POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Sour Party (2023)

Gwen (Samantha Westervelt) and James (Amanda Drexton, who co-directed this with Michael A. Drexton and co-wrote this with him and Westervelt) are going nowhere and doing nothing but still have to get to a baby shower for Gwen’s sister where the only gift left on the registry is Baby’s First Wellness Kit, complete with essential oils and tarot cards.

Except it’s $150.

And they have nowhere near that kind of money.

The journey to get the money will take them through Los Angeles and into the heart of glittery darkness. Gwen wants to show her family that she can be a success — or at least not a major foul up — and arrive with the gift. But when there are cult leaders (Corey Feldman),  a thrift store called Twin Sneaks, Reggie Watts, the liberation of succulents, a cockroach gathering and a shrine to Nicholas Cage. And oh yeah, neon smoke farts that will revolutionize the online sex industry.

Gwen and James feel like the kind of people who have been friends forever and might be holy terrors when you see them in a bar or they show up at your party, but when everyone is telling stories about them, they realize that they kind of love them afterward even if in being in their orbit can be a hurricane.

I’m a sucker for comedies where friends are oblivious to the world and defeat it just by being themselves.

Sour Party is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Wintertide (2023)

Directed by John Barnard, who co-wrote the script with Carrie-May Siggins, Wintertide is about Beth (Niamh Carolan) whose world is battling a plague brought on by unending days of night and near-constant winter. She’s trapped in an isolated northern town close to Manitoba where the few people left are mindless zombies, overcome by depression, but at night when she sleeps, she’s able to enter another dimension that she believes can help her save herself.

This is a strange one, as Beth doesn’t believe in the vaccine that stops that disease, so immediately you feel your politics — also, I despise that sickness became politicized but it’s too late for that one, right? — you’re not going to be all in for. Also, she lies to her friends about her goals and while they made end up benefitting others, they’re more for her to find closure with her missing father.

Regardless, it’s certainly a new and interesting take on the zombie film, even if your pandemic fatigue may linger. I think anyone can understand that. Maybe pretend that it never happened and you’ll enjoy this a bit more.

Wintertide is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Blood (1973)

This movie is under seventy minutes and is packed with so many things that it feels like going to one of those conveyer belt sushi places and being overwhelmed by all the things you want to eat and then trying to remember all of the ingredients.

Lawrence Orlovsky (Allan Berendt) and his wife Regina Dracula (Hope Stansbury), along with their staff of Carrie (Patti Gaul) , Orlando (Michael Fischetti) and Carlotta (Pichulina Hempi) have moved into a mansion sight unseen, but these things are necessary as Regina has a blood condition that demands constant injections. Also: Lawrence is growing a monstrous plant in his lab.

There are also human monsters as well, like lawyer Carl Root (John Wallowitch), who is stealing the money from the Orlovsky estate. That’s when we learn that Lawrence is really Larry Talbot and yes, you’d have to watch some monster movies to realize he’s a wolfman. Then there’s Jimmy (David Bevans), back in town to romance his sister Carrie. I mean, he’s there for about five minutes before Regina kills him with a meat cleaver to the head and dissolves him in acid.

For some other reason, Lawrence and Root’s secretary Prudence Towers (Pamela Adams) have an affair that only can happen in a cemetery guarded by Petra (Eve Crosby), who decides to blackmail the family and is also destroyed by Regina. And then, as one imagines, werewolf and vampire must battle within the burning home as we crawl to the credits.

This is a movie that mentions time more than once. The leg-free Orlando says that “Time is a dictator. You must follow him or you’ll be left behind.” while Jimmy, in the middle of necking with his sister, is more optimistic, as he opines, “As one grows older, time becomes a pussycat.”

At one point, Regina tells her husband, “Oh, go to hell.” He replies, “We’re there already.” Even in a world of werewolves, vampires, legs being operated on with steak knives, plants that eat people and long bloodlines of monsters, the greatest monsters are marriage and family.

This played double features with Gerard Damiano’s Legacy Of Satan and man, I can’t even imagine what audiences were like after sitting through both of these movies.

