Category Archives: Movie reviews

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

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Andy Milligan was a maniac who made movies filled with maniacs. By all reports, he was in the same constant bad mood as nearly every one of his characters, just as willing as them to start screaming no matter what, no matter when. This may have been because he inherited the same bipolar disorder or schizophrenia that his mother had. Forget the words of Stephen King, who said that Andy’s films were made by “morons with movie cameras” and instead, just imagine the chaos of each film’s shoestring budget set with a fastidious Andy melting down and then savor the results.

The other thing about the Milligan Cinematic Universe is that often there will be supernatural beings. The Mooneys in this movie are all werewolves who transform once a month on the night of the full moon. Pa (Douglas Phair) has spent nearly all of his near-two hundred years of life trying to cure his family, which includes his caretaker Phoebe (Joan Ogden), the sadistic Monica (Hope Stansbury) who mutilates vermin and Malcolm (Berwick Kaler), who is so far gone that he’s kept locked up.

There’s also Diana (Jackie Skarvellis), who has come back home from medical school along with a new husband named Gerald (Ian Innes). She’s the last hope for the Mooneys, as she is the only one who doesn’t gain fur once a month.

Shot in London — along with The Body Beneath, Bloodthirsty Butchers and The Man with Two Heads — new scenes were added when producer William Mishkin wanted to cash in on the success of Willard. Those scenes — one has Andy in it — were shot in his Staten Island home. Milligan had a hard time getting rid of the rats, even when he tried to give them away to the audience that would come to see this film. He also plays the gunsmith who creates silver bullets and Mr. Micawber, a man who sells flesh-eating rats that have already bitten off one of his arms and a lot of his face.

Despite being set a century before, we can see and hear cars, as well as see electrical outlets, but man, Andy made all the costumes himself by hand and I can just imagine him getting out the patterns and swearing the whole time, shouting about thimbles.

The greatest thing about this movie is the title, which had to lure people in because it’s so good and then people would be confronted by a toxic family just shouting and snipping and screaming and that’s the real movie, not the furry masks or flesh-consuming vermin. That’s what I’m here for.

Here’s a drink recipe to get you through the film.

Red Eyed Black Rat

  • 1/3 cup orange juice
  • 3 oz. dark rum
  • 2 oz. cola
  • 2 maraschino cherries

This one is pretty simple. Pour the juice, rum, then cola over ice and enjoy. For extra fun, drop in the cherries and pretend they’re rat eyes staring at you in the dark of the wasteland.

You can watch this on Tubi.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Beaten to Death (2023)

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Directed by Sam Curtain, who co-wrote this with Benjamin Jung-Clarke, Beaten to Death starts with Jack (Thomas Roach) being brutalized by Ricky (Justan Wagner) as the body of his wife Rachel (Nicole Tudor) lies dead next to them. Barely alive, Jack stabs the man in the throat and stumbles out of the room. He runs into his neighbor Ned (David Tracy),, but that’s just the start of his torture.

That title should tell you everything, because Jack gets destroyed in this movie, which moves across multiple timelines and spends much of its time showing a blinded Jack wandering the Australian outback screaming, covered in blood and dirt and near death.

There are long moments of a man in absolute pain just yelling alternating with moments of extreme violence and an ocular assault that awakened the dead body of Fulci who was probably either smiling or annoyed to be awoken from his slumber. You’re either going to love how audacious this is or hate that there’s this much endless gore. But hey — the cinematography is gorgeous and in no way does this movie do anything less than go hard and then somehow find a way to go even harder.

Beaten to Death 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: Nightbreed (1999)

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I decided to go with the unfairly maligned Nightbreed, a movie that I haven’t seen since it played in theaters in 1990. Directed by Clive Barker and based on his 1988 novella Cabal,  this movie was a commercial and critical failure. Barker has always claimed that the producers tried to sell the film as a run of the mill slasher, when it is anything but. In 2014, he finally was able to release a director’s cut that fixed many of his issues.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer, Fire in the Sky) dreams of a place called Midian where monsters are accepted. His girlfriend Lori has convinced him to start seeing a psychotherapist named Dr. Phillip Decker, who is ably played by David Cronenberg of all people. All along, Decker has been setting Boone up for the murders that he’s been committing, giving his LSD instead of lithium and filling his head with details of the murders.

Decker urges Boone to turn himself in, but he’s hit by a truck and sent to the hospital where he meets Narcisse, another man who knows about Midian. He explains to Boone how to get to the hidden story while he cuts off his own face.

Boone makes his way to Midian, where he meets the creatures who make it their home like Kinski (Nicholas Vince, the Chattering Cenobite from Hellraiser) and Peloquin, a demonic creature who smells Boone’s innocence, letting him know that there’s no way that the murders could have been his doing. He bites Boone, who runs into a police trap led by Decker and is shot and killed.

