Blood

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 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.

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.

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.