FrightFest review- The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan
In the 1960s, arch-outsider writer-director/cinematographer/editor Andy Milligan followed up a career in innovative fringe theatre by directing a string of low-rent movies (some now lost) in and around New York (his home turf was Staten Island) – with a 1969-70 spell in the UK which yielded five features.
Opinions differ as to Milligan’s worth as an auteur, but there’s no denying he was he was a distinctive and unusual filmmaker. Several of his films are too impressive to be written off as inept schlock. My picks for his best works are Seeds, Nightbirds, The Man With 2 Heads and Fleshpot on 42nd Street, which balance exploitation with actual underground-style dramatic ambition. However, more typical of his slipshod grindhouse style is The Ghastly Ones (1968) – which features his often-reused gruesome props, reams of convoluted soap-opera-dipped-in-venom dialogue delivered by a mixed-ability cast, hand-held in-close camerawork, recycled plot elements from vintage horror films, ill-fitting but somehow authentic costumes, and non sequitur detours into ranting misogyny and misanthropy. Also present and correct are a set of Milligan character archetypes: twisted matriarchs wrecking the mental health of the next generation of ghastlies, sadistic domineering male bullies, female masochists, gibbering snaggle-toothed hunchbacks, feeble and marginalised romantic leads, victims reduced to prop severed hands and borrowed lumps of rotten meat.
This documentary – put together by the folks at Vinegar Syndrome who issued a major Milligan BluRay box set – features some surviving Milligan collaborators (actors Gerald Jacuzzo and Hope Stansbury) but also has extensive input from writers who have gone beyond the call of duty in chronicling his life and work, biographer Jimmy McDonough (The Ghastly One) and critic Stephen Thrower. McDonough’s book – especially in the revised edition from FAB Press – is liable to be the last word on Milligan, but he takes the opportunity here to comment on a few things he couldn’t do in print, notably the fact that Andy would have been furious to read some of the things he wrote. Distributor publicist Sam Sherman is on hand to rehash his Milligan comments (‘it has ones in it and it is ghastly’) but is still not convinced – and there will still be a great many who just can’t see what it is about the work which commands attention. It may be that Milligan’s story matters as much as if not more than his films, and everyone here gives him a certain respect – while admitting that he could personally be extraordinarily self-destructive and careless of other folks’ physical and emotional safety.
Besides snippets of the films – which don’t do the works justice, since it’s often the repetition and insistence of the movies which give them power – this valuably includes extracts from some 1950s live television shows which featured Milligan as a young, buck-toothed actor (in one, he clashes with Leslie Nielsen) … along with a few subtitled audio clips from a rare recorded interview with the man himself.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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