The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Powerful telekinetic Zack Connors (Graham Skipper) is lured by research scientist Dr. Slovak (John Speredakos) to the remote campus where Slovak is investigating telekinesis. Slovak is holding Zack’s ex-girlfriend Rachel (Lauren Ashley Carter), and Zack quickly learns that Slovak is not the benefactor he initially appeared to be. Zack plans a jailbreak with Rachel, but Slovak has engineered a treatment that gives him telekinetic powers, and a violent conflict is inevitable. The Mind’s Eye, like director Joe Begos’s debut feature Almost Human, takes place in the early 1990s and feels very much like a lost film from that era. It occupies a sometimes uncomfortable space between homage and parody, although that may be largely due to the fact that it’s always kind of funny to watch two guys staring at each other intently and yelling instead of physically engaging in a fight. Begos plays on that a lot throughout the film, which pleasantly calls to mind influences like Scanners and The Fury but with even more ridiculously gruesome violence. Packed with a cast of independent horror favorites (including Carter, who also plays the lead in Mickey Keating’s Darling), The Mind’s Eye is a fun, gore-drenched ride perfect for midnight viewing with plenty of beer.

  Green Room (USA, dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

  Struggling punk band The Ain’t Rights drive 90 miles out of their way for a show promised by a young kid with a podcast, but the gig is canceled. With no other choice, they take the kid’s offer of another paying gig at an isolated club frequented by skinheads. The band arrives and plays their set, but when they’re loading out bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) stumbles upon a crime scene that club manager Gabe (Macon Blair) is trying to cover up. The situation rapidly escalates until the band is trapped in the club’s green room fighting for their lives against a violent neo-nazi group trying to force them out and eliminate all evidence of the crime. Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, Blue Ruin, upended revenge film conventions and garnered huge critical acclaim that set expectations impossibly high for Green Room. Almost unbelievably, Green Room absolutely meets and very possibly exceeds those expectations. The cast is excellent, and the amazingly detailed production design brings the world of low-rent punk clubs to absolutely convincing life. There’s a lot of violence, but like Blue Ruin, Green Room treats its characters and their chances of survival realistically. Saulnier also takes time to draw all the characters well, giving an unexpected twinge of sympathy for even some of the skinheads. Everyone’s stuck in an impossible situation, and compelled to act according to their own personal loyalties and ethics. On top of all this, Green Room is fast-paced and fun, with plenty of gruesome black comedy. This is one of the best films of the year, period.

  Fantastic Fest 2015: Day 8

  Originally published 7 October 2015

  The final day of Fantastic Fest is a little shorter, since there is no late night slot. This is so everyone can go to the closing night party, which no one in their right mind would want to miss anyway!

  Evolution (France, dir. Lucile Hadžihalilovic)

  While out swimming in the ocean one day, Nicolas (Max Brebant) finds the corpse of a young boy about his age. He returns to tell his caretaker, who dismisses his concerns. When they return the next day to find the body, her search turns up only the distinctive red starfish Nicolas saw on the dead boy’s body. As the details of Nicolas’s life on the island accumulate, it becomes increasingly clear that he, his friends, and their caretakers are living in this isolated remote island for a specific purpose. Evolution is the long-awaited second film from writer/director Lucile Hadžihalilovic, whose debut was 2004’s excellent Innocence. Like that film, Evolution proceeds at a careful pace, gradually allowing details of its strange world to accumulate to allow the viewer to build an image of what is happening and why. This time, though, the viewer has much less concrete information to go on due to the minimal dialogue throughout. Whereas Innocence worked with a strange dream logic, Evolution presents fragments of what appears to be a much larger story through gorgeous and occasionally nightmarish imagery and very little dialogue. It’s a quiet, hypnotic film that invites the viewer to pay careful attention and thoroughly consider what they have seen. Here’s hoping it’s not another decade before Hadžihalilovic directs another film!