He’d be dead if it wasn’t for Peloquin’s bite. Soon, he returns to life in the morgue while his girlfriend decides to come looking for Midian herself. Boone becomes part of the Nightbreed thanks to their leader Dirk Lylesburg (Doug Bradley, Pinhead himself) and from the touch of their god, Baphomet.

What follows is a battle between the police and clergy versus the Nightbreed, ending with Boone rallying the supernatural creatures and destroying their home to stop the attacks. Decker is stopped, Baphomet discusses that this was all part of the prophecy and he renames Boone Cabal.

There are two different endings of the film, depending on the original and director’s cut that change the story significantly. One raises Decker from the dead while another places Lori into the Nightbreed. Both set the stage for further adventures that never happened, sadly.

Barker wanted this to be the Star Wars of horror films and envisioned a trilogy of stories. But the film wasn’t marketed well and never made back its budget. Barker said that the producers expressed a concern that “the monsters are the good guys,” to which he replied, “That’s the point.”

Marvel’s Epic imprint put out several comic books and there were several video games, but soon the film slid away into obscurity, Luckily, with the excitement around the director’s and Cabal cuts of the film being released, SyFy, Morgan Creek and Barker have announced an entirely new series based on the movie.

Interestingly enough, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spoke well of Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic”, as he saw the movie being all about the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.”

There are plenty of music ties in this film, as the role of Ohnaka was first intended for singer Marc Almond and Suzi Quatro was in the film, but her scenes were cut. It’s also one of the first films that Danny Elfman scored after Batman. Barker stated that “The most uncompromised portion of that entire movie is the score.”

Nightbreed has more than held up, reminding me of the convention season of 1990 when you could see buttons and shirts of this movie everywhere. My excitement was at a fever pitch and I thought, “This is going to be huge.” Shows how smart I was.

Nightbreed 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: Don’t Look Away (2023)

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A gang of criminals unintentionally unleashes a supernatural force — a killer mannequin! — and a young woman named Frankie (Kelly Bastard) knows that it’s coming for her. In fact, the first time she sees it, she accidentally kills a trucker. And once you see the mannequin, it only stops stalking you when you’re dead.

The scariest part of the male mannequin killer is that we never see it move or kill. We only see its handiwork, as it only attacks when no one is looking. Directed by Micheal Bafaro, who also wrote the script with Michael Mitton, who also plays Jonah, the man who tries to help Frankie and earns the anger of her boyfriend Steve (Colm Hill).

There are some frightening moments, even some kills at a nightclub near the dancefloor, and the idea of the unstoppable creature following our heroine echoes It Follows, but this is very much its own film. Frankie has almost no luck, as the mannequin keeps showing up everywhere she goes, killing people and making it look like all of these crimes have one thing in common: her.

If you get freaked out by mannequins, by all means, this is going to make you ruin your pants.

I watched Don’t Look Away at 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: A Wandering Path (The Story of Gilead Media) (2023)

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Featuring interviews with the members of Thou, Neurosis, Enslaved, Panopticon, Emma Ruth Rundle, Yellow Eyes, Couch Slut, Blood Incantation, Krallice, Mizmor, Weigedood, Hell, Leech, Mania, Inter Arma and many more, as well as performances by several of those artists, A Wandering Path is really the story of Adam Bartlett, who started the Gilead Media record label in 2005.

His label may have started small, but is now a well-known source of the best noise rock, doom and black metal artists in the world. He also works with Dave Adelson from the record label 20 Buck Spin to celebrate Migration Fest every two years, with the 2018 version being right here in Pittsburgh, PA.

Michael Dimmitt has directed a movie that pays as much attention to the reasons for the music as the music itself. You’ll discover how several of these artists have used the power of this dark form of music to get past the pain in their lives. I was most impressed by Austin Lunn of Panopticon. His band’s music combines black metal with bluegrass and folk with Appalachian instruments such as banjo, fiddle, bells and acoustic guitar breaking up the expected distortion and thundering drums. In the same way that Norweigan black metal bands drew upon the past of their country for inspiration, his work draws upon issues and themes unique to his Kentucky home.

This is a difficult subject to make a movie about as just getting into who the label is, what Migration Fest is and each of these bands, not to mention the genres that all appear, could all be their own films. Dimmitt has played in bands like Disassociate, Mutilation Rites and Overdose as well as working as an editor, including on a film that tried to explain black metal, Until the Light Takes Us.

The main issue is that this is such a niche subject — it’s similar to making a documentary on a deep cut exploitation director like Franco or Rollin — that it may not be able to make much sense for newcomers. And for those who are already well-versed in this music, it may seem like it’s glossing over its subject. There’s also a fair amount of “we’re all a family” scenesterism, but that happens any time you get metal folks together. It’s genuine, even if from the outside it may not feel like that.

