The Ghastly Ones / Seeds of Sin (Something Weird)

Rating:
Summary: Andy Milligan GENIUS!!
Review: Andy Milligan is the GENIUS of TACKY and DREADFUL filmmaking. Once you turn one of his films on it's really hard to turn it off because you can't quite figure out WHAT you are watching or WHERE it is supposed to take place.
THE GHASTLY ONES looks like a period piece but who knows if it is. Maybe everyone in that family just dress wierd.
Bad gore, bad sex...just silly.
But you can have a great time with his movies.

Rating:
Summary: you have to be a fan of this kind of stuff
Review: Andy Milligan produced films on a budget that Ed Wood Jr. would have struggled with. The Ghastly Ones is no exception. The weird characters and even weirder wardrobe (when was this film supposed to be set?) do hold the attention though. It's interesting to see Richard Romanus in a part years before he hit it big with Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets.
The murders are all executed in a fashion that Herschell Gordon Lewis would've been proud of and you can't help but smile at the whole glorious ineptitude of it all.
The transfer is sharp but there's quite a lot of print damage.

Rating:
Summary: Seeds of skin
Review: First off, I love the Something Weird dvd catalog and really enjoy these rarely, if ever seen drive-in low-budget exploitation films.
I read the cover for this double feature at the store, laughed aloud and then decidied to buy it.

Two feature length films here, one in color the other in B+W.
This was my introduction to Andy Milligan and what we get is low, low budget, bad acting, screechy self centered charachters and an over abundance of poorly-lit, implied sex.
In truth these both have weak, bare-boned story lines almost as a support to the gratuitous sex scenes which by the way take up[ as much as 40 to 50% of each films running time! And it's cheap poorly lit implied sex, not actualy sexy or pasionate by any stretch.
Watching these scenes I felt like a peeping Tom in a trailer park, that's about as glamorous as it gets. Less sex and more loony drama/storyline would've been my choice.
Both films have plenty of disturbing/laughably bad violence and gore.

I do look forward to watching the Ghastly Ones with the commentary track, that should be good for a whole other laugh.

Trailers include one for Guru, The Mad Monk. That looks like a winner, hilarious, similar film to Ghastly Ones I suspect.

The movies here are low-budget gems (despite the excessive nudity) and the extras are very good. Hence I'll give this package the full five stars.
But buyer beware what you're in for, buyer beware!

Rating:
Summary: The Actors Deserved Better
Review: One of the surprises in both of these films is that the acting is much better in general than what might expect--one of the films is a piece of gut-bucket horror, the other a nasty little sexploitation drama, but the casts give performances of surprising verve and authority. One suspects that Andy Milligan, who had worked in theater as both an actor and a director had enough connections, many of them in need of a good meal, to collect talented people to flesh out his casts, so to speak.

It's a pity that he didn't give them better material to work with. Both films hold promise--angry, violent family reunions have been the stuff of stage drama since at least the 19th century, and the plots of both films are hinged on just such get-togethers; THE GHASTLY ONES concerns three sisters and their husbands forced to spend the weekend at their late father's estate, where the family ties fray and a hooded killer starts picking people off (dreadful gore effects, by the way). SEEDS OF SIN concerns a perverse young woman who invites her siblings home for Christmas, much against the wishes of her drunken, crippled mother, who suspects that most of her children are simply waiting for her to die and leave them her money. Once again, the ranks are thinned by serial homicide. Both films have potentially powerful set-ups, and both feature very good performances by veteran stage actress Maggie Rodgers, who brings subtle colorings of wit and sympathy to Milligan's ranting dialogue. She is more than matched in SEEDS by Candy Hammond, who had no training as an actress, but proved not only completely at ease in front of a camera, but gave her lines a sly, eerie twist as the devilish ingenue at the center of the chaos. Most of the male actors, with the exception of Hal Borske and Neil Flanagan, were weak and uninteresting.

Much mock has been made of Milligan's hand-held camera work with a newsreel camera--to be sure, the physical limitations of the camera and the film stock scraps that Milligan used give his film a graceless stop-and-start rhythm, but his in-the-face style also gives the stories a distinctive claustrophobic atmosphere, and it gives the sexy scenes an in-close intimacy that they rarely have (without feeling voyeuristic, surprisingly--which is probably why the producers of SEEDS OF SIN went out and shot nudie inserts for the movie to give the dirty raincoat crowd something to drool over).

In short, these two films are not the utterly wretched camp that Milligan's reputation would suggest--the man had issues and themes that could become real drama and good movies--but he needed to put the work and fuss into them that is impossible to come by working for grindhouse producers. And for whatever reason, Milligan could not pull himself out of that environment long enough to fulfill the suggestions of promise that his work carried.

Rating:
Summary: Commentary worth the price alone
Review: The audio commentary by Milligan regular Haal (the extra A is for awesome!) Borske on "The Ghastly Ones" is one of the most hysterically funny yet heartbreakingly rueful accounts of a life in low-budget films I've ever heard. Borske has a lot of nice things to say about his old pal Andy, but he's also got a LOT to complain about (particuarly being set on fire by the director). As another reviewer mentioned, you've really got to develop a taste for these films, but they can be very rewarding. Milligan was a true auteur, doing everything on his films from the camerawork to the costumes, but he did none of it well. The thing was, he was so driven to tell his insane stories that somehow it all came together. Milligan films are unmistakable and you'll never forget watching them. The two on this disc are some of the most unforgettable.