  Darling (USA, dir. Mickey Keating)

  A young woman (only ever called “darling”) is hired to take care of the oldest house in Manhattan while its owner is away. The problem is that Darling is already unstable, and the history of the house—including the suicide of its previous caretaker—makes it inevitable that something in her mind will break before she is in the house alone for too long. It’s not too hard to guess the major inspiration for Darling is Polanski’s Repulsion, and this film is modeled on that film’s striking black & white photography and the deterioration of a woman’s mental state as she lives in isolation in a claustrophobic space. Lauren Ashley Carter (who also played one of the leads in The Mind’s Eye) gives a nerve-shredding performance as Darling, who is in nearly every shot in the film. Keating mostly gives her plenty of room to explore the more unsettling aspects of her character, but he also fractures many scenes with jarring near-subliminal imagery often accompanied by ear-splitting noises. Watching Darling on a big screen is an assault on the senses with its stroboscopic imagery and startling sound design. It feels more like an exercise in style than something designed to really get under the skin, but on that count it absolutely succeeds. And at a lithe 74 minutes, Darling avoids two of the major pitfalls of too many of its independent horror film contemporaries: it jumps into the action fairly quickly, and never wears out its welcome. Darling is sure to be a divisive film among horror fans, but anyone looking for a stylish take on Repulsion-style psychological horror will definitely want to watch out for it.

  Southbound (USA, dir. Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence)

  Southbound is a horror anthology from the producers of the V/H/S series that takes a completely different approach to the form from that series, presenting a series of somewhat connected stories that overlap as characters make their way down the road in the desert of the American Southwest. Larry Fessenden provides the voice of a seemingly omniscient DJ who sets up and comments on the stories, and where one story ends and the next begins is never entirely clear. This makes the film feel less like a standard anthology, and the consistent look throughout the different segments lends to the illusion that Southbound is just one film with a variety of weird stories than the product of different creative teams. Featuring work from the producers and directors of the V/H/S films, The Signal (2007), Entrance (2012), Faults (2014), and more, Southbound is a fun, unique take on the traditional horror anthology.

  The Cheap, Crazy Cult Films of Andy Milligan

  Originally published on 9 April 2015

  “During the 60’s, I would go to see one of my double bills on 42nd Street. It was interesting. You see glossy million-dollar Hollywood productions and they’re boring. None of my films are. They may be tacky or crudely made, but they’re never dull. Theatrical… very theatrical. Like filmed stage plays.”

  — Andy Milligan.

  Andy Milligan’s first film, a short titled “Vapors,” was released in 1965. His final feature, Surgikill, was released in 1989. In the nearly two and a half decades between his first film and his last, Milligan cranked out about thirty super low-budget grindhouse films. And when talking about Milligan, that’s not “grindhouse,” that’s real, actual, honest-to-God *grindhouse*, films that endlessly played the fabled movie palaces on 42nd Street throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Milligan got his start as a playwright and director in the theater scene that sprung up around Caffe Cino, a coffeehouse that doubled as a theater for decidedly off-Broadway productions. He transitioned into film using many actors he met at Caffe Cino, often working for infamous exploitation producer William Mishkin. Milligan worked cheap, but he also exerted a level of control over his productions that would make Stanley Kubrick blush: Milligan wrote, directed, shot, and edited as well as frequently designing a
nd sewing costumes (as Raffine) and recording sound on his productions. Milligan had a reputation for terrorizing his cast and crew, but the end results were films that are as unmistakably “Andy Milligan” as any film made by more well-known auteurs.

  And now, over twenty years after his death in 1991, Andy Milligan is on the verge of cult stardom that his singular vision has previously been denied. The Cult of Milligan has been growing exponentially over the last few years, helped by such proponents as Vinegar Syndrome (who released high-quality downloads of 1970’s Guru, The Mad Monk, and 1973’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street for free download on their web site) and Philadelphia-based Exhumed Films, who featured a version of Milligan’s Blood (1973) that had been long unavailable at their Forgotten Films Festival in 2014. In April, Exhumed will be producing an incredibly rare triple feature with three of Milligan’s best-known films screening from 35mm prints: Torture Dungeon (1970), Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970), and The Man with Two Heads (1972). This show takes place Friday, April 10th at the International House in Philadelphia, and is the culmination of a Milligan rediscovery that is sorely overdue.

