The Ghastly Ones (1968)

 

Director: Andy Milligan

Screenplay: Hal Sherwood and Andy Milligan

Cast: Veronica Radburn as Martha; Maggie Rogers as Hattie; Hal Borske as Colin Trask; Anne Linden as Vicky; Fib LaBlaque as Rich; Carol Vogel as Liz; Richard Romanus as Don; Eileen Hayes as Veronica; Don Williams as Bill; Hal Sherwood as Pastor Walter; Neil Flanagan as Dobbs; Ada McAllister as Ada; Robert Adsit as Robert

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Andy Milligan got on the Video Nasties list, and whilst with gore to be found here, you do watch The Ghastly Ones, and I find myself thinking of people who were disappointed by this, hated it, or came to this because of a cult surf-garage band named the Ghastly Ones, and see how much a farce the Video Nasties panic was. Yes, there were some extreme films in that list - the Nazisploitation genre, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) - and people not used to horror films being gory would have been shocked, but with how this is matched by how more extreme Hammer films got by the seventies in their own way to match the trends, it would be like they were living in a cave. I am coming to this too with admiration for the production too, but with prior knowledge of Andy Milligan cinema as being about lengthy monologues and dialogue scenes, usually full of misanthropy, from a producer/writer/director that started in independent theatre and found that horror cinema was the best way to get to make films. Acquired taste is the appropriate word here.

Milligan has been reassessed - it helps as well a cult filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn, is obsessed with buying seemingly lost films and helping get them preserved - but Milligan himself is as idiosyncratic as you can get in terms of actually watching the films, low budget dramas with misanthropic views of humanity and low budgets, The Ghastly Ones set in the late 1800s where an inheritance of a deceased father naturally leads to someone picking people off. The tone is set up fully in its presentation - extreme low budget independent cinema, using what period appropriate costumes could be found, sets which masked the real world of the time, in this case filming at a home from the appropriate era on Staten Island in New York City, and a cast mainly of people who, if not prolific in small roles, only have a few usually in exploitation cinema or even in Milligan's own filmography. Milligan would attempt this in a Civil War period, only for the film never to be properly finished if thankfully made available, in House of Seven Belles (1979), and here as there he does manage to create a period horror film which is not going to be as immaculate as a higher budget period film, but let's one enter the time period with suspension of disbelief.

A will is to be confirmed at a late father's mansion, isolated on an island, where his three daughters, who had to be married first before the will could be opened, will have to stay there to complete the requests of the document and claim their rights, within three days of "sexual harmony". A threat with a dead animal left on someone's white linen offers the first warning signs harmony will not last, and for those uninitiated with Andy Milligan, as stated he really liked dialogue and to have it spoken, characters emoting their anxieties and grievances for large passages of the film. Watching said lengthy dialogue scenes, whilst enjoying them myself, does with hindsight make police prosecutors in the period when this got on the Video Nasties list look bad, the sense no one bothered to actually watch the film. It takes a long time from its opening, where a man and a woman are butchered by the titular ones, to when our leads start to be picked off themselves. Slanted camera shots and close-ups make up the look of the film, and neurosis is filtered throughout until it explodes out into actual bloodshed.

The will is how it is because the father, reflecting on his own issues with his wife, felt there was no love in their marriage; this is something which in mind to who turns out the killer, [Huge Spoiler] a daughter from another relationship who was treated like dirt and as a servant [Spoilers End], proves to be his fault as much as his wife's, for creating a literal monster who serves a human head at the dining table on a silver platter. Disabled characters are a subject in his work, whether they are dealt with well or not with hindsight; here the figure with a mind of a child among the servants on the island, Colin (Hal Borske), is definitely a sympathetic figure who is as manipulated, that despite the broadness of his performances is someone who is a real casualty among the figures who probably did deserve their fates in contrast. Among Milligan films, this becomes one of the more focused in terms of genre tropes, as a figure starts bumping people off, wearing black hooded robes and aiming pitchforks into necks, but you have a slower paced proto-slasher in many ways here where the dialogue is its central prerogative. Considering one of Milligan's visual trademarks has been to swing the camera around erratically in a violent scene, as seen here, we are dealing with a director in the fringes, pulled into the light with this film when the British video watchdogs came a knocking.

It is, for those able to pick up its vibes, the slasher/murder mystery of his career which for a pure pulp title is deliciously camp. His career can be summed up well with one of the films he made in his brief stint in my home of Britain, The Body Beneath (1970). For a prominent moment, the low budget vampire story takes a back seat to scenes of the vampires, debating whether to leave the country for bloodier pastures, factor in how drugs has made the blood supply worse and how difficult it is to get anything done due to the police out at night. The Ghastly Ones is a Ten Little Indians scenario in his career, one of his most prominently known due to its Video Nasties credits, which is just as idiosyncratic for where it tangents off into.