In short: Guru, the Mad Monk (1970)

Thanks to the generosity of Vinegar Syndrome, now you too can delight in one of Andy Milligan’s movies in beautiful high definition without having to pay a price, or rather, without having to pay a monetary price, for watching a Milligan movie takes its psychological toll on most of us. In fact, a viewer of any given Milligan movie might never be the same afterwards. Just look at your once mild-mannered blogger who is now, just like Milligan himself, quite hateful of everyone (yes, even you!).

Guru concerns the shenanigans medieval priest Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) gets up to in his position as the head of the Church’s island death camp. Bodysnatching, vampirism, torture and a guy in a particularly horrible hunchback costume ensue. Given the film’s Milligan-typical claustrophobically cramped sets, the school play costumes and the sub school play acting, it should be as easy – if boring – to make fun of this as of any film by the director, but as it is always the case with Milligan films and me, Guru is no laughing matter but a film making me decidedly uncomfortable.

The at times absurdly cramped sets and the even more claustrophobia-inducing blocking Milligan prefers take on oppressive hues, with people not so much standing beside one another but crawling into each other’s faces, often times shouting their decidedly angry dialogue at one another with all the enthusiasm their very basic acting talents can manage. Hardly a scene goes by where someone doesn’t do or say something deeply unpleasant while the camera looks on unmoving and most probably unmoved by human empathy, gleeful in its unwillingness to engage beyond The Swirl.

Milligan, his films convince me again and again, hates me, not just in my function as his audience, but also as a member of the human race, and while he can’t hurt me physically (one hopes, for one does not believe in life after death), he sure as hell can hurl his hate for humanity in my face in film form again and again, which he does quite effectively in Guru.

There’s an unbelievably unpleasant, brutal, undertone to the film – as to Milligan’s whole body of work – the sort of feeling that turns what should be nothing more than MST3K-style fodder for cheap laughs into something quite different, a very personal outburst of loathing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,exploitation,andy milligan,neil flanagan

In short: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

Victorian era barber Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) likes to kill his customers for fun and profit. He has been able to kill a few hundred people by now without the police getting wise to it, for he has an excellent way to get rid of his victims' bodies. Todd is partnered with bakery owner Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) and her employee Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) who bake his victims into not quite delicious meat pies.

All goes well for the dastardly fiends until they start killing off people a little more closely connected to them. Eventually, it is only a question of time 'til somebody - perhaps even Lovett's other employee Johanna (Annabella Wood) - will find out what's going on in the barber shop and the bakery.

Given how obsessed mad exploitation director Andy Milligan was with ill-advised period settings, especially a Victorian England that has somehow been transported to modern Staten Island, it comes as not much of a surprise he just had to do his own version of Victorian England's favourite fictional serial killer, Sweeney Todd.

The film turned out exactly as you'd expect from a Milligan movie. Horrible, yet uncomfortably intense, actors dressed in "period" clothing below the level most high school plays would accept are doing just plain horrible British accents. The shot composition is so claustrophobically cramped the actors never seem to talk each other like people in the real world do, but push their faces into each other, so that only hate-filled ranting, physical violence, or the face rubbing that goes for sex here can result. And in fact (again, this isn't exactly a surprise in a Milligan film), most of the film's dialogue consists of hateful, long, breathless rants, as if the characters (with the ridiculously angelic Johanna as the big exception) had never had a nasty thought they didn't throw into someone's face. It's impossible to watch this, or any other of Milligan's movies I've seen, and not come to the conclusion that you're not actually watching characters ranting at each other, but Andy Milligan ranting at you, his audience. Milligan, if you haven't realized it by now, hates you. And your mother, your sister, even your pet hamster (though Bloodthirsty Butchers counterintuitively and thankfully is not one of the Milligan movies with real animal violence).

It's this wave of hardly suppressed hatred and anger that underlies every static shot, every boring useless scene of unpleasant people talking and talking and shouting, every cramped, motionless (Milligan would prefer clubbing you to death with it instead of moving it, I suspect) camera set-up, and even the seizure-inducing camera swirling that goes for an action sequence in Milligan's films; even the happy end seems to mock the audience.

