Blood

How can someone call themselves a fan of cult horror movies like "The Blob" and the various "Godzilla" flicks, and call this movie "cheap trash. "Blood" is basically a low budget love letter to other low budget cheapies, which are also considered classics today, movies like "The Wolfman" and "Satan's Cheerleaders," are cult favorites. Maverick director Andy Milligan has taken his love for Dracula and The Wolf man, and perhaps the cult tv show "Dark Shadows," which this movie has a lot of similarities to, and created this stylish horror opus. . A cursed family arrives from an obscure part of Eastern Europe, and holes up in a large, gothic home in Staten Island, New York. They harbor a hideous secret, as the lady of the house has a rare disease in which she needs a constant supply of blood to keep her alive. Without her "medicine," she turns into a monstrous creature. The gore is brief, but when it's on screen it can be quite nasty, Fortunately Milligan doesn't let his camera linger on those gore shots for more than a couple seconds. Being a period piece, we get some lovely, albeit cheap 1930's era costumes and hairstyles. Before Milligan turned to horror, he directed a collection of erotic, sometimes even pornographic films, which he was surprisingly good at making. His films are dialog-heavy, but the fact that the dialog is so zany and bizarre, becomes a good thing. If you have patience, "Blood" is considered one of the director's more ambitious works, with it's costumes and music score. It also scores high marks on weirdness, and most importantly, "Blood" is one of the more atmospheric horror movies to come out of the 70's. But it's not recommended for cinema snobs, self-proclaimed critics who are going to rip something apart because of some imperfection. With films like this, the flaws sometimes become their greatest asset. Presently I am working through Milligan's body of work, at least the films that weren't lost due to the neglect of his careless family, and admittedly, there are some bad titles. There are also some real gems among them, the absolute best being "Fleshpot On 42nd Street," which was one of the director's non-horror efforts. I recommend "Blood" to fans of true cult horror movies.

Set in the 1880's the son of the wolf man moves back to America from Europe with his wife, who happens to be the daughter of Dracula - and three members of staff. They are employed to grow vampire plants in the basement in order to keep the wife Regina alive! Our first glimpse of her is as an old hideous looking hag but a dose from the plants and she is back to looking radiant, In fact there are three attractive women in this movie, one of the few redeeming points. There is a suggestion of incest between one of them and her brother, who pays a brief visit to the house before being killed by Regina, but no sex or nudity, despite the director being a producer of porn. Director Andy Milligan was known for making films on tiny budgets, doing much of the work behind the camera himself., I respect that even if the end result is poor. To be fair this is only the second of his films that I have seen, the other being the truly awful The Ghastly Ones, but as a fan of cult and bad movies I hope to watch more. There can be no denying that this is a very cheap, bad movie. Despite being set in the 1880's a kitchen used in some scenes is obviously from 1973. On the other hand the acting isn't too bad considering it has a cast of largely unknowns (Patti Gual is the only one who appears to have a decent filmography). The script is amusing, lines such as "We'll face tomorrow tomorrow" only adds to the charm. The "special" effects are terrible and for the transformation into werewolf the husband obviously just put a rubber mask on. Great ending, made me chuckle but I don't like spoilers in my reviews so you'll have to see it for yourself! I would only score this movie 2/10 on technical merit but I did find it mildly amusing, hence my 4/10.

Blood (1974)

** (out of 4)

Downright craziness from director Andy Milligan has Lawrence Talbot working under the last name Orlovsky. He moves his wife, the daughter of Dracula, into a house where he also brings along a wide range of weird people. Inside the house he is growing plants, which will eat humans but there are more dark secrets within these walls.

Milligan has a huge cult following and it's really easy to see why. I've gone through a hand full of the director's films and for the most part I've found them ranking from downright horrid to suicide worthy. With that said, BLOOD is probably the best film I've seen from him because of how crazy and bizarre it is. I'm not sure if the director just figured he'd throw everything into a film and see what would stick but you've got a werewolf, Dracula's daughter, a deformed mutant and of course the man-eating plants.

There are some really kooky moments throughout this thing ranging to some bizarre dialogue where the wife wants to know if her husband still loves her to a werewolf attack that is filmed in such dark conditions that you can't even see what is happening. The melodrama that Mulligan adds to a lot of his horror pictures is something that actually works here because of the fact that it's a werewolf and a vampire. The added supporting of the other freaks is just a good bonus.

The performances really aren't all that bad and the film has a much more professional look that the majority of the director's work. At just under 70 minutes the movie manages to keep your interest throughout.

This is one of Milligan's better Gothic style horror dramas. It's a lot in the style of THE RATS ARE COMING!THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE! But not as dull. The acting is much better than in most of his films and the camera work is not bad.

The film does have two strikes against it. 1)When the wolf man turns into a werewolf he is wearing a silly looking werewolf mask and 2)The action scenes seem to being missing something as if something was cut out. This is how most of Milligan's films seem to be edited though so I can't tell if I was watching a censored print or if it was edited that way.

Blood is another one of Andy Milligan's coma-inducing home-made horrors that tests the patience with its leaden pacing, awful direction, overly verbose script and wooden acting.

Stephen Thrower, author of Nightmare USA, praises Milligan for being a true auteur, with a style that distinguishes his work from other directors. This I cannot deny - Milligan's method of film-making is certainly unique - but everything that Thrower enjoys about his films, I find insufferable. Made on an extremely low budget, Milligan's movies are on a par with amateur dramatics productions, and as much as I appreciate trashy films, they're just too badly made and incredibly dull for me to enjoy.

Milligan certainly gives it his best shot, with a schlocky plot that sees the wolfman's son, Lawrence (Allan Berendt), and his vampire wife Regina (Hope Stansbury), the daughter of Dracula, cultivating carnivorous plants in order to try and cure Regina's malady. Along the way, we also get a bit of incest and some cheesy gore, all of which should add up to a good time, but Milligan's lifeless direction and the dialogue heavy script prevent this from being the entertaining cheeze-fest that it could have been (in the hands of a better film-maker).

2.5/10, rounded down to 2 for the mouse/meat cleaver scene, which I suspect wasn't a special effect.