  Most film fans who have heard of Milligan at all are probably familiar with his work through Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic magazine or Tim Lucas’s Video Watchdog. Weldon coined the infamous phrase “If you’re an Andy Milligan Fan, there’s no hope for you.” Lucas went even further, suggesting that “To reach an appreciation of (Milligan’s) work, it may first be necessary to develop a loathing toward traditional forms of cinema.” Perhaps the biggest name-check for Milligan was in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, in which he refers to Milligan’s The Ghastly Ones (1968) as “the work of morons with cameras.” However, thanks to the proliferation of film discussion on the internet and the insatiable appetite of dedicated paracinephiles to uncover new frontiers of strange cinema, Milligan’s reputation has become less that of an inept grindhouse crank and more of (as Rob Craig refers to Milligan in his book of critical essays on Milligan’s films) a “gutter auteur.” Indeed, this is likely due to more people actually watching Milligan’s films and finding they represent a distinctive, warped vision rather than taking the word of dismissive critics. The three films in Exhumed’s triple feature are great examples of Milligan at his most accessible, working in the horror genre.

  Torture Dungeon tells the story of the depraved Duke of Norwich, who has designs on the throne of Tarragon. This is one of Milligan’s medieval period pieces, which he used as an excuse to create elaborate, outré costumes for his cast. It also features plenty of gruesome violence (done on the cheap, naturally—Milligan’s horror films had a recurring bit with ping-pong balls in place of eyeballs) and outlandish characters. It also runs under 80 minutes, underlined by another defining characteristic of Milligan’s style: the dense, stagey dialogue is delivered at a breakneck pace, as though the actors are at gunpoint and trying to get their lines out before Milligan lets them have it. That was entirely possible, but it’s also a symptom of Milligan frequently shooting with “short ends” of 35mm film. A “short end” is film stock left in a used roll of film that is unexposed and can still be used, although it may only be enough film to capture a few seconds of footage depending on how much of the roll was shot. This was a common practice for shooting film very cheaply, and it was a hallmark of Milligan’s 60s and 70s productions in particular.

  In Bloodthirsty Butchers, Milligan took his swing at the story of Sweeney Todd. Throughout his career, Milligan made his own take on famous public domain stories and classic monsters (including the insane monster rally of Blood, which features vampires, werewolves, killer plants, and more). Bloodthirsty Butchers is a fairly straightforward take on the tale of barber Sweeny Todd, played by John Miranda, as he murders people and passes their corpses on to a butcher who turns them into meat pies. The costumes, as per Milligan’s usual, are fantastic, and the style is unmistakably Milligan. The story and subject matter just happen to neatly fit in with Milligan’s bleak worldview. The same holds true of The Man with Two Heads, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. While the stories may be familiar, Milligan imbues Bloodthirsty Butchers and The Man with Two Heads with his unique imprint, making them much more than just a new coat of paint on an old story.

  The Milligan triple feature follows a busy last few years for Milligan fans, kicked off by the British Film Institute’s Blu-ray release of Milligan’s Nightbirds (1970), spearheaded by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. Refn purchased the only existing print of the film (as well as Milligan’s old Auricon 16mm camera rig and other miscellany) from Jimmy McDonough back in 2009, and the resulting Blu-ray was worth the wait. The disc presented one of Milligan’s best films, previously thought lost, in a stunning HD restoration. In 2013, Milligan’s unfinished Compass Rose (1967) surfaced online, first on torrent sites and then on YouTube.

  More recently, Code Red released three Milligan features on Blu-ray, and Frolic Pictures presented the long-overdue premiere of Milligan’s final film, Surgikill, on DVD. Retromedia also released a triple-feature DVD of Milligan films (The Ghastly Ones, Guru, The Mad Monk, and 1970’s The Body Beneath) under the title The Andy Milligan Grindhouse Experience on March 24th, complete with commentary by David DeCoteau. It’s gratifying to see Milligan finally getting the audience and serious consideration he was largely denied during his life, and hopefully with the resurgence of interest in his work, more of Milligan’s lost films may finally resurface.

