THE GHASTLY ONE: THE SEX-GORE NETHERWORLD OF FILMMAKER ANDY MILLIGAN, by Jimmy McDonough.

Old Andy Milligan is dead and gone, wasted away to nothing by AIDS, even more than that he is almost totally forgotten, I think. Even in this brave new world of DVD, which has become more or less like the video revolution of the early 80s, Milligan is a marginal figure at best, with only a couple of his movies released to DVD. Admittedly there can't be much of a market for Milligan, as even the slummingest cinephile has probably been convinced long ago to steer clear of Milligan's legacy. The tag-line that usually follows Milligan is "World's Worst Filmmaker!!!" as if such bullshit means anything now. Is he worse than George Lucas? Has anyone seen the new Star Wars"movies"? Every time I go to the movies now I feel ashamed to be there. I feel, as Milligan said after seeing Tough Guys Don't Dance"violated". For every Mission: Impossible 2, every Spider-Man, every Adam Sandler "comedy" I feel dirtier and dirtier, I feel like I'm doing nothing more than contributing to the terminal decline of movie-going culture in general. Even up to a few years ago the local revival house in San Diego regularly screened oddball releases, the local art houses even had a yearly poster sale. Now of course that's long gone, the revival theaters have been bought out by this month's corporate powerhouse, and they all end up showing basically the same movies. The big 2001: A Space Odyssey revival? Gets here seven months late for three days. Now all we get are the scraps that the other major cities wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. The sort of fag shit that would've made even an old faggot like Milligan blush-coming out in ABC Town/Afterschool special is the best we can do. Hell, I don't mind fag epics, but 99% of the ones here are the bullshit kind, syrupy quasi-sitcoms with a bunch of hideous drag queens camping it up. Gays are now no longer marginalized and so need bland, formulaic entertainment too. Milligan would be turning over in his pauper's grave if he weren't hemmed in by so many other bodies. Milligan was the old-guard of exploitation, he fell into the business by accident, he shot an "underground" movie about the NYC bathhouse scene called Vapors, with a script written by a woman (one that Milligan himself dismissed) that became a hit in the shady world of mid-60s underground festivals (and no doubt the cock shot at the end didn't hurt matters). Milligan met up with bottom of the barrel producer William Mishkin and set out on his exploitation odyssey, his primary reputation in the business being that he could pump out films cheaper than anybody else.

Working on the most ridiculous of budgets (his biggest ever budget was around $30,000, most hovered in the $10,000 range) Milligan churned out sex movies, most of which are now lost to posterity. Titles like The Promiscuous Sex, The Naked Witch, Depraved!, The Degenerates, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me!, and so on have vanished, thanks mostly to producer Mishkin’s son Lew, who apparently destroyed most of these films to avoid paying the storage costs. Such is life in the bottom rungs of the exploitation business. I guess its ironic, considering the sheer amount of shit released by these fly-by-night outfits in the 60s, that Milligan's movies, that are presumably more interesting than the usual girls-and-guys-grope-like-tards epics that line the catalogs of Something Weird Video and other outfits should be gone forever, but not too many people seem broken up about this, least of all Milligan, who seemed to have a profound indifference towards his "art". If the Marquis de Sade wanted his grave to be unmarked, Milligan went one further; espousing the wish that he be cremated and his friends devour his ashes! In a business of two-bit conmen, Milligan was one hell of a character.

