By ROB CRAIG

(Note:  This is the second of a two-part article dealing with the amazing and grotesque bargain-basement horror films wrought by Staten Island filmmaker Andy Milligan.   Part One can be read by clicking here.)

Continuing our review of Andy Milligan's ghastly works...

Guru The Mad Monk

(1970) 65 minutes

SYNOPSIS:

A corrupt priest tortures innocent people and enlists the aid of a woman vampire in his quest to attain ever-greater power. He befriends a village boy, who eventually betrays him.

Guru The Mad Monk was schlock auteur Milligan's first feature shot in 35mm. As some have lamented, this meant that the earlier breathtaking madness of Milligan's hand-held 16mm "swirly-twirly" camera was lost. Thus, some see Guru The Mad Monk as unbearably static. Not so. Guru The Mad Monk is an amazing, if abominable film, quirky and revolting and wholly mesmerizing. Milligan purportedly hated it, but that may have been more for personal and financial, than aesthetic reasons.

Although the camera is Guru The Mad Monk is indeed more subdued than in earlier efforts, we can then spend more time ruminating on the dense patches of Milligan's astounding, hyper-poetic dialogue, and meditate on his players' thoroughly engaging, overwrought theatrics.

Guru The Mad Monk features a gleefully vicious attack on organized religion, and parades the brutal jungle credo of "survival of the fittest" as its one and only philosophy.

Of course, in Milligan's dark fantasy world, subtlety is non-existent. Father Guru's excesses, both criminal and sexual, would be immediately exposed and punished in any sane universe. But the Milligan universe is (need we say it?), insane!

Guru joyfully pokes eyes out, has henchmen chop off limbs and behead anyone who dares wander into his path. His "church" is nothing less than an evil, DeSadian madhouse. The spirit of evil and chaos is so complete that when Guru's boss, the head of his diocese, visits to observe his underling's labors, Guru merely beheads his nosy employer; to Hell with corporate hierarchy!

All of this diabolical absurdity makes no sense, of course, and that is part of it's absolute charm. The Milligan films are out of control, and that is their claim to art.

The gore in Guru The Mad Monk is shockingly brutal, yet insipid in its incompetence, making these scenes more like playful Grand Guignol theater than an attempt at gruesome realism. Severed heads are obvious wig forms; dismembered hands are rubber novelty items; a popped eyeball is clearly a toy. Playful low-rent gore such as Milligan's is charming, nostalgic, and harmless, in comparison to the obvious, flavorless photo-realism of the CGI generation.

Once again, Milligan's costuming of his players is absurd and pathetic, tossed together dime-store marvels, which come across more as symbol or metaphor than effective depiction of a period or era. The costumes don't begin to look anything like the uniform they are supposed to conjure, yet uncannily, they do convey the essence of the characters who display them.

Since Milligan's characters all range from either terribly troubled to downright deranged, the surreal garb fit them perfectly, illustrating not only the wearers' torn and tattered lives, but their unhinged, often psychotic personalities. In this way, Milligan may be the first true master of "expressionist wardrobing" for cinema. As Milligan crafted this ungodly, literally threadbare apparel through an alternate personality, "Raffine", one may guess that the designer was in a similar mindset as the intended fictional persona.

Indeed, the mystique of cloth seems to by one of Milligan's recurring themes. Fabric is everywhere in his films, even where they shouldn't be. Fabric hangs from the walls of a dungeon for no reason, like a visual embodiment of the artist's dementia. Fabric of various shades drapes church windows, again with no conceivable purpose (other than perhaps to cover a telephone or other modern prop). Fabric is a vain attempt to cover sins, to cover man's evil or wickedness.

Guru The Mad Monk is perhaps the only Milligan horror film to be lensed entirely indoors, in a quirky new-age Manhattan church, which was supposedly also a hideout for the Black Panthers! The always-claustrophobic Milligan universe is constricted even further in Guru The Mad Monk, and certain scenes are shot in cubbyholes so small you may find yourself actually gasping for air! So intimate is Milligan's world, even this common no-budget cheat of using tiny sets works in the film's favor, helping to enhance the atmosphere of tension, madness and confinement.

