Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Physical Media
When I was a kid, I could never have dreamed I’d spend my days working in a room surrounded by shelves of thousands of movies —films I could reach out and grab, just an armful away—and fill my days with pure insanity. The fact that I have multiple copies of The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, much less multiple cuts of it, thrills me to no end. Some people have the temerity to talk shit on Andy Milligan. If all of those people had one face, I’d punch it over and over again.
Leave it to cinema’s grandmaster of pure hatred to turn a Victorian lycanthrope yarn into a claustrophobic, venom-spitting family drama where the real horror isn’t turning into a beast. It’s having to talk to your relatives.
Andy gets it.
Shot in 1969 on a shoestring budget in Staten Island and disguised as turn-of-the-century England, Curse of the Full Moon is the unfinished director’s cut that distributor William Mishkin later chopped, padded and mutated into the 1972 grindhouse classic The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, throwing in some rats in the hopes of achieving the kind of success that movies like Willard and Ben had. Yes, Mishkin famously forced Milligan to shoot additional footage involving live rats being tortured and killed to cash in on the rodent-horror craze.
Severin’s assembly of Curse of the Full Moon strips away all that vile, real-life animal cruelty. The result? A much tighter, surprisingly coherent and infinitely more watchable gothic melodrama. Because this cut is essentially an audio-dialogue track with zero musical score, the film takes on the eerie, naked quality of a televised community theater play staged inside a claustrophobe’s nightmare.
The setup is peak Milligan misery: The Mooney clan resides in a decaying English estate, bound by a horrific lycanthropic bloodline passed down through generations. Pa Mooney (Douglas Phair) is bedridden and nearing the end of his rope, while his adult children bicker, sneer and parade their neuroses around the parlor. Enter the youngest daughter, Monica (Hope Stansbury), sashaying back into the family fold sporting a wildly flamboyant, bright orange dress. Monica was supposedly sent off to an all-boys medical college to study and find a cure for the family curse—because why not?—but she’s returned home a day before the next full moon with a surprise in tow: a new husband, Gerald (Ian Innes).
Instead of battening down the hatches, locking the doors or taking any logical precautions for the impending full moon that threatens to consume them all, the Mooneys do what Andy Milligan characters do best: they sit around in thrift-store period costumes and hurl vicious, rapid-fire abuse at one another.
It’s like Thanksgiving all over again.
While the werewolf effects are held back until the final few minutes—culminating in a hilarious, low-budget, sheer-absurdity climax that only Milligan could pull off—the real juice of the movie is in its rambling backstory and sordid monologues.
Case in point: Gerald, the outsider husband, drops one of the single greatest, most unprompted sob-story monologues in all of 1970s underground cinema:
Gerald: Perhaps I should tell you a few things about my background. My father deserted my mother when I was five. Two years later, he was arrested for raping and murdering a six-year-old girl. He was hanged at Portsmouth. And left hanging on display for all to see as a lesson. He hung there for two weeks until his body became so hideous that they had to cut it down for health reasons. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the yard of an insane asylum. And two weeks later, my mother died of grief and shame. I was shipped off to an orphanage in Scotland. The nuns there had it in for me because of my background. They punished me often for the whole orphanage to see. They would strip me, tie me between two posts, and beat me. I never made any friends there. Probably thought I was just like my father. When I finally became 18, they set me free in society. Years later, I was lucky enough to have met you. That’s why those first two years we were living together, I couldn’t show you any love.
Diana: My God. I love you so much.
People were going to come to this to see a werewolf movie. Or a rat movie. Or a werewolf and rat movie. Instead, they got Andy Milligan sewing his own costumes for a fake family that takes his anger against everything and makes it real. A movie where an old man in a robe made from curtains drones on about medical school and family curses.
There aren’t stars in the universe for movies like this.
Maybe some people like having diplomas and awards on their walls. I have two Andy Milligan box sets. Tell me who has the better life.
