“You’re a bad seed. The whole bunch of you are bad seeds!”
“A bad seed comes from a diseased plant.”

This might be specific dialogue to Seeds, in this case between bitter momma and angst-ridden son, but it pretty much sums up the shared family sentiment of the Milligan Universe

After inexcusably allowing myself to get distracted from my initial delve into this insanely super-stacked and lovely-to-look-at-and-play-with Severin bluray box-set (truth be told, is there any other kind of Severin box set these days? I’m just wondering when those guys are gonna crack under the sheer weight of it all!). But no longer. I’m back on it (including side-reading the accompanying book that came with it — yep! Along with the plentiful extras, they threw in a shiny new literary look at Milligan by the always entertaining and informative – and absurdly prolific – Stephen Thrower – while also re-reading the Jimmy McDonough bio on the violently crazed 42nd Street-lurking madman who was Andy Milligan as well).

There’s the wretched alcoholic wheelchair-bound matriarch (Maggie Rogers, in a crazed performance for the ages) tyrannizing her awful cabal of children, shrieking at them, throwing constant convulsive tantrums, smashing everything around her. The clergyman son, accompanied by his slinky nymphomaniac of a church assistant, trying to deny the shameful family secret (oh, there’s a lot of those) that he used to boff his closeted younger brother, an emotionally troubled boy just returned from the military duty he despises… as the horny assistant, meanwhile, makes her own moves on other brother Michael, who is already busy not only fending off his impetuous and mentally-troubled sister Carol, who he used to play his own hardcore incestuous games of doctor with while growing up, but keeping his wildly jealous wife in line by physically and mentally abusing her. There’s the live-in house assistants greedily scheming how to off momma and steel her fortune. Oh, and let’s not forget momma’s slimy house-call doctor, who is bribing another of the troubled children, after having helped the boy dispose of the body of his girlfriend after he forced the knocked-up girl into a botched hatpin abortion.

As if the family getting together for Christmas wasn’t on its own bad enough (because, in the world of Milligan, as I’ve said before, Home is where the Hate is), the gatherers are getting violently knocked off, one by one, by an unknown killer.

Like the stunningly bitter vision of his that I watched last, aptly named The Ghastly Ones, Seeds is just the kind of hysterical rotten-to-the-core-family reunion film that only Milligan could conjure up… only even better (or worse? Not sure which way to go with that).

Filled with unpleasant histrionics and emoting, with his camera constantly working in close-ups as if to capture a more theater-like experience, I dare say (yep, that’s right, I do!), Milligan’s films (at least the two features I’ve delved into so far, as well as his daring short set in the gay bathhouse Vapors) play like more hysterical (okay, way more hysterical) and far less controlled Ingmar Bergman chamber films. The dialogue is over-the-top (and certainly delivered that way), true, but… let’s be fair here.. when is Bergman’s not? I mean, Bergman’s approach might be more elegant, but it’s because he is reflecting a bourgeois (safe) sensibility (and this is coming from a huge Bergman fan, mind you). Milligan’s is underground, out of control and a lot more dangerous (as I watch I keep wondering if people didn’t actually get hurt – both physically and emotionally! – in the making of his films). And while Milligan’s films do have their camp quality (though they’re too harshly bleak to have the joyous revelling of real ‘camp’), and can easily be taken as blackly humorous (or absurdly bad), it’s not too out of the box to consider Bergman’s entire oeuvre as purely indulgent, career-long insular self-parody.

Milligan’s less accomplished, sure, but has an undeniable angst (and violent anger) that palpably, and without compromise, explodes out of the screen. And with an obsessive and maniacally prolific output before his death as a result of his rough street-trade life, Milligan is also a 42nd Street version of the much more celebrated German Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

And even within the jagged low budget set-ups and student-level fast filmmaking, a sense of a filmmaker with an appreciation for cinema does come through. For instance, the scene of momma flung down those stairs, chair and all, may be shot in more primitive style, yet is clearly speaking, resonantly so, to that most classic of all moments of cinematic sadism captured on celluloid – namely, Richard Widmark’s giggling sociopath practicing the same act on another unwitting old invalid lady in 1947’s Kiss of Death.

As I sat back in awe watching these films (the ones so far anyway), while completely convinced of their worth as cinematic visions, I wonder who the hell the audience was supposed to be? I mean, other than as later objects of idolization for eventual seekers of cinematically perverse outsider material like myself (and who knew that would actually be an audience?), who at the time was the audience? I guess the plentiful gratuitous nudity and (oft enjoyably daft) gore bits fit the needs for the undiscerning shadowy 42nd Street raincoat crowd, but there was no way the upper crust film festival audiences were going to do anything but react in horror at these gleefully sadistic wallowings in low rent bad taste.

With both these Milligan films shot in Staten Island, in the house he had bought to live and shoot in, as far as I’m concerned, it makes him and equally suspect filmmaker Buddy Combat Shock Giovinazzo the two seedy cinematic Kings of Staten Island. Fuck the Lincoln Center crowd and A-list festival tastemakers if they never understand that. Let them stay comfortably in their safe zones. It’s more fun out here with the outsiders and rejects anyway. And I applaud Severin Films for celebrating both of them.

Buck A Review   andy milligan   exploitation cinema   severin films