Shot on short ends, made with costumes designed by director and writer and Andy Milligan, decorated with animal organs for special effects, The Ghastly Ones was made for all of $13,000 in a country estate somewhere in Staten Island. It may as well have been made in another dimension.

Also known as Blood Rites and refilmed again by Milligan in 1978 as Legacy of Blood, this movie is all about Veronica, Victoria and Elizabeth, the daughters of a man who has ordered them to stay for three nights in his home before they learn what he has left to them. I mean, how dangerous can that be? It’s not like his hunchback butler hasn’t already killed two people before the credits and torn a rabbit apart, leaving it in the bed of Veronica with the note, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit.”

What follows are family members and their husbands sliced in two, stabbed with pitchforks, beheaded and even smashed directly in the face with axes. Yes, there’s something here for everyone, if by everyone you mean people who can deal with Andy Milligan films, which have been critically destroyed for years, by people like Stephen King who said it was “the work of morons with cameras.”

It’s also one of the original video nasties, even though that list was made a decade after its release.

You know why I love it? Because the costumes and story say centuries ago while the traffic outside the windows say late 60’s. Because you can hear Milligan end some of the scenes. And because, well, it feels like another world, another place, an escape from this day in day out work work work.

Originally released as Seeds of Sin with unconnected sex scenes inside the film, Andy Milligan succeeds at something that only Juan López Moctezuma can come close to: non-stop screaming.

Everybody in this movie hates themselves, hates one another and hates anyone that comes in between one another. Even the camera hates everyone, swirling out of the way to avoid whatever is happening on screen at times. Christmas has brought the Manning family together one last time and someone is killing them one by one, but it feels like a mercy killing as originally fake smiles give way to teeth bared and always the yelling, always the anger, always the screaming.

Peter and Jessica, the live-in help, also want to kill mom.

Maggie Rogers is Claris the mother, confined to a wheelchair, drinking herself to death, burning the money instead of heating her house, lording over a family that includes son Michael and daughter Carol forever sexually intertwined even when he’s abusing his wife Susan, sex-obsessed priest son Matthew, daughter Margaret who is dating a tough guy and Buster, the military school brat who is obsessed with the Third Reich and his lover Drew while also being abused by Matthew.

Everyone in this movie has an issue, several of them more than one, and they all drag one another into a festering abyss of tortured life and painful death. Acid to the face, knife to the heart, electrocuted in the bathtub.

I can’t even imagine what this film’s distributors must have thought when they got it and wondered, “Who wants to endure this?” Me! That’s who. Instead, they stuffed it with faceless people having anonymous sex as if that would erase the psychological barrage that you just witnessed. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to get down after watching this and if they are, they just might eat your head after they’re done with you.

A holiday movie.

A remake — a loose one — of The Ghastly Ones, this movie has three sisters and their husbands arrive at a remote inn to attend the reading of their uncle’s will. One by one, they are dispatched by an unknown killer. It sounds simple, but this is Andy Milligan. It’s going to get strange.

“Think of your worst nightmare… It’s about to happen again!” That’s what brought people in for this movie and it’s a pretty good tagline. As for the movie, it’s set in the 1800s but obviously shot in modern day Staten Island. And who cares? By this point, if you’re watching this, you’ve given into the world of Andy Milligan.

Margaret (Elaine Boies) and Mary Lennox (Marilee Troncone) work in the Hanley Mansion, which is also home to their mentally challenged brother Carl (Chris Broderick). The master of the house is long gone, but now his daughetrshave finally come to claim their pieces of the estate. There’s Regina (Dale Hansen) and her husband Joe (Joe Downing); Jennifer (Louise Gallandra) and Robert (Peter Schwartz); and Louise and John (Peter Barcia), all of whom must spend three days together to get their inheritance. Well, that is if any of them survive, as the psychic Baba (Bob Elia) predicts at least one will die.

This was also edited into a TV cut, Legacy of Horror, that is a little longer but is missing the gore. That’s so much of the fun, as someone gets their guts sawed into, there’s a decapitation, a hand chopped off and an accidental hatchet to the head.

Legacy of Blood may be the most technically well-made of Andy Milligan’s films, but do we even come to his work for that?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Ten years after her family was killed in a tragic car crash, college student Millie Barnes (Parker McKenna) has a bright future and plenty of friends. Or maybe I should have written that she had plenty of friends, as they start dying off one by one. Now, Millie has to figure out who is killing them all and why.

If you watch Tubi Originals, you know Chris Stokes (three movies of The Stepmother, The Assistant, Picture Me Dead) and his usual writing partner, Marques Houston (No Way Out, You’re Not Alone). They’re back for another thriller that has a lot of I Know What You Did Last Summer to it.

A decade ago, Mille had to deal with losing her parents Eric and Tracy. Sure, she’s made a comeback, but those scars run deep. Yet she’s now the most popular girl in college and her friends come from rich and powerful families, like her boyfriend Kaleb (Marc John Jeffries), whose father owns the company that she’s about to start working for fresh out of school. Her other friends are Adam (Jorden Smooth), Lewis (Paul Toweh), Bree (Asia Harmony), Terri (Taylor Crawford), Timmy (Milo Stokes), Sophia (Zonnique, whose father is T.I. in real life), Channel (Janina Gordillo) and Sommer (Iyana Halley).

Well, you can cross the first four off the list. Adam overdoses on steroids (which rarely happens), Lewis slips and ends up with a broken neck, Bree’s heel breaks and she falls off a balcony and Terri, the daughter of Judge Eleanor Smith, is killed in a car crash. Someone starts sending letters to Millie teasing each of these murders, asking if they were accidents.

