By ROB CRAIG

(Note:  This is the first of a two-part article dealing with the amazing and grotesque bargain-basement horror films wrought by Staten Island filmmaker Andy Milligan.   Part Two concludes this series in next month's issue.)

From Manhattan to Staten, to Merry Olde England, Andy Milligan made no-budget horror films the likes of which we'll never see again. Is this a blessing or a curse?

Andy Milligan is a name that strikes terror in the hearts of many a horror film buff. His dingy, grubby, reckless no-budget wonders are unlike any other genre films. A viewer will likely find a Milligan film either impossible to watch, or impossible to forget.

Yet both devotees and detractors agree that a Milligan film is an unique experience. They are very real, very raw and visceral. They feature outlandish costumes (by Andy himself under the pseudonym "Raffine"), threadbare sets that look like they're about to collapse (they often did), characters that look like refugees from a drug rehab center (many were), and screenplays that obsessed, often in screeching tones, on the very darkest aspects of human nature.

Add to this a virtually avant-garde filming style (often shot with a hand-held 16mm camera), laughably fake gore scenes, and dreary stock library music, and you have a series of films which are not mere "camp", and venture far beyond traditional standards of "bad."

The Milligan universe is a wholly peculiar one, an odd cross between underground film, home movie, and amateur Theatre. Indeed, one might easily consider these films Milligan's home movies, an unabashedly personal visual diary of his friends, his passions, and most assuredly, his mental demons, i.e., his world.

According to Jimmy McDonough's amazing new biography, The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan (2001, A Cappella Books), Milligan began his artistic career by joining the fledgling Cafe Cino, soon to become a notorious New York off-roadway dive, now considered an important historical landmark of the off-Broadway theatrical world.

Helping to mount the Cino's popular cutting-edge Theatre productions, Milligan soon became adept at producing a show in no time flat, with no budget, in an unending whirlwind of activity, creating sets and costumes from leftovers.

When the play was in production, Milligan coached his actors to spew forth their lines with great enthusiasm (some might say "venom"). Additionally, he had a curious predilection for inserting violence into his productions whenever possible. He would encourage his characters to resort to realistic rough-housing, and more than one actor has confessed that he really did come to harm during one of Milligan's none-too-theatrical brawls!

For himself, Milligan always seemed completely obsessed by his productions, totally immersed in them, as if they were the real world, and reality was the bad play. Many observers noted that Milligan always seemed on the verge of hysterical collapse. To call Milligan a mere workaholic would be an understatement.

At some point, Milligan and a woman at Cino collaborated on a screenplay, and made Vapors, an unusual 16mm underground film about life at a gay bath house in New York City. Although Milligan was gay himself, Vapors seemed at the least ambivalent about the lifestyle choice, portraying gays as either absurd flaming queens or pathetic psychological cripples.

Regardless of this curious self-loathing, Vapors is a most interesting and atmospheric film, and was a success in its runs at various NYC experimental film venues. It seemed for a time that Milligan might be destined to join the ranks of legendary underground filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Paul Morrisey, Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith.

Perhaps it was fate, or the lure of "the Deuce" (AKA Times Square), but Milligan soon found himself filming another film called The Promiscuous Sex, which abandoned underground sensibilities for a lurid romp through the genre that was the nadir of the film industry: the "sexploitation film."

It was then that fate stepped in, and Milligan teamed up with William Mishkin, a distributor of low-budget motion pictures for inner city grindhouses and suburban drive-ins.

Mishkin, known in the skid-row film ghetto as "notoriously cheap but scrupulously honest," was the only distributor to express interest in Milligan's rag-tag little sex film. Mishkin offered Milligan a paltry sum for the finished product ($10,000 by some reports), and blew the 16mm reversal print up to 35mm. The film was unleashed on grindhouse in New York and suburbs and, and did surprisingly well.

Once hooked, Milligan caught the sexploitation bug. He filmed other quick-buck sex films such as The Naked Witch, Depraved!, The Degenerates, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me!, Gutter Trash and Tricks Of The Trade (many of which are considered lost).

Invariably, Mishkin offered Milligan just enough cash to manifest a shoestring production and string him along from picture to picture, pocketing all the considerable profits for himself. Why anyone would continue to suffer such a humiliating, abusive and unprofitable partnership is a complex question, but Milligan was apparently a very complex man.

