The Ghastly Ones (1968)

Andy Milligan may be one of those filmmakers who compel our interest for everything but their films. Notoriously cheap and terrible, Milligan’s flicks inspired even the usually trash-tolerant Michael J. Weldon to write “If you’re an Andy Milligan fan there’s no hope for you.”

This is the trailer for Milligan’s The Ghastly Ones, which got none-too-glowingly name-checked in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre: “The work of morons with cameras.” At the other end of the spectrum resides Rob Craig at horrorwood.com: “An amazing piece of rotgut celluloid considered by many Milli-fans to be his masterpiece.” I haven’t seen the movie, but the trailer sure makes me want to.

“With some of the most hideous tortures and heinous crimes ever shown on the motion picture screen!” Outside of the faux trailers in Grindhouse (and I’d bet Eli Roth had a good look at the reveal at 00:38 before making his Thanksgiving trailer), you just don’t hear boasts like that any more. The trailer certainly packs most or all of its gory money shots into its 96 seconds. We also get to meet various weirdos, like Liz, who gets off on being raped, and Colin, who eats live rabbits. It’s as if John Waters had dropped acid and remade The Old Dark House. This is an object lesson in how to sell a bargain-basement exploitation film.

Despite Weldon’s assertion, Milligan does have his fans nowadays, people who find the singularly twisted worldview of his films fascinating and the sordid details of his life (as detailed in Jimmy McDonough’s The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld Of Filmmaker Andy Milligan) even more so. I feel like I ought to get familiar with his work, but then I remember all the Bergman and Antonioni and Kurosawa I still have yet to catch up with. I’ll say this, though — I’d probably rather watch a terrible Andy Milligan film than a terrible Garry Marshall film.

~ by Rob Gonsalves on September 7, 2007.