Talk about pissin' in some Wheaties
Thursday, May. 08, 2008 at 8:53 a.m.
Recently seen on the Valkyrie�s Screen of Bad Cinema:
The Ghastly Ones: Ghastly. Yes.
Seeds of Sin: Seeds of Shit, more like.
I should really be more fair, although I�m not sure why. Both of these film were written and directed by Andy Milligan, an auteur of the late sixties who continued to make films featuring his favorite subjects, violence and sex, until his death in the early nineties. What is rather interesting about his films is that they tend to be in period costume . . . ! The Ghastly Ones (and I�m not quite sure who exactly the ghastly ones were supposed to be in the film, so I�m accusing everyone even remotely involved, including the little rabbit) takes place post-Civil War and is a bevy of crinolines. Three daughters and their husbands are required by the old dead man�s will to take a 3 day weekend in �sexual freedom� in the old man�s house, but then everyone gets picked off with various farm implements inbetween softcore sex romps. Seeds of Sin is more or less the same movie (it was even filmed in the same damn house with the most ugly wallpaper) but it�s more of a family reunion chock full of incest, suicide, and one major bitch of a matriarch in a horrible wig who screams every syllable of her dialogue.
But like most other auteurs of the underground cinema ilk, Andy Milligan�s movies are all labors of love, chock full of family members (in particular his mother), made on shoestring budgets, and filmed on stock that looks like it was processed in a bathtub in an abandoned frathouse (because that was all that could be afforded). These are the kinds of movies you saw in those movie houses on 42nd Street that were too scary to actually sit down in unless you wore bicycle clips on your pants (to keep out the fleas) and sat on a tarpaulin (to keep out the god-knows-what on the seats) but now either those kinds of movie theatres don�t exist or they still exist and they�re too damn scary to even walk by on the sidewalk anymore.
So with films and filmmakers like Andy Milligan, yes, I say ghastly. I say seeds of shit. But I still love them.
Just like I love goofy pictures. By the way, how does that cereal taste, kiddo??
