Two ANDY MILLIGAN monstrosities reviewed, HAL BORSKE interviewed
[Email interview with Andy Milligan regular Hal Borske late 2002; both reviews and interview are previously unpublished]
Andy’s first period gore film after a string of no-budget sexploitation features is real cinematic delirium. Imagine a Victorian drawing room melodrama rewritten by a native of a Parisian bedlam with an addiction to ether and sodomy, the scenery painted in fresh blood with animal carcasses, and roles played by speed freaks with a Joan Crawford fixation. Mommie Dearest with a pitchfork instead of a knitting needle. Just fucking insane. Andy’s trademark obsessions are on display - a family riddled with incest and fueled by greed, loud obnoxious characters wallowing in their own filth, the innocent freak turned corrupt by a heartless world - and wrapped up in his hurtling off-kilter camera and weird claustrophobic framing. In turn-of-the-century New York three socialite sisters, crazed hetero harpies with sex and money on their fiendish minds, are called to a reading of their father’s will. The contentious estate is to be finalized on one condition - they spend three days with their husbands (assholes, each one of them) in “sexual harmony” on the family island at Crenshaw House with the three servants including the hunchbacked, buck-toothed half-wit Colin, so that the building may experience the “married love” his heartless cold fish of a wife never allowed. To quote Waiting For Guffman: they’re all “bastard people”.
Hal with rabbit
In the film’s opening scene a cavorting young couple dressed to the hilt in their Victorian finery and clutching a ludicrous-looking parasol stumble across the island for a clandestine picnic, and are set upon by the crazed Colin, played with foaming gusto by Hal - picture a bedraggled postman on a rampage, or a post-prison Pee Wee Herman gone to seed. Out comes the meat cleaver, then “thwack”, “thwack”! Eyes pop out, limbs are torn from their sockets, and the camera lingers on the bloodied female corpse being dismembered because, let’s face it, they’re ALL Andy’s mother. When the family’s boat lands on the island, Colin’s there to meet them, chowing down on a rancid bunny (see Hal’s interview for the real story) in front of the suitably horrified party.
The rabbit soon turns up staining the eldest sister’s mattress, and their door is daubed with a bloody “X”. Poor housekeeping, they ponder, or a portend to impending doom? The husbands and soon-to-be-headless middle sister then are dispatched one by one by a hooded assassin, complete with hump (or is it?) before a the family’s dark secret is revealed in a gloriously absurd, over-theatrical Grand Guignol finale. Its pre-MPAA butchery is astonishingly graphic: there’s a memorable death by pitchfork, cleaved skull spraying its fake contents along the stairwell wallpaper, and a trip to the woodshed which ends in getting sawn in half and disemboweled. Camp Grotesque, Milligan style, and for all its blood-red trickery and overwrought skullduggery, my favorite of Andy’s oeuvre.
Hal Borske on The Ghastly Ones: “The Ghastly Ones is a classic example of ‘extensions’. The point of the original is that the retarded Colin is completely innocent. He hasn't, or wouldn’t, kill anybody. Andy's bitch mother is the real culprit (and turns out to be Colin/Andy's mother as well). Someone (Miskin) wanted more blood and sooner - so logic be fucked, Andy had to write and shoot the opening murder of those two. I think the opening murders turned out well (and we got to eat the hard-boiled egg ‘eyes’) - so - what the fuck, it's not Citizen Kane.
“I just remembered (and before I forget) - I couldn't afford makeup, so I smeared my face with Vaseline and threw the contents of a few ashtrays at my face. Don't try that at home, kids - I'm a trained asshole - and my face was covered with blackheads for a week afterwards.
“That's Neil Flanagan (Guru, The Mad Monk), in a nice bit in swell makeup, as Lawyer Cribbs. Neil and I were good friends (he directed my first play) and neighbors. His wife, Jackie (the wonderfully crazy, blood clot licking witch in Guru) found and gave me what would become Claude, the doggie love of my life. Neil was up for several Broadway parts and tossed that great bit off the way a baker would make a special little cake for friends. They moved to California. He died. I miss him.
