Blood

BLOOD is yet another epic from Director Andy Milligan. It is the tale of Dr. Lawrence Orlovsky and his wife, Regina (Hope Stansbury). Lawrence is a stern, rude man, perhaps due to his hat being six sizes too small.

Enter Regina, a vampire brought in during daylight. This explains why she resembles a molten pizza with fangs. Regina needs injections to keep her from disintegrating altogether. Thus injected, she whines incessantly. This helps to offset Lawrence's turd-on-a-rope personality.

Meanwhile, their servants, including the leg-deprived Orlando (Michael Fischetti), the brain-destroyed Carlotta (Pichulina Hempi), and the soon-to-be-one-legged Carrie (Patti Gaul), take care of the Orlovsky's man-eating plant collection (aka: plastic hotel lobby foliage). Horror ensues.

While this movie is full of Milligan's signature cardboard characters spouting absurd dialogue, there is a bit of a story here somewhere. In spite of the Director's trademark meandering, there's even a modicum of tension. In fact, this could be the best Andy Milligan movie ever made!

Of course, it's still a sub-sludge production, featuring horrid camera work, lantern-like lighting, etc., but at least the damned thing makes some sort of sense! With BLOOD, Milligan reached the pinnacle of his... "talent".

THE BEST SCENE IN THIS MOVIE: When Petra (Eve Crosby), who looks as though she sleeps in a coal bin, is attacked by Halloween-novelty-teeth-wearing Regina! After witnessing this, one will never look at mannequin arms in the same way again! Ever!...

Andy Milligan, a maker of extreme low budget horror flicks. Most of them are boring but even stranger most of them aren't available. To find an movie by Milligan you really have to search hard, the only two you will find easy are The Ghastly Ones (Blood Rites) and The Rats Are Coming.... All his other features are in the public domain. So it's for the real geeks out there to find them. if you have seen the two ones mentioned earlier then you will know what to get from Milligan. A low budget movie with almost no acting whatsoever. The effects are not really effects, no transformation into a wolfman, the teeth from Dracula's wife are there from one shot to another. But still, it is watchable because it only clocks in into 1 hour. Now IMDb stated it as 74 minutes but so far I haven't found someone who had that version, so for me there's only this version. Most of he actors only played in this flick or in other Milligan movies, just one has made it, Patricia Gaul. Her biggest acting was in Silverado. This was her second feature. again, if you are collecting grindhouse flicks then you should add it into your collection.

Well, here's my first Andy Milligan film, and I'm feeling fairly indifferent about it, even though I fully knew what to expect. A strange family move into a new home. The husband is some sort of doctor working on various serums from carnivorous plants. His wife has an aversion to sunlight and needs constant injections. One of their servants is used as a blood bank to feed the plants and is all messed up due to this, and of the other two servants, one has no legs and the other is well on the way to having no legs due to some horrible disease.

The doctor meets his solicitor who's up to something dodgy with his dead father's estate, and also he falls in love with the solicitor's secretary. All this leads to, mainly, is people standing around in period costumes, talking endlessly. This film was under an hour long and I still had to watch it over two nights just to keep my attention.

There's werewolves, vampires, man-eating plants, people getting axed through the head, but everything to me seemed a bit flat and boring. Also, it looked like someone killed a mouse for real at one point – that's no good, is it? I'm not writing Milligan off yet – I've got Guru the Mad Monk to watch too – I'll give that a chance soon.

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 (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.