Severin has just released an astonishing, revelatory Blu-ray set which includes two thought-to-be-lost films of grindhouse great Andy Milligan plus a brilliant, deeply moving documentary on this truly offbeat director.
Andy Milligan churned out twenty-nine movies between 1965 and 1988, everything from sex melodramas like The Degenerates (1967) and Tricks of the Trade (1969) to gory, heavily costumed, period-piece horror films like Bloodthirsty Butchers (1969) and Torture Dungeon (1970). As a cult director, Andy Milligan doesn’t inspire the camp adoration of Ed Wood. “If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you,” snipes Michael Weldon, author of the schlock fan’s Bible- Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Cheap looking, badly acted, incredibly talky Milligan’s films are often tough to take. But his life represents an era that is forever lost- that of the grindhouse exploitation director who thrived in the seedy pre-Giuliani Times Square.
The documentary: The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, by directors Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson, is a stunning tribute to this crackpot auteur. It includes interviews with Milligan’s co-stars and collaborators like Hope Stansbury and Gerald Jacuzzo; and a witty overview of Milligan’s career by author Stephen Thrower, plus personal insight to the man by Jimmy McDonough, who wrote one of the best books ever about a filmmaker and his life- The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan. The film charts his difficult, Tennessee Williams-like, childhood in Minnesota and his monster of a mother Marie Gladys, an overweight, neurotic, harridan who served as the basis for scores of her son’s hateful film characters. A fascinating part of his life is his Caffe Cino days- a small Greenwich Village coffeehouse which served as a hothouse for rising theater talent like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen and John Guare in the early 1960s. Andy Milligan brought “a certain depravity” to the Cino and staged productions described as: “fast-paced to the point of mania.”
In 1965, Milligan brought that feeling to his first movie, the gay short Vapors set in the St. Marks Baths and written by Hope Stansbury, the raven-tressed beauty who would star in his later films. Milligan then hooked up with famed sexploitation producer William Mishkin and made 11 features, all shot with a 16mm Auricon camera. Later he used short ends (the unused snippets of film from mainstream shoots). Many of the early work plays like bizarre moral tales where sleazy characters whored, bickered, and got violently paid back for their excesses- Depraved! (1967); Seeds (1968) (“Sown in incest! Harvested in hate!”); and my favorite: Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), about a street-smart New York City hooker (Laura Cannon) who moves in with a transvestite prostitute (played with hilarious gusto by Neil Flanagan).
Milligan bought a Victorian mansion within walking distance of the Staten Island ferry and his house became “Hollywood central” where Milligan was a one-man army- writing, directing and doing the sets and costumes for splatter epics like The Ghastly Ones (1968) shot in “cranium-cleaving color”. His usual stock company (Hope Stansbury, Neil Flanagan, Hal Borske) were often joined by Staten Island locals who were dragged into performing.
Milligan even married one of his actresses- Candy Hammond who starred as “Pussy” Johnson in Gutter Trash (1969). No one took the wedding seriously- Milligan was unambiguously gay, heavily into S & M and an avowed misogynist. The service took place at the Staten Island house which was still decorated for a movie shoot. It was a real circus. “The guests stole all the wedding gifts.” Milligan cruised the gay bars that night to celebrate.
Andy ground out gothic horrors like Torture Dungeon (1970); Guru, The Mad Monk (1970) starring Judy Israel; The Body Beneath (1970) and the riotously titled The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972). The documentary is a fascinating look back at Milligan’s life and films. It even includes Andy Milligan’s acting appearances on early live TV dramas (one even alongside Leslie Nielsen). Playwright Donald Kvares compared Andy Milligan to “an American Bunuel,” and said of his films: “They have this dark funky power- the gutter and blood and stink of hell, but at the same time a kind of sadness or poignancy…”
The Degenerates (1967) was recently discovered in a Bussels vault. It’s Milligan’s futuristic sci-fi/horror film about three soldiers wandering through the woods looking for other survivors after a nuclear blast. They come to a farmhouse filled with loony sisters in burlap dresses lorded over by the psychotic, man-hating Violet (Bryarly Lee). Violet takes a whip to her sisters when they cozy up to the soldiers and keeps them separated. She lets the men sleep in a filthy shed. “If it’s good enough for the animals…” It all ends in lunacy and murder. Filmed in a decrepit farmhouse in Woodstock, it includes an interview with Laura Cunningham about how she got to be in the film and the two weeks shoot in Woodstock. There is also Jimmy McDonough introducing the film at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. That disc includes Compass Rose (1968) about wealthy Miss Gloria (Anne Linden), living on blood transfusions and injections sleeping with an off-off-Broadway aspiring actor/gigolo Dewey (Anthony Moscini– who spends much of the film in his underwear). There’s a coughing man (Gerald Jacuzzo), a kooky girl in only a negligee (Candy Hammond), and thank God for subtitles because the sound is muffled and often completely incomprehensible. This is basically the work print of an uncompleted film so it’s difficult to know what the hell it would have been. There’s nudity, a psychedelic party a suicide, and even a pie fight. Some of it was shot at the Caffe Cino (called the Café Fuerer- or “F.A.G.” in the film). It’s really, really bizarre. But it does gives you an inkling of the kind of crackpot theatrical presentations Milligan put on then. Author Stephen Thrower has a fascinating dissection of Milligan’s Avant-garde experiment.
The third disc includes Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me! (1968) It comes from an extremely rare 35mm release print archived at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and restored by Severin Films for this Blu-ray. “No One Man Could Satisfy Her!” was the poster. It’s about the ditzy, alcohol-guzzling, mother and wife- Jean (Natalie Rogers), who lives with an abusive husband Stan (Don Williams) in a cramped tenement apartment. She begins an affair with her husband’s best friend Eddie (Peter Ratray). But when Eddie grows distant, she hooks him up with her husband’s sister Ellen (Joy Martin), who is much more puritanical about sex. Still, Eddie proposes to Ellen and Jean tries to throw a monkey wrench into the nuptials. Stan violently snaps when her neglect of her son leads to tragedy. A family melodrama gone berserk with endless screaming harangues and the most outrageous of endings. There are terrific new interviews with lead actress Natalie Rogers and actor Peter Ratray on the filming plus an interview with Andy Milligan expert Alex DiSanto. Author Stephen Thrower gives a great overview of the film and cast. The co-feature on this disc is another unfinished film by Milligan– House of Seven Belles (1979), a film set in the Antebellum South, a heavily costumed period piece, using many of the cast of his last film Legacy of Blood (1978) shot at a dilapidated mansion near Tottenville, Staten Island. It’s about a curdled Southern family where the female siblings scheme and berate and humiliate the men in the film. Not that the men don’t deserve it. And typically, there are plenty of grisly murders too. As Stephen Thrower sums it up- it’s all about the “frocks” that Milligan created for the movie. “Something in Andy Milligan snapped in the late 1970s when he made this movie and he just went for it.”