Considered by friends to be a dyed-in-the-wool sadist, Milligan chronically pursued S/M sexual encounters in which he could dominate his current pick-up. The Milligan/Mishkin tryst suggests another side to Andy; that of the masochist, playing the passive role to a dominant man, money-man Mishkin in this case, who kept Andy begging and groveling and working with no budget and impossible conditions, forcing him to craft his mini-masterpieces literally out of scraps.

As the Sixties lunged towards the Seventies, the sexploitation film began to lose steam. The major studios were starting to add touches of formerly taboo sex topics to their films, making the inferior independent product seem archaic at first, and eventually obsolete. Also, the threat of hardcore sex on film was looming on the horizon.

And so it was that Milligan turned to horror for his next group of efforts, and these are the films which the horror film buff either embraces enthusiastically, or rejects with extreme prejudice.

Milligan's first horror film was The Ghastly Ones, an amazing piece of rotgut celluloid considered by many Milli-fans to be his masterpiece. Filmed in and around a run-down Victorian mansion which Milligan had recently purchased on Staten Island, The Ghastly Ones is perhaps the most avant-garde, and certainly the most bizarre, take on "The Old Dark House" story ever filmed.

The Ghastly Ones

(1968) 72 minutes

Synopsis: A family meets at an old house to collect an inheritance from an eccentric relative. One by one they are killed off, until the house goes up in a fiery inferno.

Milligan's first venture into horror is a true experiment in terror. With its breathtakingly unstable camerawork, sincere but incompetent actors, comic-book gore, faux-Victorian setting and unrelenting hostility, The Ghastly Ones is assuredly a modern film masterpiece.

That The Ghastly Ones fails as a straight horror film, due to myriad obvious incompetencies, is not to say that it doesn't work on many other levels: art/underground film, psychological horror, raw Theatre, avant-garde experiment, and even as a chronicle/journal of a mentally ill artist.

Filmed in and around a run-down Victorian mansion which Milligan had recently purchased on Staten Island, The Ghastly Ones is perhaps the most avant-garde, and certainly the most bizarre, take on "The Old Dark House" story ever filmed. People meeting at an old house to inherit an heir's fortune are forced to fight and bicker with each other, and they start to disappear, one by one. Straightforward enough, right?

Not with Milligan at the helm! The threadbare plot is all but obscured by Andy's maniacal camera, which swoops dizzyingly about like an eyeball having convulsions. The actors, sucky all, deliver their cornball dialogue like methadone addicts on payday.

And the gore! The gore, such a staple of low-budget horror by then thanks to the likes of H. G. Lewis and others, is absurdly primitive, almost comical in its naiveté. Yet it still shocks the audience and degrades the film, making the proceedings ever so seedy. The infamous head-on-a-platter scene is another bit of fake gore that works, due to its impossible silliness.

Add to this the always-bizarre costuming, a madman's attempt to capture a period flavor with nothing but a bag of scraps and bobby pins, and the not-unsuccessful Victorian setting, and the viewer ends up wondering if he has stumbled onto rare footage of an 1890s lunatic asylum!

This is the genius of Andy Milligan. All of his severe aesthetic deficits, put together, become a bonafide "reality" in Milligan's hands. The Ghastly Ones is one of those rare films that actually looks like something from another planet, or from a very sick parallel universe. It works exceedingly well at disorienting and disturbing the viewer.

When the comic-book hunchback bites the head off of a rabbit, we are shocked not only at the literal brutality of the act, but at the unabashed theatricality of its filming, the audacity of the cheat editing, the sheer cheapness and anger of the scene in toto. It becomes high art instantly upon completion.

Also, genius on Milligan's part is the inclusion of a cruel codicil in the madman's will, which states that the heirs must attempt to get along sexually for three days before they are eligible for their slice of the fortune. This is sheer genius of a cruel kind on Milligan's part, as he decreed that NOBODY gets along, especially sexually, in his pained, twisted, wounded world. Thus the real drama, the real passion, the real tension in THE GHASTLY ONES, is all sexual. And nobody gets along, of course!