Milligan popped out on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1929 in St. Paul Minnesota. The proverbial Army brat, his pops was a mild-sort (or so it seemed) who moved the family around a bit, as is the lot of any professional military man. But looming larger over Milligan's life was his mother, Marie Gladys, a woman whom Milligan despised so much he yelled out "she's a bitch!" at her funeral. Milligan described her as overbearing, jealous, prone to psychotic fits of rage. Milligan tells a story of his mother causing a row over a waitress who had done some sewing for young Milligan and his father. "Who's this whore you're with?" Milligan calling her a "crazy woman" seems the understatement. Not surprisingly, as Milligan tells it, the woman was dead-set against his artistic leanings, calling it "sissy shit". Considering Milligan's seemingly life-long, latent homosexuality, it might not be too surprising he went into the Navy (to the consternation of his Army father). After the Navy Milligan ended up in various show-biz routines before trying his hand at acting, by his own admission appearing in commercials, live TV, etc. Milligan talks of the young James Dean and points out he was a shit. Milligan designed dresses for hoity toity New Yorkers, and proved himself to be a rather unstable dressmaker, under the name "Raffine" he would tear up dresses and throw out customers who complained about his wares. Andy was certainly an artiste, and lucky for him he found his milieu in Café Cino, the genesis of off-Broadway theater in America.

Biographies tend to be two-faced, while they are aiming to tell us about this person or that, they end up being more about the era of said luminary. McDonough really covers himself in that respect, giving us a rundown of both mid-to-late 60s underground theater, and late 60s and early 70s exploitation filmmaking. I'm indifferent to the subject. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. It's a cliché now, isn't it? We know how the story will end. Café Cino for a while becomes the apex of avant-guard theater in New York (and by extension, America, of course), and it seems every screw-up, every oddball, every marginal character in New York gravitates there. Most provocative is maybe Andy Milligan himself, who's brash and violent plays electrified his audiences. It might not be surprising to pause, as is customary, and discuss Milligan's sex-life. Hardly a discriminating homosexual, he boasted (if that's the right word) of thousands of conquests by the end of his life, but on top of that (and maybe with more bearing on his movies) Milligan was a dyed in the wool sadist. The man obviously enjoyed pushing people beyond their limits, pushing them into committing real violence on stage, pushing pushing pushing, maybe that's the real sadist; not the stereotype of the misfit pushing pins into bound and gagged females, but a sociopath, a manipulator, he'd rather see one person slap another than do it himself. Then again God only knows exactly Milligan got up to in private life, we are given glimpses: Milligan beating the holy hell out of a pick up, Milligan tearing into a random drag queen on the street. McDonough insinuates things, but doesn't really back it up, maybe he's not too sure one way or another, or senses some bullshit from Milligan. I have a hard time believing in the slightly winking story of Milligan knowing "too much" about a grisly murder in England, but…well that's posterity for you. At any rate, Milligan gravitates around this little world for awhile, then leaves as things go out of control, people drop dead one by one, it all goes to hell in a hand basket as the drugged out Warhol con crew arrive.

Milligan, we are told, was not a pleasant man. Misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-human, Puritanical. No one measured up to him. He ranted and raved and screamed at cast and crew (what minimal crew he might have had) he made few friends and a plethora of enemies, yet people continued to come back to him, time and again, the sadist always finds his masochist. Of course Milligan himself was drawn into similar patterns himself, especially in his relations with the Mishkins. Both William, and later his son, Lew, were notoriously tight with Milligan, giving him almost nothing, in fact the only kind words directed at them are that they where "honest". William was a movie guy while Lew was a money guy, Milligan put up with William, but his screaming matches with Lew were apparently something to behold.

