This totally berserk micro-budget horror movie has baffled and mostly delighted everyone who has come into contact with it.
As Michael Weldon has famously written: “If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you.” The blood and gore are plentiful but insignificant compared with the spiritual violence the characters inflict on one another. Bloodthirsty Butchers is Milligan’s version of the Sweeney Todd story-about a murderous barber who plies his trade with a straight razor. This relentlessly misanthropic outlook makes Milligan’s films sublimely entertaining to people with a very dark and depraved sense of humor. Milligan’s characters can barely get through a simple expository scene without bickering and ranting. His movies are venomous parcels of filth, made by a miserable person and depicting the continuing adventures of hateful people whose entire reason for living is to make others suffer. And Andy Milligan’s heart was a tiny, black, malformed thing that pumped hate instead of blood. Whatever bad things might be said about Andy Milligan’s films, they all come straight from the heart. His casts consisted largely of prostitutes, drug addicts, and other street people. He produced, wrote, shot, edited, directed, and even made the costumes for all his movies. So Milligan got a chance to make some of the strangest, most personal exploitation films of all time. At those prices, a distributor didn’t have to wait very long to start turning a profit. He delivered 35mm feature films (blown up from 16mm) on budgets of under $10,000 a piece. These are movies that each seems to open the door into a unique phantasmagorical world with its own set of rules, from the Max Ernst-like surrealism of THRILL OF THE VAMPIRES to the cough-syrup-drunk continuity nightmares of BOARDINGHOUSE.”Īndy Milligan made films more cheaply than anybody else before or since. The ones I have selected here aren’t necessarily the most frightening around, but I don’t think we’ll hear any complaints about how dull or conventional they are.
Nilsen explains, “ In the years before we spun the horror movie titles from Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series into their own iconic night (Terror Thursday – later Terror Tuesday), we played a lot of horror films. It’ll also deepen your appreciation for what it takes to program repertory screenings.įor the book’s release, Nilsen curated an exclusive list of horror exploitation for Bloody Disgusting, in tune with Warped & Faded‘s informative and stunning genre guide, including when it screened for Weird Wednesday.
It’s an expansive and passionate dive into film history made accessible for all but will appeal most of all to exploitation enthusiasts and fans of offbeat cinema. Part oral history of the Alamo Drafthouse’s best known programming series and part compendium of films that have screened throughout the program’s history, Warped & Faded offers everything from cult faves to deep, deep cuts for the cinephile. Warped & Faded is over 400 colorful pages dedicated to cinema’s weirdest, from personal accounts, essays, newspaper clippings, and photos.
Mondo’s Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive, edited by Kier-La Janisse ( Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror) featuring numerous genre contributors, hits shelves on November 16, 2021. Author Lars Nilsen, a longtime Alamo Drafthouse film programmer, and now Austin Film Society lead film programmer, has written a definitive guide to exploitation cinema.