Can she figure out who the killer is before the two detectives on the case? Will Timmy and Kaleb kill one another before the murderer gets to them? Will it take an entire hour before we even get to the nautical vessel this is titled after? Is there a secret sibling? Will I watch every single Tubi Original?

Of course. Yes. Uh-huh. Yep. Totally.

There are also childhood flashbacks, the fabulous Aunt Carol (Cynthia Brady), a strange woman named Olga (Carnette Jones), our protagonist with a bomb strapped to her and an ending that teases a sequel that knowing Stokes, Houston and Tubi that I feel sure that we will receive.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Church of Mortavia needs cash, so Father Guru does what he can, which means getting dead bodies for medical students to experiment on. This may mean stabbing churchgoers in the eyeball or working with vampires and hunchbacks. And while this is all supposedly set in the Middle Ages, it was really shot in New York City’s St. Peter’s Church, which means that you just may hear the sounds of modern traffic.

Shot for $11,000, this is yet another Milligan film where the director Milligan wrote, directed, built sets and sewed costumes for a film made up of mainly off-off Broadway actors and Staten Island locals. How else would you populate a prison colony of Catholic sinners who were all waiting to be served sentences that are all being wiped out by an insane priest?

This was made as part of a double bill with another of Milligan’s movies, The Body Beneath. It’s around 55 minutes long and has some gore, but in no way does it have as inventive of a title as Milligan’s best-named film, The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!

Milligan is a fascinating character study, probably moreso than his films to be perfectly honest. He was considered one of the worst directors of all time until his movie Fleshpot on 42nd Street was rediscovered by Something Weird Video and his theatrical efforts were unearthed. In some strange universe, his work as a queer filmmaker found a better audience than maniacs like me who watched his movies like The Ghastly Ones.

Frantic Friar

• 1.5 oz. Frangelico
• .75 oz. lemon juice
• .75 oz. lime juice
• Maraschino cherry

1. Pour Frangelico and juices into a shaker with ice.
2. Scream at it like you’re in an Andy Milligan movie while shaking, then pour in a glass and top with a cherry.

The Amazing Two-Headed Transplant came out in 1971 and The Thing With Two Heads more famously was playing theaters in 1972, but as strange as it is seeing Rosey Grier and Ray Milland share the same body, Andy Milligan can somehow outdo any movie, one or tw0-headed, just by making his normal — well, not really normal — movie.

Don’t be put off by the idea that this is based on a classic book like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mri Hyde. It’s still certifiable.

Dr. Jekyll (Dennis DeMarne) has perfected a surgery — well, as much as cracking open a skull and poking a brain can be an operation — that allows him to isolate the evil in the brain. Everyone thinks that this is a ludicrous idea, so he invents a formula that allows someone to become the dark side of their mind. Why would anyone want this? Science is like that. Now, the good doctor becomes Danny Blood, who is everything twisted inside his once medically inclined brain.

Instead of just being with his wife — who definitely wants him — Mary Anne Marsden (Gay Field), Jekyll would rather experiment in the laboratory. His assistant, Jack Smithers (Berwick Kaler), would rather be getting with Jekyll’s sister Carla (Jaqueline Lawrence), so in the middle of their tryst, he gets all the formula’s notes soaked. That means there’s no changing back now.

But does the doctor even want to? I mean, Danny Blood does stuff like force barmaid April Conners (Julia Stratton) to bark like a dog and rides her around quite literally while absolutely shrieking, “You shouldn’t be allowed on the face of this earth! You’re scum! You’re the defecation of the slums of London!”

I mean, if that’s consensual, good for you, Danny Blood. But then he decides that topping ladies isn’t enough. He needs to kill some to get off.

Who loved the fog machine more? Andy Milligan or Lucio Fulci? I mean, my nose is burning just from watching this and it was made fifty years ago. But whatever. Smoke up all the fog, Andy, and let your characters shout at the heavens.

But no, no one in this movie has two heads.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Vapors was Andy Milligan’s first official film. It was first released as an underground gay film in selected art houses in 1965 and to the general public in 1967. Today, it could really play anywhere, not in adults only theaters.

Directed by Milligan and written by Hope Stansbury, all of the interior shots were filmed in a vacant apartment floor on 199 Prince Street in Manhattan, the same apartment building where Milligan lived. The clerk scene was shot in a candy store and the opening exterior shot of the bathhouse was filmed outside the actual St. Marks Bathhouse on 6 St. Marks Place in the East Village, a location famous at the time for hookups when gay sex was illegal in New York City. Keep in mind this was just over fifty years ago.

The entire movie takes place inside the St. Marks Baths, as a young man named Thomas sits on a bed and observes the other men and their personalities. He’s joined by an older man named Mr. Jaffe  They get pasty their opening lies — Thomas is not a frequent visitor, Jaffe is not a first-timer — and begin to discuss their lives. Jaffe has been married for 19 years and wants nothing to do with his wife any longer. Sixteen years ago, their son drowned and life has never been the same. He sees something of his son in Thomas and has to leave, but promises to send him a gift. The loudness of the baths continues as a paper sunflower arrives for Thomas, who cries upon Mr. Thomas leaving, but is soon greeted by another man who disrobes for anonymous sex with the young man.

This movie feels like a place that I am invading and not just because I am a heterosexual. It’s because Milligan has so completely created a privacy between these two men that only they should share and we’re just as bad as that peeping tom looking through a hole in the wall. It’s fascinating to see this movie, one free from murder and the supernatural, and see where Milligan’s movies went after this.

You can watch this on YouTube.