As in most Milliganfilm, the dialogue seems rushed, even forced. No one pauses when speaking. They shoot their lines out and the next guy picks up. You can almost hear Andy yelling "Faster! Faster! I'm almost outta film!"

The acting is uniformly bad, which is its charm; it's uniformly bad. Like a tacky bit of local theater, there is a certain constancy which makes the whole production more real, more thrilling.

Neil Flanagan as "Father" Guru, (head of "The Lost Souls Church of Mortavia"), is simply incredible. This is a performance of a lifetime. With his bloated face, shower-curtain gowns, crinkley paper hat and weird stove-pipe cap, he looks more like a crazy 8th Avenue drag queen than a 19th-century clergy!

Guru reveals himself not to be a holy man, but a bloodthirsty ghoul. Yet he turns from pompous preacher to psycho killer in the blink of an eye, with no motivation of any kind. He is the perfect demon, completely unrepentant, completely unpredictable.

In a classic piece of skid-row schizophrenia, Guru talks to himself in a mirror, as the "bad" self bullies the "good" self in a moral puppet show. This is Neal's greatest scene, which foreshadows such derivative imitations as Robert DeNiro's mirror scene in Taxi Driver. It apes the mood swings of the bipolar personality with dizzying aplomb.

Guru's partner in crime is Olga, conceivably the world's only lesbian vampire witch-hag. Olga as played by Jackie Webb is an astoundingly overwrought character from a child's nightmare, a blissfully evil, buck-toothed monstrosity. Olga's getup is simply astounding. Her headpiece alone is an impossible amalgam of pattern prints, tacky veils, and odd hex-like emblems. And Olga's "pad" looks like a motel shower stall. In short, Olga's little world is really messed up.

Leading man Paul Leiber is hilarious, with his overacting, hippie haircut, bad New York accent, and a smirk that suggests vast ignorance. His lover, Judy Israel, is one of Milligan's trademark sexy sluts, a fetching if homely dime store tart.

Guru's sidekick is a hunchback, played with ludicrous sincerity by Jack Spenser. Milligan loved cripples, physical as well as mental, and the hunchback/cripple figure appears in many a Milligan horror film.

Guru The Mad Monk was released in that watershed year for cinema, 1970, when "the lunatics took over the asylum", and was seen on a mind-bending double bill with Milligan's excellent The Body Beneath. Milligan had high hopes for this duo, even forming a releasing company with some shady Times Square characters, in hopes of realizing a bit more of the booty than he ever saw when giving away his product to schlockmeister William Mishkin.

Alas, Milligan's new partners were crooks also. Milligan, the archetypal Sixties starving cine-artiste, ended up as broke after Guru The Mad Monk's considerable box office success as he was before. Andy Milligan's painful, frustrating life continued to imitate his tortured art more closely, more brutally, than even his most cynical detractors would care to acknowledge...

As in other films by Milligan, Guru The Mad Monk unreels as an unreal, hyper-real melodrama, badly but enthusiastically acted, and captured by an unbalanced yet unblinking eye. It conveys an entirely corrupt world of pain, deceit, and betrayal, a "Hell" if you will...

Andy Milligan is probably the closest thing to a one-man band the world of feature filmmaking has ever seen. He did virtually everything but act. Guru The Mad Monk is a good example of this fierce self-reliance, an amazing achievement in "filmbrut", an act of pure genius from a tortured mind.

"I hope you like horse; it's all we have!"

"You told me to warn you if somebody come. Somebody come!"

Milligan then went to England for a failed partnership in the production of sexploitation pictures there, but he stayed long enough to crank out three more incredible horror shockers:

The Body Beneath

(1970) 75 minutes

SYNOPSIS: In England, a family of vampires tries to recruit new members by holding a spurious "family reunion". A young woman in particular is imprisoned, and forced to birth vampire babies.

A family reunion turns to disaster yet again in this strong entry in the Milligan horror canon. Basically the same plot as Seeds Of Sin, The Ghastly Ones, Legacy Of Horror and who knows how many other Milli-flix, a group of fools is lured to their destiny via a malevolent family gathering.

Ostensibly an attempt at gothic horror along the lines of the Hammer and Amicus films of the day, The Body Beneath comes across as more accessible than many of these, albeit simplistic to a fault.