If you're sensitive to Milligan's style (quite a few people will just be bored by his films), watching one of his movies can be a truly unpleasant, disquieting experience. Once you've seen enough of his films, they all start to turn into one big mass of ranting, shouting, dismemberment and bad accents that hates you and wants you to die.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,andy milligan

Blood (1974)

In some not more closely defined part of the past (I'd say it's supposed to be the Victorian or Edwardian era, but who truly knows?) a rather interesting family comes to an even less closely defined town in America (or is it England? I could only divine that it's not continental Europe).

The Orlofskis are a deeply peculiar bunch. Head of the family is Lawrence Orlofski (Allan Berendt), a mad scientist by profession. In truth Lawrence is not called Orlofski, but Talbot, like his father, the original wolfman. He is married to Regina (Hope Stansbury), birth name of Dracula. Besides being the most high-strung vampire this side of a Transylvanian debutante ball, Regina is also the victim of a peculiar illness (possibly a side effect of being undead?) that can only be treated through a serum extracted from the poisonous, blood-sucking monster plant that grows in the Orlofskis' cellar. The plant for its part can't suck people dry willy-nilly, it is instead fed the blood of Carlotta (Pichulina Hempi), whom the Orlofski's once took out of a Rumanian orphanage as a convenient way to get tasty, fresh blood for their plant pet on a regular basis. Poor Carlotta has gone mad from the perpetual blood loss and now acts and looks as exalted as everyone else under her thick layers of theatrical make-up.

Orlofski/Talbot can't take care of all the details connected with his troubled household alone, of course. In fact, he's the sort of wolfman who can't even remember when the night of the Full Moon is. So he employs two very loyal servants, Carrie (Patricia Gaul) and Orlando (Michael Fischetti). Orlando has lost both of his legs through the plant's poison and now rolls around the house on a wheeled board. He's not bitter about it, though, and seems to have a relatively satisfying relationship with Carrie. It's just too bad that Carrie is not so secretly in love with Orlofski and has her own plant-induced leg problems.

All this should be complicated enough to somehow filter sixty minutes of plot from, but the charming quintet needs more problems than mere lycanthropy, vampirism, man-eating plants, mad experiments, madness and soap opera love lives can provide.

So how about adding a nosy realtor (Martin Reymert), a corrupt lawyer (John Wallowitch) who for once steals money from the wrong client, a blackmailing old hag (Eve Crosby), Carrie's brother (David Bevans) and the lawyer's virtuous and beautiful assistant (Pamela Adams) to the mix? That will certainly do the trick.

Until now I have avoid Andy Milligan's films like the plague, but Stephen Thrower's book Nightmare USA convinced me to give the man's work another look. I can't say that I regret it. Apart from a very unpleasant mouse decapitation sequence, Blood delivers quite a singular experience full of all the things I like in my no budget films. The same things will unfortunately also send most people running as far away from Milligan's work as possible, but that comes with the territory.

So, Andy Milligan's strangeness, let me count your ways. There's the weird, stagy acting, completely off and most definitely not like acting is supposed to be, yet at the same time so consistent that it must be done this way on purpose. The actors often reach a weird, melodramatic intensity, especially when their efforts combine with the claustrophobic framing of most scenes, the unnatural (in a nearly Lovecraftian sense) camera angles and the nearly perversely wrong lighting of many scenes. The whole affair feels as far removed from reality as possible, but it is as much removed from movie reality as we know it as well, somehow straining for a different kind of cinema, I hereby (and I'm not even drunk) dub "Anti-Cinema", the cinematic equivalent to Darkseid's "Anti-Life Equation" in Jack Kirby's New Gods.

The feeling of deliberate wrongness is further strengthened by Milligan's script, full of lengthy, semi-coherent rants that seem to have been written by a misanthropic Camus fan and which don't even try to fill in for the film's lack of not only important transitions, but its lack of whole parts of the plot. How much of the latter is the fault of the print I saw (which is definitely shorter than the runtime the IMDB gives), how much of Milligan's lack of money and how much of the auteur's very special vision, I really can't say. I'm not even sure that I want to know.

What I do know is this: if you have any love for people like the ranting madman around your corner (or the ranting madman inside yourself), and always wanted to see what would happen if he would somehow be able (allowed?) to make his own, obsessive, manic movies, you could possibly fall in love with this film.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,andy milligan,horror,reviews