant scene, “Danny” punches and slaps April, forces her to crawl on the floor and bark like a dog, burns her face with a cigar, and stops just short of raping her, the better to prolong his twisted arousal. “You shouldn’t be allowed on the face of this earth!” He screams at her. “You’re scum! You’re the defecation of the slums of London!” Perhaps more than any other of Milligan’s ’70s films, The Man With Two Heads makes the persuasive case that Milligan used movies to process issues, but in this case, the issue seems to be unrelenting hatred for women. Until it devolves into bloody chaos during an incoherent scene combining an orgy and a killing spree, The Man With Two Heads is almost technically competent, and DeMarne’s leading performance isn’t bad. Thematically, however, The Man With Two Heads is vile.

The title of Milligan’s next opus—The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!—might be the best thing in his entire filmography, though one assumes Nicholas Winding Refn would argue the point. Alas, the movie doesn’t have the same vitality as the moniker, because it’s a painfully boring domestic drama concerning the horrid Mooney family. These 19th-century Brits spend all their time abusing each other physically and verbally; in one scene, repugnant protagonist Monica (Hope Stansbury) visits her mentally challenged brother, whom the family keeps locked in room filled with chickens, then pours hot wax on him and beats him with a broom. Eventually, Milligan gets around to introducing horror elements, with brief scenes of rats (some of which get killed on camera) and a wisp of lycanthropy (translation: a few actors wear hairy masks). Yet most of this interminable film comprises aimless familial nastiness.

            Nineteen seventy-three found Milligan broadening his cinematic horizons, after a fashion, because he did uncredited directing work on a porno film called Dragula—a gay spin on Stoker—and used his real name while making a skin show called Fleshpot on 42nd Street. (Like Nightbirds, both films fall outside this survey’s parameters.) Then it was back to gore for the succinctly titled Blood. Shot in and around the house where Milligan lived at the time of filming, this is low-budget schlock at its least impressive. The discombobulated plot involves a werewolf and Dracula’s daughter hiding out while the werewolf performs arcane scientific experiments. Also featured are amputees, bizarre servants, flesh-eating plants, and a prissy lawyer. Any improvements in technical areas that Milligan achieved while filming The Man With Two Heads seem to have evaporated before he shot Blood, which has nonsensical camera angles, out-of-focus shots, and pitiful sound quality. Milligan also takes the gimmick of killing animals onscreen to a nauseating extreme, because at one point an actress chops a mouse in half, then shoves the tail end into her mouth.

            Milligan’s ’70s output sputtered to a halt with Legacy of Blood, which, title notwithstanding, bears no relation to its immediate predecessor. Rather, Legacy of Blood is a loose remake of Milligan’s 1968 movie The Ghastly Ones. And here’s where things get confusing. Both The Ghastly Ones and Legacy of Blood steal the basic plot from The Cat and the Canary, a 1922 play that has been filmed, officially and unofficially, many times. (Premise: Relatives gather in a creepy house to compete for an inheritance, but a killer stalks them.) Among the other unauthorized versions of The Cat and the Canary is a 1971 movie with John Carradine, Blood Legacy a/k/a Legacy of Blood. Yep. Same title. Although Milligan’s Legacy of Blood was unavailable for review, reports from those who’ve seen the picture suggest it has all the usual flaws, from bad acting to incompetent filmmaking, with dialogue consuming most of the screen time.

On the topic of legacies, it’s disheartening to look at the scope of Milligan’s career and see how little he had to show for his work, the adoration of Nicholas Winding Refn notwithstanding. As of this writing, not one of Milligan’s ’70s movies has a rating above five (out of ten) stars on IMDb, and most online commentary about the man’s work focuses on his remarkable cinematic incompetence. (The same is even more true of his later output; Milligan made a handful of widely detested pictures in the ’80s and died in 1991.) As noted earlier, it’s not as if Milligan’s screen career set him up financially—exactly the opposite. One therefore hopes that he had more fun making his movies than most people have watching them, or at least found some measure of release from his psychosexual hangups.

Bloodthirsty Butchers: SQUARE

Torture Dungeon: SQUARE

The Body Beneath: LAME

Guru, the Mad Monk: SQUARE

The Man With Two Heads: FREAKY

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!: SQUARE

Blood: SQUARE