Filmed in Merry Olde England, the camerawork is rather sedate for a Milligan picture, but one may argue that the film looks almost...professional. At least, the artist's psychosis here is more evident in the script's excesses, than in the camera's eye.

The estate where the picture was filmed lent an immediate vintage and legitimacy to Andy's skid-row production, making it look quite tenable. The moss-covered graveyard behind "All Souls Church", cheap set though it may be, is a marvelous setting for this threadbare tale of dime-store decadence.

The modern vampire angle is somewhat botched due to Milligan's tinny sound and the actor's obscure dialogue readings, yet the film does drip with a certain low-rent atmosphere, and tension and dread are indeed summoned by the confusing proceedings.

The screenplay accurately reflects Milligan's troubled background; even in this dense, virtually fantastic horror framework, what we see most of is... bickering!

The theme of clergy being in reality engines of pure evil is one dear to Milligan's heart; he would revisit it shortly in the astounding Guru, The Mad Monk.

Impossible-yet-endearing characters abound, as always: the creepy gay reverend-cum-vampire; his catatonic wife; a cockney tart maid; a menacing, retarded hunchback. As elsewhere in the Milligan universe, the "normal" couple, of the least interest to the filmmaker, are unutterably boring and cliché.

Amongst the more interesting characters are the Harpies, strange overdressed zombie-women who appear out of nowhere to taunt and terrorize the normals.

The Harpies are a wonderful symbol of "women-as-hideous monsters," one of Milligan's favorite social philosophies. These grotesque and quite rabid creatures have been deformed and demented by the innate rottenness of their souls. In Milligan's world view, this is simply because they are female...

 The gore is somewhat sparse, but does pack the trademark punch when it does come, as when a maid is stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle.

In one odd scene, our beleaguered hunchback (played with Berwick Kaler) is nailed to a tree and left to agonize, pondering his sins. The scene is fairly creepy in itself, and gets even creepier when you discover that a real murder, with circumstances similar to this scene, had just taken place nearby! A man had been nailed to a tree and left to die, with indications of S/M torture involved. Even creepier, Milligan seemed to know an awful lot about it...

The climax of the film is genuinely exquisite; a trick-lensed night scene of the walking dead on parade and holding court. This sequence is, for Milligan, a magnificent conscious achievement, undoubtedly the highlight of the movie, and possibly the strongest single sequence in Milligan's whole career. If nothing else, this unworldly and provocative scene is a showpiece of Milligan's largely untapped talent, an aural and visual collage worthy of fine art cinema.

At one point, the almighty vampire queen, Elizabeth (giving new meaning to both "Queen" and "Elizabeth") gives a magnificent hate speech about why the Ford family of vampires should not expand to America:

"What is America? What is it made of? Pimps, prostitutes, religious fanatics, thrown out of England but a few small centuries ago! They're the scum of the earth!"

As well as an argument against corporate globalization, the wildly imperialistic speech serves as shocking historical revisionism, and pure political vitriol.

In the dumfounded finale, Elizabeth is dethroned with extreme prejudice, the vampires Ford have a pre-dawn orgy, and then prepare to head off to America! Even our heroes have been turned into vampires; civilization itself is corrupted! And it is headed our way!

The Body Beneath is passable faux-gothic horror, probably an aspirant to high art, but surely a most cynical and profound philosophical statement from "Mr. Times Square," (the voice of sleazy America!).

The Body Beneath was one of a very few pictures Milligan made in England, in a joint venture with a producer who actually liked his work, and was willing to give him a budget that was, for once, not insulting. Milligan managed to nip this promising partnership in the

bud with his usual paranoid accusations and absurd demands, and slunk back to Manhattan shortly thereafter. Can you say "self-destructive"?

The Man With Two Heads

(1971) 80 minutes

SYNOPSIS: A mad doctor steals the brain of a killer and injects himself with the serum. He then becomes a sadistic monster, raping and killing prostitutes and whores until he is captured.

This most schizophrenic take on Robert Louis Stevenson's morality tale, The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, portrays the cursed doctor's dark half as a charismatic, DeSadian sexual predator, not a mere wailing monster. His rape-mentality dementia is as creepy and disturbing as Frederic March's freak-out in the 1932 classic version, sort of Jack the Ripper as Doctor  Frankenstein. Thus, Andy Milligan has taken a time-honored and shop-worn story and given new, ungodly life to it.