Milligan gleefully, or humorlessly, its hard to tell, kept up with the times. As his brand of low-brow sexploitation grew stale (especially as hardcore porn became popular, a genre that the scrupulously anti-sex Milligan was uninterested in) Milligan switched over to horror and gore. It is here that the primary evidence of Milligan's work is located, since all of these films (more or less) exist today. Starting with his first horror film, The Ghastly Ones (1968), Milligan's horror films are fairly formulaic: period piece settings, melodramatic plotlines, grainy handheld photography, and periodic outbursts of primitive violence, mostly directed at various mannequin parts. H.G. Lewis Milligan was not. But this is hardly the point, Lewis' movies were all about the gore, beyond that there is absolutely nothing to recommend them, the canned music, the lackluster acting, the passionless direction, Lewis, like his producer Dave Friedman, was a typical hack of the period, more huckster than filmmaker. Milligan though, he was aiming at something else. If Lewis is the most overrated exploitation filmmaker ever, Milligan is the most underrated. Dubious distinctions like Worst Ever don't mean much and Milligan had something that Lewis and most other exploitation directors lacked: a viewpoint. What exactly goes on in Lewis' films? The villain tears the guts out of various characters, the situations are hyper normal, bland, everything is shot in perpetually sunny, ghastly areas of tract housing, the violence is just window dressing, it lacks effect because the situation we are viewing is so typical, so boring. I guess it would be the theatrical background that Milligan had, or maybe simply his "artistic" temperament, but in Milligan it is the people. As Milligan tells McDonough over and over, the films of the 30s and 40s were the best, ground out one after the other, but they had heart, they had character. The women bitched and the men slinked about, they weren't "real" people, they were drawn out caricatures, usually ridiculously so. Milligan's people are the same, they are not meant to be some sort of neo-realist portrait of the Working Man (Milligan, I think, was probably dismissive of politics in general, though we are never really given an inkling of his political views) they are archly drawn stereotypes: the scheming patriarch, the evil sister, the kind freak, the homicidal priest, the weak father and so on. Generally in Milligan the women can hold their own against the men and then some. In Lewis women are stupid weaklings who need the protection of their men, in Milligan they are bitchy schemers, who ruthlessly go after what they want and to hell with anyone in their way. This is almost a one eighty from the typical exploitation filmmaker, who simply wants to reassure everybody that women are only weak little flowers that always need the big husky chap with HERO emblazoned on his forehead to save them. Milligan might have despised women, but he could envision them as human beings at least. It speaks of our immaturity to think that women are not capable of being sadistic and cruel and bitchy, we've been spoon-fed both macho bullshit about "weak" women, and feminist bullshit about "peaceful" women, that someone like Milligan is either a shrieking woman hater or an outrageous nut. Some of the worst people I've met have been women. Some of the worst people I've met have been men. Go figure. Milligan was a realist, women are bitches and men are assholes, and everybody wants only what they want: fuck the next guy.

As truly bad as most of Milligan's films are, it is this viewpoint that draws me to him. The crudeness of his technique is easy to overlook. It is the personality, the unremitting, dour vision of mankind that makes Milligan so unique. Stanley Kubrick seems positively pollyannish next to Milligan. The quality of his films is up and down, and since Milligan can't even really be said to possess a "cult" there can never be any agreement about his works. McDonough dismisses The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! while I think it is one of Milligan's better works. He glosses over Carnage, but that was as close as Milligan came to a "professional" film (and it is undeniably entertaining, if ridiculous). He raves about Bloodthirsty Butchers but that put me to sleep, likewise The Body Beneath, slow and dull even for Milligan. I desperately want to see Seeds and Fleshpot on 42nd Street now, even if I have to shell out $20 for a Something Weird videotape that will no doubt take six months to get to me. Milligan is like that, he gets under your skin and can do something to you. You say to yourself, "this is shit" but you come back again and again. Milligan has always been so damn mysterious, the Overlook Encyclopedia claims that the almost totally unseen Blood was Milligan's last film before moving into porno, which is patently false, Milligan in no uncertain terms was uninterested in porno. Milligan fans are an even rarer bunch. But the oft quoted Michael Weldon quip, "if you're an Andy Milligan fan, there's no hope for you" should be taken at face value. Its true, there is no hope for us, we're at the last stop, Lewis has historical value, Russ Meyer has mainstream support (despite the barren heartlessness of his work), John Waters can publicize himself to the ends of the Earth, Ed Wood is loved for the wrong reasons, but is accessible, and so on. But Milligan? That weirdo fag and his dreary, theatrical little films? If you like him it says more about you than him. Maybe we Milligan fans are similar types, misanthropic assholes, bitter and mean. The sleazy, crazy SOBs from Milligan's films are more real and entertaining to me than the cardboard cutouts of Tarentino, or any other trendy hack will ever be.