This is also Milligan as cynical Utopian, taunting his characters by saying, "If you can only get along, you will inherit the earth!" knowing full well that this elusive goal was impossible for the demented virus called man.

The entire cast of The Ghastly Ones is incredible in their own way, but Maggie Rogers as the evil mother figure is simply astounding. Where Milligan found her is anyone's guess, but this prune-faced emblem of wicked matriarchy would grace other Milli-film such as Seeds, and was a perfect vehicle for Andy's endless anti-mommy tirades.

The Ghastly Ones entertains on many levels, and fails only as a horror film, ironically. Perhaps it works best in illustrating how close Milligan's real-life madman world was to his lunatic visions; according to actor John Borske, who was interviewed in Jimmy McDonough's great Milligan bio, the fiery climax of The Ghastly Ones was all too real. "It was like a murder scene, a real murder scene...I laid the camera down, Andy just threw gasoline all over, and threw a match in the f**kin' room. He said, 'the f**king building's going up!'

We're talking about serious flames! You could hear us both screaming on film. The girl we set on fire was in the kitchen, she was lying there, and her head was actually burning! She could've burned her head off!"

Maybe reviewer-cum-director Joe Dante said it best: "It's like a home movie from Bedlam..."

Here! Here!

Bloodthirsty Butchers

(1970) 78 minutes

Synopsis: A mad barber kills people. His wife cooks their remains in meat pies, and sells them to unsuspecting neighbors. In between killings, the deranged killer has affairs with all the local sluts.

This most over-the-top version of the "Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street" story (since made into a Stephen Sondhiem musical Broadway hit!) is a hallmark of the apocalyptic gore film, and perhaps Andy Milligan's most notorious title.

Filmed on the fly in England, in Milligan's beloved faux-Victorian setting, the film comes across like a disturbed off-Broadway play filmed and acted by halfway house inhabitees.

As is the norm with the films of Andy Milligan, raw, grotesque histrionics proceed against evocative location backdrops, with incongruous stock music playing constantly in the background, creating the eerie yet lackluster climate of a demented educational movie from PS Hell.

Very soon, Milligan's thesis emerges; humanity is completely corrupt, the total, tooth-bared beast. Sweeney chops the hand off a customer, and chops his finger off to get at a gold ring!

John Miranda is perfect as the barber Todd, a pure "gentleman madman." Somehow, he fits perfectly into Milligan's distended macrocosm, in which Women in ridiculous hats babble and gossip in a terrible, claustrophobic bakery set. Elsewhere, men and women bicker as per usual in Milligan's sad, sad world. Some steamy and lurid nude scenes wake up the Times Square audience. A fight between two men is broken up by a bizarre man in drag named Corky". Within, there are references to Shakespeare, and his Othello. Only in the Milli-verse...

The expected gore in Bloodthirsty Butchers is casual yet shocking. In an upstairs loft, a man slits another man's wrists. Out of nowhere, a man is chopped up into little bits, a scene cheesy and shocking at once. A woman cuts open a meat pie, and a giant human breast stares back at her. This, the film's most infamous scene, is effective, but brief and perfunctory, and seems almost a marketing afterthought.

Eventually, Sweeney kills one of his barroom lovers while a monotonous Irish tenor brays in the background. This is surely Dickens’s Cold Hell!

Some of the most interesting dramatic exchanges are between the various women, giving a rare, birds-eye view of what a woman-hating homosexual thinks women talk about. And oddly, Milligan may not be too far off, although he predictably tends towards the antagonistic and confrontational.

Milligan's ever-present sado-masochistic agenda is showcased brilliantly in a scene in which a hack producer berates his torch singer for her excesses. After seeming to acquiesce to her agent's accusations, the tables are quickly turned as the woman reminds her boss who is in charge, sexually. The man immediately cowers and begs his devotion to his employee-bed mate. To cap off the switch in the power dynamic, the singer spits on her lover's grimacing face. This scene, which figures nowhere in the narrative of the film, shows the pure, unbridled genius of Milligan as wannabe libertine and moralistic provocateur.

As might be expected, actors plow through their lurid, agitated dialogue at breakneck speed, with nary a thought to subtlety or nuance, obviously honoring the director's off-screen request to talk "Faster! Faster!"

