“If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you,” wrote Michael J. Weldon in his 1983 cult-movie reference book The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film; “the work of morons with cameras,” wrote Stephen King of Milligan’s The Ghastly Ones in 1981. Between the release of Milligan’s first film in 1965 and his death (from complications due to AIDS) in 1991, these two sentences represented not just the consensus on but also, more or less, the complete scope of critical response to his work. As a writer/director/cameraman/editor, he worked mostly in two disreputable genres—horror and sexploitation—providing bottom-of-the-bill slot-fillers for Times Square theatres, and working with budgets that rarely even approached $10,000. What reputation he had was largely built on his horror films, or really their titles: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1971), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), Torture Dungeon (1970), The Man with Two Heads (1972), The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972), and others.
Even while acknowledging that Milligan toiled heroically with impossible budgets and under discouraging conditions, it should be immediately conceded that his worst films (which tend to be his horror efforts) are hard to defend except as camp. To watch is to be confronted with an exhaustingly talky screenplay, badly rendered gore effects, a cast of amateurs dressed in (1973), a character study of a Times Square sex worker, is the product of some kind of artist. The horror films are funny for how they fail to meet the accepted standards of the genre, but the sexploitation films resonate as authentic portraits of the gutter—by the gutter, for the gutter.
