The mythology of exploitation cinema has its pantheon: Doris Wishman, William G. Castle, Fred Ohlen Ray, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Sarno, Jack Hill. But if they adopted sleaze, Andy Milligan was born to it.
Well, not quite. As shown in The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, which received its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, Milligan was a pretty regular kid, a Midwest army brat who loved his father and had a strained relationship with his mother, but nothing seemingly exceptional. That he would go on to make some of the most debauched, disturbing, sordid, and brutal movies to ever play in the grindhouses of New York’s 42nd Street didn’t seem preordained. Yet hardened fans, many of whom found his films on those old Something Weird Video double-bills or rare late-night 35mm Weird Wednesday screenings, make a case for a forgotten and arguably submerged genius.
Yet even fans of his supremely sleazy career as a filmmaker may learn more than they expect from this new biodocumentary co-produced by Severin Films (who also released the expansive The Dungeon of Andy Milligan box set). Co-directors Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson explore his early career as a promising TV actor and his role in helping create the very idea off-off-Broadway with his plays at avant-garde theatre hangouts Caffe Cino and La Mama, before his move into underground cinema where he embraced the sickness, finally leaping fully into horror in 1968 with The Ghastly Ones.
The Degenerate makes a somewhat convincing case that, somewhere behind the schlock, Milligan had a kinship to fellow confrontationalists Kenneth Anger and Paul Morrissey. Yet while his debut short, Vapors, had a raw authenticity to its depiction of bathhouse culture it could only get screen time in the grindhouses of New York’s 42nd Street. Similarly, his first film produced in his brief run in the UK, 1970’s Nightbirds, had a hint of the Angry Young Men and social realism about it. But his willingness to throw himself unto the more salacious end of cinema was re-enforced when his second film, Liz aka The Promiscuous Sex, got acquired by the reigning king of sexploitation, William Mishkin, who convinced Milligan to add five overtly sexual scenes to make it more marketable.
And while “sex sells” is a mantra of exploitation, the difference between Milligan and his peers like Jean Rollin, Jesús Franco, and Tinto Brass is that they weren’t happy about smut being added to their films. The same could not be said for Milligan. So the die, the talking heads suggest, was cast, and he was soon churning out an endless cavalcade of $10,000 cheapies.
True exploitation movies are a rarity. Half of them are cornball comedy-horrors with a little bit of titillation but nowhere near what the posters promised. The other half? Art house flicks with too much nudity to go mainstream. Imagine if Ingmar Bergman hadn’t made The Seventh Seal: odds are, the sexually delirious Cries and Whispers wouldn’t have been nominated for five Oscars. Instead, it would likely have been seen as high-end smut because expectation defines reception. But Bergman was Bergman, and Milligan was not. It didn’t matter how much art he tried to cram in around the edges of the exploitation equation, he was always seen as an exploitation director, nothing more.
Many of his early films are missing “as they deserve to be,” observes former distributor Sidney Sherman, one of the few of Milligan’s contemporaries appearing on screen. Directing as many as seven films a year, most of which were undeniable junk, by the mid-sixties Milligan seemingly settled into the profitable and disposable world of sex and violence. Yet it’s impossible to ignore that most of his creative decisions were somewhere between innovative and incompetent. Shot composition and convincing performances had no place in his films, even if there was plenty of space for nudity and entrails.
Moreover, The Degenerate relishes depicting how Milligan was the real deal scumbag compared to his peers (Herschell Gordon Lewis was a marketing consultant, for goodness sake). Yet it’s never quite sure how to handle his misogynistic and violent tendencies, and his seeming complete lack of concern for the safety of his cast, crew, or friends.
The fact that there’s only one woman (Hope Stansbury, who made four movies with Milligan) appearing as a talking head may be telling or just be because Time has taken its toll on the number of people who really knew Milligan. So The Degenerate depends on anecdotes from Milligan historians and fans like British film journalist Stephen Thrower, Alex DiSanto. and Jimmy McDonough, from whose book The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan much of this is taken. As a result, The Degenerate is rich in details while still leaving Milligan himself a little hazy. Even the inclusion of a previously lost interview with self-proclaimed serial killer expert and notorious liar Stéphane Bourgoin can only fill in few blanks. indeed, It’s hard to get a grasp of who Milligan was as a person, beyond some insight into his lifelong hatred of his mother.
If anything, The Degenerate is less about what Milligan did and more about the eternal suggestion of lost potential. If he’d had a budget, could he have been the next Russ Meyer, rather than flipping houses in Staten Island to finance his films? If he’d moved from Greenwich Village to Chelsea in the early ‘60s, would he have thrived under Warhol’s tutelage? If he’d stayed in experimental theatre, would he be talked of in the same terms as Wallace Shawn rather than as a tacky smut-and-gore guy? Or maybe, the truth is that whatever it was that made him fascinating would always exile him to the fringes.
The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan
Escape From Tribeca, World Premiere
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
