BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (1970)
THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS (1972)
THE RATS ARE COMING - THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE (1972)
"Their prime cuts were curiously erotic ... but thoroughly brutal!" Apparently "sadism was just an appetiser" for Andy Milligan's BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS.
THE three Andy Milligan pictures under consideration here all typify the filmmaker's "horror and hate" ethos, showing disdain for family, heritage and both sexual and working relationships. His take on Sweeney Todd, BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS, can be described as his most entertaining London-based release, and in true Tod Slaughter style, is filled with grisly details and unnecessary melodrama. Todd (John Miranda) brutally murders customers in his barbershop, with the corpses passed on to neighbour Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary). With the help of "head" butcher Tobias (Milligan's English mainstay Berwick Kaler), Lovett fills her prize pies with body parts. Lovetts’ innocent employee Johanna (Annabella Wood) and her fiancé, sailor Jarvis (Michael Cox), are just two who get caught up in the convoluted shenanigans.
BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS starts as it means to go on, where Todd slits the throat of an Irishman, then uses a meat cleaver to hack off a hand to take the victim’s ruby ring. Later, a couple discover a female breast (complete with nipple) in a pie, and Mr Busker (William Barrel) whispers to Mrs Lovett the items he and his sister would like to find inside their next purchase. The picture benefits from strong performances - particularly a haunting Kaler, and Wood excels with a Madeline Smith-like purity - but basically it is one unhinged argument after another.
Filmed as DR JEKYLL AND MR BLOOD, THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS was chosen as the title to ride the coattails of AIP hits such as THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT and THE THING WITH TWO HEADS.
Milligan's strangely static version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, THE MAN WITH 2 HEADS, credits the source novelist as Robert Louis Stephenson and opens with a totally unrelated scene of what one assumes to be a Jack the Ripper murder. Dr William Jekyll (Dennis DeMarne) believes that evil has a specific location within the brain and can therefore be isolated and removed. Working alone in the lab, Jekyll's assistant Smithers (Kaler) accidentally knocks over a glass of water, obliterating Jekyll’s antidote notes. Smithers attempts to write over the impressions, recreating the formula. Jekyll, frustrated by the non-delivery of lab rats and unaware his antidote is now ineffectual, tests the formula on himself, transforming into Danny Blood, a brutal sadist who torments and abuses prostitutes – taking particular interest in Soho resident April (Julia Stratton).
The movie sees Milligan particularly barbaric towards women. "There’s nothing a man likes more than to come home to a cigar, his beautiful wife, and dog," Blood tells April, "only you’re not so beautiful, and I don’t have a dog" (this precedes his command to April to bark, then puts out his cigar on the nape of her neck). As the madness begins to bleed into Jekyll’s day-to-day life, he cruelly and misogynistic-ally addresses a quiet female student, Victoria (Jennifer Summerfield), in front of her peers: "what makes you think you should be a doctor, standing up there as if you know what you’re talking about? All women should be in bed… to be used."
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A more apt title for Milligan's English swansong would be THE RATS ARE COMING TO PAD OUT THE PICTURE - THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE EVENTUALLY.
THE RATS ARE COMING - THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE attempts to do for werewolves what THE BODY BENEATH did for vampires. But due to the success of the rodent-themed WILLARD, sequences were added to increase the running time (one of which has the real killing of a rat). Set in 1899, a lycanthropic clan is headed by Papa Mooney (Douglas Pfair), who lives in a country manor with children Phoebe (Joan Ogden), Mortimer (Noel Collins), sadistic Monica (Hope Stansbury) and subhuman son Malcolm (Kaler). When his "normal" daughter from a different mother returns home from medical school, Diana (Jackie Skarvellis) - together with new husband Gerald (the godawful Ian Innes) - the family starts to unravel for good, including the revelation that the curse was not due to an animal bite, rather Phoebe's incestuous union with Papa.
Festering in their estate, the Mooney's are your quintessential Milligan doomed family. Jimmy McDonough, in his Milligan biography The Ghastly One, describes the picture as "by far the weakest effort from Milligan’s English sojourn," and only Stansbury's bitchy psychopath is of note. Started under the title THE CURSE OF THE FULL MOON, the film is ineptly bland and talkative, and like all of the filmmaker's output characters seem genuinely beyond hope, a reflection of Milligan's wider wounded soul.