By painting Jekyll/Hyde as a sexual sadist, Andy creates a reason for his patented scenes of strong violence, sexual discord and grisly gore. As Jekyll/Hyde is a tortured soul, so is this movie, and ultimately, the viewer.

This includes an absolutely impossible scene in which drooling medical students perform an "autopsy" with axes and cleavers!

The psychological import of these cynical scenes is clear, as is Milligan's London, which is truly Freudian; there are whores everywhere, on every corner, in every shadowy doorway, lurking in every corner. And they're all dying to be punished for their sins. And they are...

Somehow, Andy has always been able to get talented and attractive young talent to sweat it out in his Grade-Z, no-budget, never-seen abominations. This flick has a most exciting parade of alluring cheap tarts.

April Connors in particular, playing herself brilliantly, is one of the most enticing Staten Island-Cockney tarts to ever burn up the drive-in screen. Her lusty, low-rent vulnerability against William Defane's grimacing hysteria is superb, especially in one intimate, unbearably tense scene, in April and Hyde's first meeting. The electrifying seduction scene between Hyde and April in the bar has the erotic intensity of great art.

After much wailing and gnashing, the film degenerates into a wild, Dionysian sex orgy in which Hyde pays a madam to inject everyone with his serum, turning them all into drooling, sex-crazed ghouls! This ungodly, horrendous scene is wild, just wild!

The Man With Two Heads is a good example of Andy Milligan as amazing aesthetic alchemist. He takes the most hackneyed cinematic/dramatic elements and chucks them haphazardly together in an unutterably and entirely new way: avant-garde, free-form camerawork alternates with stagy scenes worthy of Warhol or Warren (Ed or Jerry); literate (if hoary and tedious) scripts; sincere if hammy acting; a ruthless fixation on mock-Victorian period settings, with moldy costumes and authentic locations; the cheesiest stock music (from the infamous Thomas J. Valentino music library in New York); surprising and shocking sex-and-violence subtext, including ludicrous gore; tinny sound; breathlessly unrehearsed takes.

Put 'em all together, it spells: "Andy Milligan Is God." And as a tortured artist-cum-madman, is not Milligan himself a "Man With Two Heads"?

The Rats Are Coming, The Werewolves Are Here

(1972) 92 minutes

SYNOPSIS: A family of werewolves tries to preserve its lineage, and its secrets, against intruders.

One of the great titles in exploitation history begets one of Milligan's oddest films, a flop in many ways yet a definite landmark in the Milligan canon.

Starting life as a werewolf opus called Curse Of The Blue Moon, The Rats Are Coming, The Werewolves Are Here holds the honor of having the most absurd "killer rats" premise in that whole ridiculous, mercifully short-lived schlock genre. According to popular legend, producer Mishkin asked Milligan at the last minute to add some rats-oriented footage so he could market the result as a cousin to ratty super-hits Willard and Ben.

The result is a schizophrenic mish-mash, which for a Milligan film is saying a lot. This is a shame as the Blue Moon portion of the feature is probably Milligan's most successful attempt at gothic horror. The center of all the conflict is (what else?) a bickering family, this time with a lycanthropic secret in addition to the usual sexual/political skeletons in the closet.

The basic plot here is not dissimilar to Milligan's The Body Beneath, with werewolves subbing for vampires.

The Rats Are Coming, The Werewolves Are Here is an unusually attractive film for Milligan, filmed in lush English gardens and opulent if threadbare mansion rooms. There is a great, atmospheric scene of the Mooneys (get it?) walking about in a trance as the full moon has its way with them.

The Mooneys are a charismatic, if way-dysfunctional family. Papa Mooney sits in a chair and gets pain-killer injections from Mumsy. Papa Mooney's bedside tirades are quite entertaining. Mama Mooney is relatively sedate for a Milligan monster-mommy. Daughter Monica is the real star of the show, a spooky goth bitch who's constant excesses are pure Milli-gold.

For S/M fans, psycho sis Monica whips wimpy bro Malcolm for what seems pure sexual pleasure.