“I'm reminded of a very deep hurt and disappointment. The big fire scene near the end - (I call them the ‘raisin debt’ scenes) was going to be MY BIG SCENE. The ‘gag’ of the scene is: the half-wit, misunderstood mess (me) - the only decent person in the film - discovers the truth: the bitch is his mother (hello, Gladys) AND the real killer. He runs upstairs to warn the remaining two women. He's stopped on one landing by Mommy, who throws a lit kerosene lamp at him. He catches fire but continues running up to the next landing, where he collapses. Mom pulls out a cleaver and goes up, stepping over Colin's smoking body to finish the blood bath. She raises the cleaver at the two women, but Colin revives for a moment, catches at her dress and the cleaver flies out of her hand to flip and embed in her cranium. Colin and Mom tumble down the stairs together and die - but not before Colin looks at the body and says, ‘Mother.’ Well - what the fuck did you expect? Casablanca?
“Everything went great for the shoot. We were all excited, happy to wrap and all that. The wonderful Maggie Rogers (Mother) even volunteered to do the tumble with me - she didn't have to, she WANTED to - a true pro. I was padded and hump-backed and took all the stair hits with no pain at all. We did it once with no rehearsal and it was like a wonderful dance with a loving partner. Even during the fall we were looking at each other and both were thinking, ‘Shit! This is great! This is going to look SENSATIONAL!’
“During the bit about me on fire, they wet my long hair, set up a blanket to put me out and I was to roll down the stairs alone, end up on the landing on my stomach and someone was to put out the fire. This tumble down the stairs was not meant to be seen but would allow me to dash out the flames myself and then go on to the next scene of me at the top of the stairs, still smoking. SWELL! No rehearsal - we all knew the drill - it went beautifully. Except for one thing: no flames. There wasn't enough kerosene on my hump to make anything more than what looked like me running with a candle in my hump. I insisted on the unthinkable: a SECOND take! SWELL!
Andy Milligan directs
“By this time my hair had dried and the original kerosene had soaked the hump. They added more kerosene and lit it and FWOOMP! I was REALLY on fire! I smelled my hair and clothes burning, saw the flames light up the walls, and ran like - well - like a fucking person on fire. Also, this time I was REALLY screaming. I got to the top of the stairs (ahead of schedule) and rolled back down, thinking, ‘drop and roll, asshole, drop and roll, wow! - it looked great - but drop and roll or you ain't going out Saturday night!’ I hit the mark for the guy with the blanket to put out the last flames. He was transfixed in terror and couldn't move, so Andy had to come and stomp out the last embers. I lay there thinking, ‘Oh shit, Jesus knows about all those times I jerked off and I'm going to get it now.’ Everybody else stood there in shock (mentally picking out outfits for the trial).
"But, wonder of wonders - no pain, no burns, cuts, bruises . . . just a half-moon of hair burned from the back of my head. A relief for all - and we continued shooting the rest of the ‘gag’.
“I couldn't wait to see this on film. I'm thinking that this will be my audition clip. This is my ticket to - dare I hope - Hollywood! This is my entry into the daredevils club where the big boys play. This is the fucking RENT! You have guessed where this is going - the whole fucking day's shoot was underexposed and all you see on film is some confusion with some yelling. A later insert of broomsticks and trousers on fire was perfectly exposed, of course.
“I'm not really bitter (never was) about this - shit happens. But, oh Cholly - ‘I coulda been a contendah.’”
It almost seems inconceivable in this day and age that someone would attempt the pomp and pageantry of a ye Olde England costume gore epic on a budget LESS than a cross-town ferry ride. And yet Torture Dungeon, the first film for producer William Mishkin’s newly crowned Constitution Films, is filmic proof that Milligan’s audacity knew no bounds. Cue credits, the music – straight from a 40s Gary Cooper western – swells, and a procession of medieval misfits make their way down a deserted Staten Island beach, looking for all the world like a lost borstal passion play, carrying the coffin of the newly-dead king, beheaded in the film’s opening by the prissy yet evil Duke of Norwich (“Jerremy Brooks”/Gerry Jacuzzo). The Duke, last in line to the throne and sterile to boot, hatches a plan to marry off the new king, who would plant the royal seed in the Queen’s fertile soil. Once plowed, the Queen becomes the unwilling property of the Duke, and the remaining heirs are dispatched to their untimely deaths.
