The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan
by Jimmy McDonoughAcappella, 375 pp., $26.95
Grindhouse filmmaker Andy Milligan died of AIDS in 1990 after completing some 29 movies, none of which played at your local multiplex. How could they? Filled with lurid sex, hyperviolent sadomasochism, and shocking, if poorly lit, scenes of degradation, misogyny, and graveyard humor, they were direct descendants of the Thétre du Grand Guignol and schlocker Ed Wood, less a diversion than an outright challenge. Milligan, a “cantankerous provocateur” who came to film by way of his Christopher Street dress boutique, was an important part of New York’s semilegendary Café Cino theatre scene (off-off-Broadway), staging Jean Genet’s Deathwatch and Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast with an eye toward shocking the audience (frequently composed of Café Cino regulars, drag queens, pederasts, and junkies) out of their seats and into conniption fits. By McDonough’s account, it worked, and Milligan took up the camera in 1965 with Vapors, ending in 1988 with Surgikill, aka Screwball Hospital Central. In between, he alternated between Warholian cinéma vérité and outright crap. What makes McDonough’s accounting of Milligan’s bad, bad life so interesting, and dare I say fun, is taking it in the context of its place in history. Arriving on the scene at the height of the Beat Gen’s raucous poetry party and foreshadowing The Factory by a couple of years, Milligan blew minds for a living, and not much of a living at that. Sex, gore, art, and death, it was all the same to Milligan. And you thought John Waters was a wild man.
This article appears in December 28 • 2001.