The Rats Are Coming! the Werewolves Are Here! (1972)

 

Director: Andy Milligan

Screenplay: Andy Milligan

Cast: Hope Stansbury as Monica Mooney; Jackie Skarvellis as Diana; Noel Collins as Mortimer Mooney; Joan Ogden as Phoebe Mooney; Douglas Phair as Pa Mooney; Ian Innes as Gerald; Berwick Kaler as Malcolm Mooney; Chris Shore as Mr. Micawber

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movie) #257

 

Andy Milligan is an acquired taste. That is, undoubtedly, the most redundant of comments, but as Milligan has not been as well known in the United Kingdom, his cinema is one which comes off as a real outsider until his work is more readily available here. Now, context wise, that does not mean he is alien to the United Kingdom or its cinema. Milligan managed to get a film in the Video Nasties list, of films notorious in the early eighties on videotape, with one of the list's oldest called The Ghastly Ones (1968). Also significant is that, with The Rats Are Coming... among them, Milligan did spend a time in Britain making films, to which I can proudly say it was the British Film Institute (and ultra-fan Nicolas Winding Refn) who first made restoring and releasing his films for rediscovery cool again when Refn managed to find Nightbirds (1970), a film presumed lost. But Milligan, whose work here with The Rats Are Coming... is best described as theatre stage melodrama in the trappings of horror tropes, is a figure until recent rediscovery of infamy. His infamy in his homeland, of Something Weird Video, and rediscover is that as a real renegade from North American psychotronic cinema. His film here may begin with a man being set on fire, but conventions of horror cinema are chucked out the window for a Gothic drama.

This is melodrama to be precise, with all the hostility and shouting on display just in the first ten minutes opening one to the very misanthropic world of former off-Broadway theatre creator. A filmmaker with his own tropes, including clear issues with his own mother he evokes here, from the few films I have seen he becomes a true misanthrope with moments of light tenderness and whimsy, someone who watched in the wrong mood would be absolutely repellent to sit through, but when at the right time is compelling for the extraverted attitude to his work. It was pure catnip as a film even without this context, clearly a film made for my own tastes.

Set up as a period drama set in 1899, the patriarch of the Mooney family is ailing, and likely to die. Monica (Hope Stansbury) is a put-upon but psychologically sadistic younger daughter; the eldest sister has taken the role of the absent mother, one of two the father married who died, the first in childbirth and the second poisoned; one of the sons Mortimer (Noel Collins) is frustrated, but affable, whilst the other Malcolm (Berwick Kaler) is kept in chains with rabbits due to being more animal than man. The third and youngest sister Diana (Jackie Skarvellis) returns, in this history able to have studied medicine, despite not in reality being historically accurate to be possible, and arrives home to the disagreement to her father married to a painter from Scotland. The family are clearly not human as other people, as it comes apparent they have been cursed with lycanthropy. This aspect, just to give you an idea of what type of filmmaker Milligan was, is only ever physically depicted in the last few minutes of the film, and it does not feel like a copout either, but part of his attitude to tropes.

This is a film about talking, which is one of the things about Milligan's reputation built up for me over the years which has made him ultra divisive. He is a man, working in other genres but infamous for the horror films, who came not to make traditional horror films, but twist their tropes into his world of theatrical dramatic narratives of family hostilities, angst and moments of twisted humour. This is a cinema of some of the most deliciously bitchy dialogue you can get, not for werewolf attacks. The low budget aesthetic emphasises this, Milligan having to work on the fringe with little in most cases, with the period costumes clearly rented, and the locations having to be carefully chosen from where they could go, helped by shooting in England where these would not be difficult to locate. Fast, nasty theatrical dialogue is shot out by the actors, and the music is so dramatic this becomes soap opera's evil horror cousin.

And it is, what between multiple dead mothers and step siblings, the husband even confessing that he had a sex pervert of a father who was hung for such crimes, forced to live in a hellish religious orphanage as a result, a plot point that never becomes important but is part of Milligan fleshing his characters out with anxieties, traumas and the venom of his pen as the writer. The family themselves even in terms of being horror archetypes, inhuman figures who have lived a l-o-n-g time, are portrayed more for their squabbles and occasional moments of tenderness, as Diane the breadwinner has compromised the intended plan, to help her father with the work that allowed him to live as long as he could, by marrying an outsider. The werewolf curse is less a pulpy horror twist but something to angst over especially when she confesses to Mortimer, she loves greatly, she is expecting child, with the complications likely to happen a concern.

Incest will even take part in this plot, the film throwing itself gladly into the heightened whether good taste or not. For me, probably the amazing thing watching this film is how compelling it was for me, immediately hooking into its logic when, truthfully, other films like Nightbirds or The Body Beneath (1970), the later closest to this, did not feel this intense in the dialogue or the emphasis on what feels like a theatrical production, curdled intentionally with more soured dialogue and prolonged scenes of arguing, on filmic form. An additional wrinkled to this film is that, whilst one of the few he shot in England, it has the curious caveat that he was requested to add more footage to fill the running time. In this case, when other times this leads to redundant content, this filler is compellingly weird, where an animal seller, who loves Charles Dickens and "Mothers' Milk" (i.e. booze), sells man-eating rats to Monica, a psycho who tortures animals and people, with the gristly back-story of having part of his face and a whole arm chewed off by them from drinking too much and falling asleep. (Or admitting he fed the body of an old lady to cause their tastes). Usually in another film, this type of filler would be off-putting or a squandered opportunity, as the footage was shot much later with the rats never playing a part in the main narrative, but here it is befitting this strange, magnificently heightened and hyper-dramatic production.

A film like this, if this has not been stressed already, is an acquired taste. This is a rough production in how it is made, low budget with limited resources, something you could actually stage on theatre with ease even if there are some exterior shots and a couple of moments to work around. To Milligan's credit however, his dialogue and the people who cast are a bar higher than some of his fellow notorious filmmakers from this psychotronic bowl of cinema - Milligan is among them for his intense, over-the-top style contrasted by his very low budgets, but few films have The Rats Are Coming...'s snappy and compelling dialogue. It clearly knows, with maybe even a little tongue in cheek if played seriously, how ridiculous it is when it throws plot twists one after another in one scene, and it has a humour of a very twisted kind which does appear through intentionally.

Even whimsy is found too, as for all their nastiness, these characters can be nice to each other, suggesting more to the filmmaker when he contrasts other scenes with them. Mortimer, the older son, and Diane as siblings have a moment of kind bonding over her secret pregnancy, and even the father softens to her in the end for all the arguments that happen. Surprisingly the sweetest scene has Milligan himself in a role, a man infamous for how confrontation and razor tongued he could be, playing an elderly gun seller, belying his reputation as a misanthropic volcano at times by playing a charming older man wanting friendly banter and someone just to talk to. Yes, he should have twigged that melting a silver crucifix into bullets is clearly not a nice gift for someone's father, but for all the anger, and some gristly murders that transpire in the film, it is a film to reveal in as a work which has more whit to it, and a lot of deliberately off-kilter aspects, such as the final scene being the most intentionally (and amusingly) banal sequence of two people sat around, one knitting, contemplating baby names despite all that transpired beforehand. It is, if you can appreciate the film's attitude, a work which is really unique, and yes, this is the sort of film to win me over to Andy Milligan completely.