Hal on Torture Dungeon: “Torture Dungeon is a ‘classic’ Andy Milligan movie, in that all the elements mentioned in ‘The Ghastly One’ (the Jimmy McDonough book) are in place... The crooked producers - Andy really got fucked on this one. He finally got them to sign a contract for a piece of the action for him. But the contract had a "third-party clause" which allowed the majority owners to sell the film (to themselves), pay off Andy next to nothing, and distribute the film while keeping ALL the profits (PLENTY). That's not bad for a few thousand dollars' investment (pissing and moaning all the way).
Hal in Andy's final film Monstrosity
“The crappy script - well, all right, I TYPED the script (and others), but was afraid that people might think I had anything to do with the ‘writing’ of that shit. The off-camera talk had more drama, comedy, tragedy, wit and life than any Milligan script (but that's true of most Hollywood scripts as well). The dialogue is Andy's, verbatim, and my real job was to take stage directions like, ‘Business’ or ‘Swirl Camera’ and type out several pages of bullshit (that was never used - Andy knew what he was going to do anyway). I had to dummy-up fifty pages (ninety minutes) of crap to show to the producers for their approval (‘More tits and ass, Andy’). The so-called romantic montages and scenes between the guy and girl was a euphemism for a mere chance to ogle her tits (‘No faggy hands reaching for the tits and ass, Andy, get somebody else's hands in there’). I was paid a dollar per page, and those fifty bucks were more than any of the actors or crew ever got. Ever. All right, I padded my parts. In this one, in a stunning role reversal, I was not the Misunderstood Hunchback Dwarf, but Just Plain Idiot. What an acting challenge! The Misunderstood Hunchback Dwarf was played by the tallest ‘dwarf’ I ever saw, but I still couldn't fit into the costume. It was a nice change for me to be festooned in upholstery fabric instead of burdened with the usual hump, and I highly recommend being festooned now and then.
“The Innocent Bystanders - those Staten Island neighbors, business owners and friends of friends who traded use of props, property, settings, material, and whatever ‘stuff’ they had, for a small part in what they led themselves into believing was Staten Island Shakespeare. Some of those ‘Brooklynese’ voices belong to really heavy Staten Island ‘muscle’. They got us the horses, the locations and a lot of - um - ‘protection’ from nosy civilians and police who had the audacity to inquire into what the fuck we were doing.
The One-Shot Actors - there's the pouty dumpling with big tits. We know about Candy from The Ghastly One, but I wonder what happened to the others. Now and then I'll see a house (in a housedress), herding around some piglets and a ‘fuck this shit’ husband - like at Disney World, and wonder, ‘Is that whatsername?’ Then there's the hapless Male Lead who always seems startled at what the hell he's doing in this ‘thing,’ with the "they never told me about this shit in acting school" look and demeanor. Maybe they went back home, married ‘Debbie’ and became decent, productive members of society.
“Jeremy Brooks (Gerry Jacuzzo), whose roles always reminded me of a priest gone rotten (or rottener). Andy had a particular hatred for religious hierarchy hypocrisy and had written a dangerous ‘turns-out-to-be-true’ script that NOBODY would touch. Gerry had a wonderful dry wit and unflappable personality. When Andy had his obligatory "one-per-production" tantrum, Gerry simply walked away - and got away with it!
“Me, Me, Me. There was no use complaining about that too tight, female Go-Go dancer's wig (Betty Page of Staten Island), so I had as much fun as I could get away with. I regret the camera didn't linger long enough to see - during the funeral cortege scene - I'm the Idiot Prince Albert, heir to the throne, helping to carry my father's coffin. You see me picking my nose, but you don't see me rolling the booger and sticking it to the bottom of the casket.”
Vapors (1965) Hal Borske: actor
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