But the lot of a bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation filmmaker is a tenuous one, and Milligan's existence was more tenuous than most. He traveled around making films, but slowly the market started to dry up, he ended up back in the barely legitimate theater, first in the hinterlands of Staten Island, where he lived in a haunted house that was reputed to be haunted (and, in on of the more bizarre episodes from his life, married one of his leading ladies, Candy Hammond, for what he deemed was, “the press”, to which one witness replied, “what press Andy?”) pulling out dingy production in a dingy theater in the dingiest possible part of NYC. It seems pretty clear that Milligan was descending into his own little unpleasant world. Whatever drove Milligan managed to keep him afloat in situations that would despair most people. Directing plays in theaters that featured dead junkies in the entrance would be depressing for most people, but Milligan seemed to thrive on the streets, sleaze kept his blood going. Logically then, Milligan ended up in LA, full of ambition it seems, but less and less capable of pulling anything off. A dress shop failed, and eventually he ended back up doing films, this time back with arch-nemesis Lew Mishkin. These final films are quite different from his earlier New York efforts, as McDonough points out, they are full of eager, but bland Z-level SAG players who seem barely able to keep up with the pitiful lines they are given, the starkness of his New York films was replaced by, if not a sunny optimism, then a lighter touch, as they are comedies of a sort, or at least self-consciously campy horror/comedies, of these I personally have only seen Monstrosity and it isn’t nearly as bad as McDonough would have it; it is a train wreck of a movie, but so weirdly, stupidly fascinating that it remains just as watchable as any of his earlier films. It's hard to get too worked up about movies destined to end up on video. Surgikill, though by all accounts is unwatchable, as was his remake of his lost 1971 film The Weirdo, the main difference being that the remake found Milligan growing even more cruel and sadistic towards his actors. At any rate the whole scene at that time was depressing. Those movies are better off ignored.

Maybe it's not that important anyway, since Milligan was on the way out. His long-time lover, Wayne Keeton a semi-literate hustler from Louisiana, had died of AIDS, and it wasn't long before Milligan himself started suffering from the disease. The final parts of McDonough's narrative are too depressing for words. The pathetic machinations of Milligan's life are hard to take, but Milligan was Milligan, and even at the end managed to be an asshole, cheating the man who basically took care of him in his last days, actor John Miranda (Bloodthirsty Butchers) out of his will. One side of the mouth says, "what a shit" the other laughs uproariously, at least he didn't go soft at the end. Milligan’s effects were sold off at a garage sale by the cheated Miranda, and McDonough himself had pawned Milligan’s camera and movieola, to fund his long-running attempted biography of an unnamed Major Celebrity (possibly Neil Young, I have no idea and am not very interested), with a friend pointedly observing that “I don’t think you’ll get too much for the ashes.” No ceremony for Milligan, no ashes, already forgotten he was dumped into a mass pauper's grave, McDonough tells us that 42nd Street, the center of Milligan's filmmaking universe so many years ago died too. Bought out by Disney, crazy ass baseheads replaced by pristine middle-class bullshit. Why be sad, that world was already dead long ago really. Sleaze was co-opted, now Hollywood regularly puts out the sort of shit they railed against in past lives. Mainstream movies are thousands of times more violent than anything HG Lewis could ever do. Porn is quaintly nostalgic now, shown regularly in revival houses, the once taboo of John Holmes' cock isn't even trendy, it's no different than bellbottoms and ugly leisure suits. Nothing is really "dangerous" anymore; Hollywood even gives us bland movies about porn and snuff films. Once outrageous John Waters is blander than this months' teen gross out epic. Kids don't rebel anymore, its all been done, all that's left is to kill, but that hardly constitutes rebellion. Our world is nothing like Milligan's, nobody can be freewheeling, nobody can buy haunted Staten Island mansions for pennies on the dollar, our world is expensive, bland, controlled. We're the spies now. Milligan's brand of misanthropy, anger, and realism isn't correct anymore, self-important gays look down on his type, studious college students could never understand, since we are all so terribly equal, and besides, anyone who shows too much of the old “antisocial” will be immediately doped up and turned into your friendly neighborhood zombie. Fuck you… maybe.