  Lost Films Get Found at Exhumed’s Forgotten Film Fest!

  Originally published 23 July 2014

  In order to understand how the Forgotten Film Festival came into being, it may be helpful to have a bit of background on the gentlemen who put the show together: Exhumed Films. Exhumed was formed in 1997, and since then has screened hundreds of genre and exploitation films in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Particularly impressive is that Exhumed is committed to screening these films on film from 35mm and sometimes 16mm prints. These shows started off as simple horror screenings, then double and triple features, and as their popularity grew Exhumed was eventually able to put together a full 24-hour horror marathon in 2007. The Horrorthon—with its mysterious lineup, never announced in advance—proved to be a massive hit. The success of the Horrorthon inspired Exhumed to start a 12-hour exploitation film show in the Spring, eX-Fest. Their constant search for long-lost gems has now resulted in what is hopefully a new annual show, the Forgotten Film Festival.

  The Forgotten Film Festival is exactly what it sounds like: five films (all prints!) that have fallen through the cracks of cinematic history. A few of these films are floating around out there in bootleg formats, taped off HBO in the early 1980s or ripped to a video file from decades-old PAL VHS tapes. None of them have ever seen an official home video release in the States, and in a couple of cases it’s likely they never will. For serious cinephiles and cult/exploitation fans, this was the kind of show that had previously only existed in dreams and fervent wishes, and it did not disappoint.

  True to the spirit of the screening, the show began with an introduction from Chris Poggiali of the Temple of Schlock blog, who put each film in context and gave some interesting trivia for the films. Each film also had a short reel of trailers before the film started, mostly on themes similar to the film itself, which also gave the audience a chance to take a break between each feature. After Poggiali’s excellent introduction, the first block of “trailers” played. Like the features, all of the trailers and other material were screened from film prints. The first block included a video of Mick Jagger and David Bowie performing an exceptionally embarrassing version of “Dancing in the Street” to promote Live Aid, the video for “You Better You Bet” by The Who, a “Let’s All Go to the Lobby”-style concession stand commercial with a dancing joint and skating coke razors, and trailers for The Hollywood Knights and Roller Boogie.

  Then the first feature started: Skatetown U.S.A. (1979, dir. William A. Levey). Rushed into prod
uction to beat Roller Boogie into theaters and capitalize on the roller disco craze, Skatetown U.S.A. is possibly the Platonic Ideal of the rollerskatesploitation film. There’s sort of a story that threads together the footage of people skating and dancing, the “live” performances (Dave Mason inexplicably gets to perform two entire songs on-screen), and the insanely corny vaudevillian comedy bits, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing. Richie (Scott Baio) wants to win the Skatetown, U.S.A. competition, so he enters his friend Stan (Greg Bradford) and Stan’s horny sister Susan (Maureen McCormick of The Brady Bunch) into the contest. What they don’t know is that the contest is always won by Ace (Patrick Swayze in his feature film debut), leader of a tough gang of, uh, disco roller skaters. It sounds ridiculous, but Swayze completely sells it.

  Skatetown U.S.A. is extremely dumb, but it’s hugely entertaining. The cast looks like the entire 1970s film and television industry collapsed in on itself: In addition to Baio and McCormick, the cast includes Ron Palilo (Welcome Back, Kotter) as Ace’s right-hand man Frankey, Billy Barty as Jimmy, the owner of the rink, Flip Wilson as Harvey (Jimmy’s son) and Jimmy’s wife, Ruth Buzzi as a food critic, Judy Landers working the ticket booth, and even Dorothy Stratten in a cameo appearance as “Girl at the Snack Bar.” The film’s non-stop soundtrack is likely what has kept it from seeing any official home video release. Virtually every second of the movie is accompanied by a huge hit song, some of which aren’t even listed in the ending credits of the film. Fortunately, some theaters around the country have shown Skatetown U.S.A. as a midnight movie, so if you’re lucky enough to have a good rep house in your area, you may catch it on the big screen someday. The print that played here was in fantastic shape, with maybe a tiny bit of color fade, but otherwise it looked great.