Almost the entire film is shot in very tight two-shot, as if filmed in a closet or a hallway. As independent producer Sam Sherman once marveled about Milligan's art, "They were the smallest pictures possible; they should have never seen the light of a Theatre."

In addition, there are some amazing exterior scenes, filmed in modern London but looking for all the world like Victorian home movies, with goofy cartoon music (and a human making dog-bark sounds!) blaring in the background.

After killing 258 people, Todd pontificates on his victims: "Pimps, prostitutes! The scum of the Earth!" in a speech not dissimilar to one in The Body Beneath.

The breathlessly botched "ironic" ending, involving a most badly-timed kidney pie, proves once and for all that the bargain basement is where the real treasures are.

Bloodthirsty Butchers is a fine example of an artist who, playing it straight, comes across much better than someone trying to consciously craft satire or "high camp". Other cult film giants such as Larry Buchanan and Ed Wood are now considered modern artists for the very same reason; their films were played seriously, however bizarre or threadbare their execution, and this wild but faithful reality is their integrity, their charm, their strength.

Although the film is ostensibly horror, the screenplay primarily revolves around the machinations of degrading sex (i.e. rape, seduction, torture and betrayal). When folks aren't killing and eating, they are screwing around. Its as if Milligan is suggesting that Man, the only creature with free will, can't handle this ironic gift, so forgoes his better, spiritual self in order to embrace his lower, animal self.

All in all, Bloodthirsty Butchers is a landmark in the grade-Z horror canon, offering a most twisted and ill-informed sketch of Dickensian London with a superimposed shadow of the 1960's sexual revolution, a doomed world of idiot tarts with bad accents, predatory fops with bad sideburns, and a mankind completely fixated on gleeful, homicidal self-gratification.

This desperately exciting and dangerous world of alcoholic sluts and malicious cads is vivid yet surreal through Milligan's bloodshot eye. Is Milligan thus suggesting that our new world is no better/worse than any random old one? Why else the period setting?

Surely, as one contemplates this treatise of doomed, demented lust posing against fabric-covered walls, one is tempted to say "Progress = Regress." Although The Ghastly Ones may be Milligan's cinematic masterpiece, Bloodthirsty Butchers may rank as his purest, and most emphatic, misanthropic ode.

It is a sure bet that anyone seeing this film in the Theatre with its original double-bill, the maniacal Torture Dungeon, (as did the author of this article), was surely to suffer an irreversible shift in his cultural perspective, and perhaps moral imperative. As 1970 proved conclusively (cinematically and historically), and as these films illustrated perfectly, the inmates were truly in charge of the asylum!

The truly disturbed and pained Milligan was able to create a completely intact dramatic universe, with a minimum of money, resources and tangible craft. This is the signature of a true artist.

"There is no low, when two people become one..."

"You've been drinking so much that your brains are pickled!"

"I didn't know before we were married, she was an alky!"

"Women can't stand happiness for more than three days at a time..."

"Now you're talking like my little old Boo-Boo!"

Torture Dungeon

(1970) 80 minutes

Synopsis: In an unnamed past century, an evil duke forces an innocent girl to marry an imbecile prince, in order to gain control of a kingdom.

From the very first minute of this astounding, blood-drenched, pseudo-historical mini-epic, in which a man clips a rose and is beheaded, we know we are in for prime (even primal) Milligan.

One of Milligan's patented in-camera swirl pans then takes us to a motley procession of faux-Medieval hippie flotsam, who parade across a barren Staten Island beach, as absurdly dated stock music, like something from a silent-era cartoon, wails in the background.

Lurid title aside, Torture Dungeon is essentially a political tale of intrigue, betrayal and revolution, with a rampant and unsavory sexual underpinning. The ridiculous histrionics cover everything from hostile kingdom takeovers to brother/sister incest, with liberal doses of Milligan's beloved S/M themes sprinkled throughout.

This film contains some of Milligan's most incredible verite camerawork. The jittery 16mm camera is almost always moving, searching nervously for the dramatic focus, not realizing that the disturbed eye itself is the dramatic focus, illustrating perfectly a madman's pure if inchoate vision.

In many ways, Torture Dungeon is an oddly beautiful film. The claustrophobic but well-dressed sets and the amazing expressionistic costuming by "Raffine" work well to illustrate even the most vile and lurid scenes. Like most other Milligan films, it actually looks like something, even though it is made out of virtually nothing.