Is this movie successful? It caused me to look up several of these bands and listen to their work. I think that’s a very clear case of it working quite well.

You can learn more at the official site.

I watched A Wandering Path at 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: Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972)

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Shot with new permits or budget on the very real streets of New York City, Fleshpot on 42nd Street starts with two sex workers, Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon) and Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan in drag), trying to make it in the world. But it all gets to be too much for Dusty, who quits the nightlife and tries to move on to the straight life with Bob (Harry Reems!). But as you know — or you should — this is an Andy Milligan movie. Things have a way of not working out.

Once Dusty and Bob hook up, this movie moves from a realistic world where two sex workers rob everyone they can to stay alive while being truly honest with one another about it to another where a man comes in and seemingly saves the day but not caring about his lover’s past.

Maybe that brief respite from a tough world of fighting to stay alive every day is echoed by how Milligan felt, back from London and still making movies for nothing that hardly anyone would see on the rough streets of NYC. But even 42nd Street was about to change, going from simply dangerous in places to absolutely harrowing in the wake of crack by the end of the decade. And even in 1972, the movies playing there went from just plain old exploitation to full penetration.

If you hear some people discuss the films of Milligan, they’re either dismissive or outright mean. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but unlike his horror work, this feels authentic and true. It’s got a downer ending that 1972 Hollywood would have embraced, even if there’s no way they ever could have.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

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Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) to disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its time period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: House of Seven Belles (1979)

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The description of this movie on IMDB: “The seven sisters of the outcast LeFleur family try to survive in a post-Civil War Deep South.”

My wife’s description: “What is all that screaming downstairs?”

There’s a version of this movie online and it’s as complete as it can be. Milligan ran out of money before he could film the last scenes and the ending. So how should it have ended? No one is sure, as the only surviving shooting script ends at the same point the film does. So who is the killer? Who knows! The only part of the ending that is known is that the mansion was going to burn down.

In 2019, this premiered on byNWR, Nicolas Winding Refn’s free cult movie streaming website. Jimmy McDonough, Andy Milligan’s biographer, had the only surviving copy of the workprint, given to him by the director before he died. Whatever survived was restored, along with another unfinished Milligan movie, Compass Rose.

Who else would film a Southern gothic in Staten Island other than Milligan? And who else would have people stabbed in the neck with a pitchfork, a face burned with acid and decapitated heads rolling around in the midst of a talky — well, screamy? — blast of a family in decline, repeatedly slapping and spitting and yelling at each other? Not to mention voodoo and costumes that are so good that they stand in defiance of the actors attempting to get all they can out of the overly detailed dialogue!

Seven sisters try to survive the South with a serial killer on the prowl. Write your own ending while you’re at it. You’ll get an Andy Milligan No-Prize or something.

You can watch this on YouTube.

THE FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN: The Ghastly Ones (1968)

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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.

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Bloody Bridget (2023)

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Bridget O’Brien (Anastasia Elfman, The Once and Future Smash, Aliens, Clowns & Geeks) is a red-haired waitress and burlesque dancer at a Van Nuys dive bar where she performs Grand Guignol-style dance routines with her partners Pepe (Marcos Mateo Ochoa) and Leticia (Naomi de la Cruz) while avoiding the sexual come-ons of her boss Tony (Tom Ayers).

Her life isn’t all that great, despite her perky attitude. Her boyfriend Edwin (Christian Prentice) basically sleeps around right in her face and the guy who seems like a knight in shining armor, a lawyer named Goldman (Adam J. Smith) assaults her and she ends up in jail when she fights back. She’s soon attacked all over again by a female prison guard and tries to kill herself before she’s saved by Baron Samedi (Jean Charles), who thinks that she’s the reincarnation of his long-dead wife, Maman Brigitte, the former Celtic goddess who has become a Haitian death goddess who drinks the blood and hearts of evil men.

He recreates the lost woman in the image of that scarlet woman and sets her on the path of revenge. But soon, she wants her soul back, as Samadi slept with her to give her the power when she was drunk on spirits from the spirit world. And yet Satan (Richard Elfman, who directed and wrote this) claims that sometimes, women will do that. I’m certain lots of folks will be upset by this moment but I am even more certain that Elfman doesn’t care. Have you seen Forbidden Zone?

If you haven’t seen a movie by Richard Elfman, well…buckle up. There’s a stand-up routine in here that’s more offensive than in like ten Hollywood films. Doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s in there. What is great, however, is the look of the film, the music and the lunatic energy. I mean, what other film has a father and son lawyer duo — Daniel Dershowitz Sr. and Jr. (Rick Howland and Evan Eckenrod) — trying a case in Hell?

You can learn more at the official site.

Bloody Bridget 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.