Suddenly, out of nowhere a shocking, brutal scene in which Monica stabs a poor little (real!) mouse, then hammers a nail into its quickening head. This sickening scene has no place in this or any movie, and its presence single-handedly raises The Rats Are Coming, The Werewolves Are Here to the level of vicious artbrut.

Although many fans hate them, it is irrefutable that the inserted "rat" scenes contribute a loony shot of adrenaline to what might otherwise be an unbearably tame outing, considering its maker. They also supply the sum total of the gory/sick element of the film.

Monica, wearing a pathetic hat, goes to a most bizarre and repulsive junk dealer, and the two dicker over the purchase of some rats. Their exchange is cynical, nay hateful, and pure unbridled Milligan. This amazing scene is claustrophobic and lurid and far more compelling than the sedate drawing room antics of the "Full Moon" section.

Later, Monica converses with her new pet rats; one, which she calls "Ben," is a black plastic toy. Surreal and tacky.

In a terribly disturbed later scene, Monica talks to a retarded girl, who gives her a snake, in a vaguely lesbian scene. After realizing the girl is trying to blackmail her, Monica chops off her hand and stabs he in the face.

The filmmaker Milligan makes a rare cameo appearance as a gun dealer, a bizarre amalgam of the Pepperidge Farm guy and Rip Taylor. Andy playing a shopkeep was truly art imitating life, as Milligan spent many years as a skid-row tailor before being seduced by the grime-stained lights of Times Square.

The finale of the Blue Moon story has everyone turning into werewolves (wearing great rubber masks) and attacking each other. The rat subplot, hopelessly botched to begin with, doesn't even bother to wrap itself up.

An odd coda has an old bag making fun of "Petunia" as a name for a baby. Why not?

One might call Curse Of The Blue Moon a stab at legitimacy; it is both sad and happy that Mishkin decreed auteur Milligan ruin his precious picture with schizo inserts worthy only of madman Milligan.

"You know, we could dig him up again and bury him all over!"

"She has a few problems, hasn't she?"

* * *

Disgusted with filmmaking, England, and the Eastern U.S., and very tired after another failed New York theater experiment, Milligan picked up stakes once again and trekked to California. He was able to rustle up enough cash for a few final features, all shot on 35mm and lacking much of Milligan's youthful misanthropy.

Legacy Of Horror was a fairly tame remake of his own The Ghastly Ones. Carnage explored the "cursed marriage" theme yet once more, with meager if bloody results. A film called Monstrosity remains unreleased and lost.  Surgikill, AKA Screwball Surgical Hospital, a gory horror-comedy set in a wacky hospital, produced in 1989, is more Animal House Redux than Milligan.

Perhaps the most interesting of Milligan's final films was Weirdo: The Beginning, a remake of his own earlier, presumed lost screenplay.

* * *

Weirdo: The Beginning

(1988) 91 minutes

SYNOPSIS: A mentally challenged boy finds true love with a crippled girl. The boy is continually hounded by bullies, until he exacts his revenge on society.

This, the last released film by Andy Milligan, is a strange and beautiful farewell from a complex and troubled artist. Purportedly a remake of an earlier, lost film, Weirdo: The Beginning was marketed on home video as a horror film, where it died an ignominious death, ending up in clearance bin all over the country.

Actually, Weirdo: The Beginning is a most odd and funky love story, coupled with a most graphic "Revenge of the Nerd" fantasy. It is a bittersweet love story with a tragic angel hovering, almost a post-modern gore riff on Romeo And Juliet with a touch of Frank Perry's David And Lisa thrown in.

It is certainly a very strange and powerful epitaph from a gifted yet conflicted man, and Milligan is surely reconciling some important psychological issues here.

Weirdo: The Beginning shows foremost the maturity of Milligan-as-artist. Whereas the story is tragic, as almost all of his films are, the love between our heroes is strong and pure, if doomed, and their demise is wrought through no fault of their own.

This is in stark contrast to earlier Milligan couples, who spit and growl and snarl at each other, who were almost entirely embittered, twisted and self-destructive, dictating their failed, toxic romances.

Another pivotal point is the resolution of Milligan's obsession with crippled characters. In previous efforts, the token cripple (often a retarded hunchback) was almost always a flunky or servant of evil, although sympathetic. Here, the lame Jennifer is good, indeed the most powerful positive character in the film, an angel of sorts who helps Donny actualize his own empowerment, bloody though it may be.