In this truly muddled and bungled historical soap opera, poor young village virgin Heather is forced to marry Albert, the Duke of Abernathy, who is a drooling idiot. The evil Duke of Norwich wishes an heir he can manipulate from behind the scenes, for he wants the kingdom all to himself.

What ensues is the usual Milligan mega-plot, with excellent doses of gore and bizarrity along the way. A slave whips Ivan the hunchback in a touching S/M scene. Heather's boyfriend William gets a pitchfork in the chest for daring to interfere. The groovy Duke of Norwich has an amazing seizure at one point, which is as hard to watch as it is hard to believe.

We finally arrive at the titular "Torture Dungeon", in which the evil Duke keeps all of his enemies in a state of agonizing non-death; tongues ripped out, legs chopped off, poor damned souls wailing and moaning and praying for sweet death. The dungeon scenes are truly a vision of hell on earth, and some of Milligan's strongest work.

The Duke soon reveals himself to be "a tri-sexual; I'll try anything for pleasure." This comic-book deSade is hilariously pseudo-decadent.

The wedding is the most perfunctory, unromantic, even cynical possible. The wedding night is seriously comic-tragic, as Heather gives her nubile young flesh to a hopeless imbecile as the evil Duke watches, drooling, from the corner. Soon, poor husband Albert gets a stake through the heart.

Before a ménage-a-trios, he has arranged between his hunchback lover and whore lover, the nasty Duke makes each participant reveal their secret sexual history, like something out of a "Skull and Bones" initiation.

Ivan the hunchback tells his tragic life story via a ridiculous monologue which could have come straight from the pen of a hopped-up Rod Serling.

Showing the Duke and his idiot hunchback slave as lovers, the highest cavorting with the lowest, is one of Milligan's profoundly sickest displays of his most unusual sexual politics.

The film ends in a dazzling grand finale in the tradition of Shakespeare: Ivan stabs the Bronx Studley; Studley retaliates with a an axe in Ivan's back; Heather mounts a horse and is assaulted by the Duke of Norwich; "One Eye" enters and stabs the evil Duke.

In a silly, cool O'Henry coda, poor, abused Heather turns out to be royalty after all, the daughter of "One Eye," who's really a Queen!

Gerry Jacuzzo plays the decadent Duke of Norwich like a gay skid-row deSade character, hilarious and unbelievable in the best Milligan tradition.

Milligan fave Neil Flanagan plays a corrupt politico in a role (and costume) virtually identical to one he would play the same year in Guru, The Mad Monk.

Susan Cassidy, one of Milligan’s trademark buxom cuties, plays vestal virgin Heather MacGregor. Her very first scene involves not un-erotic nude swimming and lovemaking in the woods.  Hal Borske, another Milligan stalwart, plays dumb Prince Albert with overwrought imperfection.  And what Milligan flick would be complete without a sympathetic hunchback. Ivan (played by an unknown actor) is not only a flunky and court jester, he turns out to be his boss' lover! Ugh!  Maggie Rogers, also fantastic as the evil matriarch in Seeds Of Sin, is sensational here as a one-eyed crone.

Another amazing character is Magda, the "marriage counselor." Her lunatic antics are quite surreal; imagine Benny Hill as the Wicked Witch of the West! Magda's description of wedding night protocol is strictly from Bellevue! (Incredibly, according to Milligan biographer McDonough, Andy could not remember this actor's name, or even filming this scene!)

Yet another incredibly bad performance is given by yet another unknown (Ah, fame!), playing a stud-flunky, prancing around near-naked in Bee Gees wig and spouting the thickest Bronx accent possible.

A unique, unholy cross between an avant-garde play, a tawdry soap opera and a demented Classics Illustrated comic book, Torture Dungeon, warts and all, may be Andy Milligan's Citizen Kane, his Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, his one, true, immortal Carnival Of Souls.

"In this life, we make our own answers, my dear!"

"Only think the worst, and you'll survive..."

"I hate time! Time is evil! Time is spent! Time must be destroyed!"

"I see beauty in only decadence, for only decadence is the mother of invention."

"Why do people do such foul things? I think we are all beasts by nature."