I like this movie so much I wrote about it twice.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Carnage (1984)

Starting with a murder/suicide, Carnage is about love. Three years later in the same house as that tragedy, Carol (Leslie Den Dooven) and Jonathan Henderson (Michael Chiodo) move in. They got the house for cheap and they even threw in the furniture. There’s even a photo of the last occupants, which is yanked somehow out of Jonathan’s hands.

I’m excited to report that while this can be seen as an Amityville Horror rip-off, it’s still an Andy Milligan movie because the main theme is that every single married couple is a mess. Walter (John Garrit) and Caol’s sister Susan (Deeann Veeder) only argue more than Susan and her mother (Che Moody) who also wants to sleep with Walter. Meanwhile, we learn that the house is haunted by the couple from the beginning, but again, that’s just second place to the fact that no two human beings can be in a relationship without screaming at one another.

There are so many people in this movie to the point that you’ll wonder why there just keep adding people. That’s because this will eventually have a body count and if you were also asking yourself or God or whoever you ask things about, maybe the ghost of Milligan, “Will there be a pitchfork impalement?” Yes, why wouldn’t there be? That’s like going to see a band that refuses to play its greatest hit.

This is a movie that feels like no one cared in front of or behind the camera. It goes on and on, talking and talking, and yet there’s something to admire that this is a haunted house movie more devoted to long toasts or dialogue between people who don’t matter to the main story. It’s like if some college filmmaker got hired to make Poltergeist and Spielberg didn’t interfere and that student didn’t show up but sent their girlfriend who hates horror movies and she just wanted to be done with the whole thing.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Torture Dungeon (1970)

“I’m trisexual — I’ll try anything for pleasure!”

Any movie that has this line, no matter what happens in it, has something good in it.

Norman (Gerald Jaccuzo) is The Duke Of Norwich. When his half-brother is killed, he gets closer to the throne, which makes him filled with a need for power. He sets his other half-brother Albert (Hal Borske) up with a commoner named Heather MacGregor (Susan Cassidy) with plans to take control of their child and therefore, the throne. But there’s also the dead half-brother’s pregnant wife Lady Jane (Patricia Dillon), a hunchback named Ivan (Richard Mason) — who even gets into a threesome — and a woman with one eye.

I can’t even imagine what people unaware of Andy Milligan think when they saw this. It could still be happening now thanks to streaming, as someone sees the poster art and the title and thinks. “I’ll try this” before they’re confronted by Staten Island being a foreign country and costumes that look like they came from a Christmas play. Will any of them make it to the end? Or will they just be upset by what they have seen?

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Nightbirds (1970)

One of five movies that Andy Milligan was to shoot for British distributor Leslie Elliot — before the falling out with Elliot’s father, who was his business partner — Nightbirds was written on the plane to England.

It’s not the normal — well, was anything he did normal? — horror movie that Milligan was getting known for. Dink (Berwick Kaler) and Dee (Julie Shaw) meet, hook up and he moves into her attic apartment. Then they grow so obsessed with each other that the outside world no longer matters. Their worship game is one of trying to outdo the other, trying to make the other the victim when it should be about lovemaking. It’s not, but you already knew that going in.

Like Vapors, this is an intimate film and not one of blood and horror. Well, you could say that there is horror but not the supernatural kind. I read someone once who said they wondered what Milligan’s career would have been like if Warhol had paid him instead of Paul Morrissey and I bet he’d have ruined the opportunity sooner than later, but just dream of what could have been.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: The Body Beneath (1970)

Making his way to England instead of Staten Island, Andy Milligan created a vampire movie in which Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) has an entire family of vampires — a wife who doesn’t speak, three green-skinned vampire women and a hunchback named Spool — living in Carfax Abbey.

Inbreeding is destroying this vampiric brood, so he calls out to America for more family members to add to the DNA and increase their chances of survival.

To get this on film, Milligan handmade costumes and smeared vaseline all over the lens. As always, he also had everyone scream at the top of their lungs.

Spool is abused throughout the movie, even when he’s trying to do the right thing and save the victims.

A lot of people seem to hate this movie and you know, maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome because I watched so many Andy Milligan movies all in the same week, but I am not seeing the same movie that they have. I kind of fall into a drone dream when I watch these, letting them wash over me and take away the world that I don’t want to be in. I feel sad for others who can’t use these movies in the same way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

The same people who made this made the equally wild Lake Michigan Monster. Let me sell you on this: it’s a Merrie Melodies-influenced black and white no dialogue movie about an applejack maker whose life is ruined by beavers, so he fights back against them as a trapped and finds himself up against, well, hundreds of them.

Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who co-wrote this with director Mike Cheslik) must survive a brutal winter, then learn how to trap fur, selling the dead beavers to The Merchant (​Doug Mancheski) while making eyes at his daughter The Furrier (Olivia Graves).

All the while, the beavers are planning to destroy mankind.

This movie is an absolute joy, a quick moving living and breathing cartoon in which one man challenges the odds and the beavers and the snow and the sharp objects and oh man, this was great.

Hundreds of Beavers is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Monstrosity (1987)

Three maniacs —  Clay (Tommy Voager), Kyle (Joe Darrel) and Savage (Charles Prior) — have assaulted Ronnie (Audra Marie Ribeiro) and then Clay goes even further, dressing as an orderly and killing her as she heals in a hospital bed, then even going further to tear the pages out of the police mugshot book that has their photos.

Her boyfriend Mark (David Homb) is, as you can imagine, destroyed. He tells his friends Scott (Michael Lunsford and Carlos (Joe Balogh) that he wants revenge, but then they bring him down to Earth. He could go to jail. Worse, he could be killed. But, Carlos wonders, what if they made a golem?

It’s at this point that you realize that this movie is not a normal movie and instead you are in the world of Andy Milligan. Carlos studied religion in college and man, if I knew they taught you how to make golem, well, I wouldn’t have gone to art school. Scott goes to med school and has some dead bodies. I have no idea where they got the gorilla parts, to be honest. And soon, Frankie (Haal Borske) is ready to hunt down those three people who ruined Mark’s life.

That’s when Milligan decides that maybe instead of this being a revenge-o-matic, it should be a comedy about Frankenstein trying to fit in and his love story with a girl named Jamie Lee Curtis Wackowski (Carrie Anita), who helpfully explains that her mother is obsessed with horror movies. Seeing as how this movie was made nine years after Halloween

This movie has the wildest punks — these ones blow away the TV ones on Quincy — and for some reason, Frankie kills the gang leader first. Who knows why, yet again. Mark and Scott are also using Frankie to kill every criminal in the city and there’s also a guardian angel (Joel Weiss) who tells Frankie and Jamie Lee that God wants them together.

This movie is pretty much as weird as you can get and who knew that it would come at the end of a lifetime of odd movies, an almost hopeful monster movie made far from Staten Island.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: The Weirdo (1989)

Garagehouse did everyone a favor when they re-released The Weirdo on blu ray.

One of the last movies Andy Milligan made, it’s a film about teenage innocence being destroyed directed by someone who seemingly has no innocence left. Donnie (Steve Burington) just wants to stay in his secret hiding space looking for garbage, but continually he’s set upon by larger and larger packs of bullies. The only kindness he finds in this world is in the disabled Jenny (Jessica Straus).

Jenny has one of those rambling Milligan speeches that ends with a truly haunting few sentences: “When I woke up my dress was all torn and I was bloody…all over here. When I finally got home my mother and sister beat on me. They blamed me for everything that happened. Bobby didn’t call me names after that but he would whisper to the other boys and they would giggle at me in the halls. I never went back to school again after that. I don’t need school. I don’t need anything.”

Donnie finally explodes and destroys everyone that ever hurt him, even decapitating his horrific mother. Heads getting cut off is something that happens regularly in Milligan movies. And seeing as how Andy hated his mother, this time the act takes on more meaning.

Yes, someone is also killed with a pitchfork.

Donnie and Jenny have a love that must battle three thugs — Nails (Shawn Player), Dean (Patrick Thomas) and Vic (Dennis Robbins) — as well as a horrible religious figure named Reverend Cummings (John Miranda), Donnie’s drunken mother wanting to sell him into slavery and the fact that they are in an Andy Milligan movie, which means that these things never seem to end well.

Supposedly, there was going to be a sequel with Donnie has an unkillable monster being controlled by Jenny and coming back for even more revenge. I despise the idea of AI-based cinema, but if there’s any movie I’d want to see made that is impossible to make today, this may be it.