There are some trademark Milligan touches here, however. We know the local priest just has to be a pervert, and when he fondles lame Jenny's knee, we feel almost relief that something in this world is familiar Milligan territory.

Even Milligan fans hate this movie, as it is such a departure, one might say even atypical, from earlier efforts. It is neither horror film nor cautionary fable, and assuredly not the misanthropic diatribe we have come to know and expect. This film suggests hope and redemption, from a most unlikely source.

Some have also decried that the film lacks the artbrut style of earlier Milligan efforts, and while the film is traditional in comparison, it works well within its low-rent 35mm setting. For once, we can hear all the dialogue, which is none the worse for wear from Milligan's aging process.

Some of the love scenes are tender to the point of maudlin, and look strange, juxtaposed with nudity and fairly strong sex scenes. The film fairly drips with sexual tension, as the frustrated Donny lusts after both the angelic Jenny and the sluttish Lori.

The bullying scenes between Donny and the biker sleaze allow Milligan to let his S/M fantasies out for a nice walk, especially when Donny is made to grovel and bark and act like a dog.

Eventually, Donny is summoned to see his abusive mother, and this scene is pure Milligan. Donny's mother is a horrible alcoholic shrew who berates her only begotten with a vulgar tirade that alludes to incest, adultery, and derangement. The cruel mother announces she has sold her son into slavery.

When Donny quarrels with this shocking claim made against his person, the demented Mrs. Raymond whips him with a leather belt, Donny rebels, attacking and beheading the evil wench in a primal scene which Freud himself would have been proud of.

Once Donny tastes freedom through violence, the trademark Milligan bloodbath ensues: a pitchfork through a white slaver; a cross through the heart of the priest's corrupt wife; a string of Japanese Christmas lights strangle the rotten priest; live immolation for the nosy landlady-cum-aunt; a nifty de-handing for the biker sleaze.

Donny is finally beaten to death by an angry mob, while Jenny lays comatose nearby. Jenny later laments, "Why can't people be nice to one another?" This is surely Milligan's foremost existential question, as she watches another slut-mommy berating her kid.

With its ambiguously hopeful ending, and strong performances by Steve Burlington and Jessica Strauss, Weirdo: The Beginning is definitely one of Milligan's crowning achievements.

"You are like a great big head of cabbage."

* * *

Shortly thereafter, Milligan was diagnosed as HIV positive. He died in 1991 of AIDS, penniless and forgotten.

When Milligan died, an era died with him. Independent filmmakers nowadays are, by and large, snot-nosed punks who haven't a clue what drama, or passion, or cinema aesthetic is all about. In short, they have no soul. Look at all the shot-on-video drivel that has been foisted upon a disgusted public for almost twenty years now.

Times Square is now a giant Disney store. Home video homogenized film art into one giant clearance bin, where everything looks somehow, the same. The days of thrill and danger in the movie ghetto are lost forever.

Perhaps nobody captured that reckless, volatile world better than Andy Milligan. Perhaps no extant films better offer a precious time capsule of that dead golden age than the sad, angry, gloriously real films of Andy Milligan.

Having been fortunate enough to see several Milligan films in a Times Square flea pit or on a drive-in screen, the author can attest to their absolute vitality, and their disturbing, even provocative effect on an audience.

The rowdy Saturday night crowd watching Torture Garden on 42nd St. whooped and hollered through the whole thing, screaming not only at the over-the-top gore and ludicrous sexual couplings, but at the bone-shaking primitiveness of the entire production, and the wild first-take boners of the actors. Even Milligan's shaky camera was worthy of comment.

Likewise, at a local flea pit showing of The Ghastly Ones, which arrived unannounced at the tail end of a "Dusk-to-Dawn Horrorama Show," the horn honking was so loud and sustained at moments of high drama or low gore, the manager had to finally come over the loudspeakers and ask for restraint.

An audience can either love or hate an Andy Milligan film, but they cannot just sit back and observe, uninvolved. Milligan's films force a response, even if it is one of avowed disdain. This is part of the genius of Andy Milligan, and why his films are destined to be one day seen as much, much more than they originally appeared to be.