McDonough doesn't leave us hanging. Long after Milligan turned to dust he traveled to St. Paul to scope things out. More insinuations, Andy drummed out of the Navy as Section 8, also one of his, perhaps autobiographical, plays, though he denied being discharged as a Section 8 vociferously. Coming home bloodied and battered one night without a word of explanation (some fag-bashing perhaps? Made a pass at the wrong sailor, or maybe he asked for the beating?), and more, the specter of molestation, from both his mother and father. His stepbrother gleefully admits to being a pederast with unquenchable tastes; Milligan being beaten to a pulp by his sister's gruff husband after Milligan attacks her (Milligan it seems, liked and maybe even identified with his stepmother, a Japanese woman, stranger in a strange land and all that, Milligan goes ballistic when he thinks his sister is "interfering" the sister though, all these years later, professes an interest in her brother, and who knows, maybe she’s watched a few of his movies and feels a tinge of pride for her crazy little brother). Daddy was impotent, pathetically, his second wife's only sexual encounter being with an anonymous serviceman that produced her illegitimate daughter, the ultimate Milliganesq outcast, from both Japan and America. Was Milligan molested? We can never know, Milligan was tight-lipped about himself to a strange, obsessive degree. Did he want to simply be "mysterious" or was his past simply too painful to recount? Milligan himself was a great advocate of opening one’s hurts and injuries to artistic scrutiny, and, as a quote from one of Milligan’s plays goes, “for God’s sake, charge admission!” Milligan's own homosexuality seems to obviously come from pederastic encounters with God knows who, Milligan himself claimed to have been fondled by an Army officer as a 12 year old. Was that Army officer his father? His stepbrother? What of his mother? Did her smother love cross over into the physical realm? Daddy couldn't get it up but Andy junior? No wonder Milligan was so fucked up in the head, who wouldn't be. The incest present in most of his films suddenly takes on a deeper meaning now. Maybe all of this somehow explains his sadism, but that would take some sort of Freudian bullshit session to figure it all out, obviously Andy had the sort of screwed-up Midwestern existence that most people have, crazy-ass parents, fuck up siblings, not everyone turns into a half-crazy queer filmmaker with a thing for rough trade, but such are the vagaries of life. Milligan himself claimed that a deformed pinky came as an accident of birth, his little hands clenched into fists, he was “born angry”, and the doctors deformed him to make him right. More than that, there is the idea that maybe Milligan's mother wasn't a monster, she smothered him, supported his art, while his cold father thought him sissy. In Milligan's mind the roles reversed, mom the monster dad the good guy. Was he a natural woman hater? What was it? Or was he the perfect Wildeian, killing what he loved in order to purge himself of all human feeling an emotion, doing so to avoid hurt; now the story becomes almost Wagnerian, Milligan, renouncing love, forging himself in the furnaces of hate and rage. Not surprising he had no relationship with his family. His father wanted to see him before he died, but Milligan had vanished, no yearly Christmas cards from little Andy. Its all a depressing little story, isn't it? Not a movie, just a bunch of lonely screwed up people. Milligan a monster? Certainly. We're all monsters, Milligan didn't make any bones about it, in a world of conmen and bullshitters he stood out and said, "yes, I'm a real piece of work alright". In a world of priests who fuck little boys, and wholesome politicians who drop one-ton bombs onto the heads of starving children for the express reason of seeing their poll numbers climb a percentage point over night, Milligan never once pretended to be what he wasn't. Why is that such a terrible thing now? That's the question Milligan raises: I'm an asshole, we're all dirty conniving bastards, he says, your reaction to his life and his films depends on what you want to admit about the world. Maybe. Or maybe it doesn't really matter, its much easier to call it trash and move on.