Two Lost Exploitation Films from Trash-Cult Favorite Andy Milligan Will ‘Re-Premiere' at Tribeca
'It's so funny to me that Andy Milligan has become this great cult figure,' Laura Shaine Cunningham told IndieWire. To Cunningham — an author and playwright who describes her stint in Z-grade movies as 'a totally aberrant episode in my life' — Milligan was a sadist with a reddish beard who did his best to ruin her good time while shooting a movie on a derelict farm outside Woodstock, New York, in 1965. 'He was prolific, but not talented,' she added, a common sentiment even among Milligan's most passionate defenders.
And Andy Milligan does have a cult, a small but devoted subgroup fascinated by the contrast between the cracked auteurism of his films and the callous commercialism of their production. 'These are true independent movies, and if you really are inclusive and you really want to spotlight independent filmmaking voices, then Andy Milligan needs to be there,' said Jonathan Penner, programmer at Tribeca Festival, where two Milligan films will screen on Friday, June 13.
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Milligan's films 'will move you,' Penner added. '[They] may not move you in the most pleasant way, which is OK. Not all art is nice. Andy Milligan was not a nice guy, and he didn't make nice movies. But they are near and dear to my heart, because horror movies in general are about fear and suffering and mortality, and Andy made movies about the darkest shit in humanity.'
A once-promising independent filmmaker and gay Off-Off-Broadway pioneer, Milligan sold his soul to 42nd Street in the mid-'60s. He did so by joining up with producer William Mishkin, who would provide Milligan with small sums of money to churn out one-take wonders — horror movies and sexploitation pictures, mostly — that ran continuously in grindhouses until the prints wore out. Then, they were thrown away. 'They were considered orphans that nobody cared about,' Jimmy McDonough, author of the Milligan biography 'The Ghastly One,' said.
'Mishkin in particular cared very little about his legacy,' McDonough added. 'He saw it as all very contemporary stuff that you worked to death at the time. Maybe a few more years passed [when] you could get it into a drive-in and fool people into thinking it was in color.' Then Mishkin's son, Lou, took over the business in the mid-'80s. So the story goes, after an interview with Fangoria, where Milligan complained about him, Lou destroyed the remaining films out of spite. 'Melted down for the silver content,' as Severin Films researcher Todd Wieneke put it.
As a result, many of the films Milligan made for the Mishkins are now considered lost. But Wieneke kept looking, and after years of searching, he discovered two previously unseen Milligan films, 'The Degenerates' (1967) and 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' (1968). Both were found in Europe, where it's common for unclaimed materials to be sent to national archives when a film company goes into receivership, a practice Wieneke credited to the 'deeply entrenched film cultures' in these countries.
'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' was originally shipped to the Netherlands as part of a package of Mishkin films. This particular title, a hysterical New York apartment melodrama in the style of Doris Wishman, was a poor fit for the all-night theaters in Amsterdam's red-light district. And so it 'sat on the shelf, unscreened, not a single blemish on it,' as Wieneke said, for decades. It was eventually sent to the Eye Filmmuseum and kept, unlabeled, in its archive until it was finally catalogued in 2023.
McDonough said that 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' is 'the most mainstream of [Milligan's] exploitation pictures, certainly, and perhaps all of his strange pictures.' McDonough credits this to the fact that Milligan didn't write the film — Josef Bush, best known for the cheeky 1968 gay guide 'The Homosexual Handbook', crafted the script from Mishkin's outline.
'Mishkin really felt like this was his 'Star Wars,'' McDonough laughed. The film was a hit on 42nd Street, possessing a certain tawdry entertainment value. It's also a valuable time capsule: 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' contains some of the only known footage of the Caffe Cino, the bohemian West Village coffee shop that nurtured Sam Shepard, Al Pacino, and Andy Milligan.
'The Degenerates,' meanwhile, resurfaced at the Royal Belgian Film Archive. This print's origins are murkier — Wieneke believed it 'fell into private hands' between its initial theatrical run and its rediscovery at the archive. It comes subtitled in French and Flemish, and like 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!,' it was restored by Severin Films after being scanned at the archives. The restorations are clean, but not too clean: Citing 'defects that are native to the print,' Wieneke said, 'sometimes you can fix things, but it's not aesthetically correct to fix them.'
'The Degenerates' is technically science fiction, although it plays more like a feverish blend of 'The Beguiled' and 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill!' 'It's very much in character with Milligan,' McDonough said. 'There's ranting, there's raving, there's poisonous family dysfunction, and total destruction at the end.' Cunningham sounded amused recounting her scenes in the movie, about a band of six women 'surviving in the post-apocalypse' on a dirt farm in Woodstock. 'I do remember running through the rain with a pitchfork … the whole thing was absolutely ludicrous,' she said.
'Everyone said [Milligan's] films were ungettable. As if they didn't really exist,' Penner said. This is especially true of his sexploitation pictures: The eternal popularity of the genre has ensured that Milligan's horror movies — with colorful titles like 'The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!' — have remained in circulation since the VHS era. But sexploitation is 'a pocket that's never going to be duplicated,' according to Wieneke. 'It's very much a product of its time and the carnivalesque characters who worked behind the scenes.'
Penner will attempt to capture the atmosphere of old, gritty 42nd Street at 'That's TribecXploitation! The Andy Milligan Time Machine,' part of the festival's Escape from Tribeca sidebar. 'There's a secret history of the movies in New York, a really profound history on 42nd Street,' Penner said. 'These movies truly will take you back to a different time and place and filmgoing experience, which is very beautiful to me.'
Both 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' and 'The Degenerates' will 'world re-premiere' in the program, along with a selection of trailers and commercials meant to capture the look and feel of late-'60s New York. (The festival will also premiere a new documentary, 'The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan,' co-directed by Severin Films' Josh Johnson.) McDonough and Cunningham will make the pilgrimage, as well as Milligan players Natalie Rogers and Hope Stansbury. All will gather for a celebration of Milligan and the grindhouse film culture that made him — minus the street hustlers and discarded needles.
'The idea that we're showing his pictures at the Tribeca Film Festival … his ghost will be there cackling, madly, just laughing his ass off,'' Penner said. 'These movies sank below the bottom of the barrel, and we've fished them out.'
For McDonough, who was close with Milligan in the years leading up to Milligan's death from AIDS complications in 1991, the homecoming is personal. 'I feel his presence on a regular basis,' he said. 'When I wrote ['The Ghastly One'], nobody wanted to hear about Andy Milligan … now Andy belongs to the world in a larger fashion. I'm just thrilled that he's finally being acknowledged as the idiosyncratic, unmatched talent that he was.'
Asked if he thinks the ghost of Andy Milligan will be present at the screening, McDonough laughed: 'Wear your Kevlar vests is all I have to say. You never know how Andy might strike back — with a kiss, or something sharper.'
'That's TribecXploitation! The Andy Milligan Time Machine' will screen at the Village East by Angelika at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 13 as part of the Tribeca Festival.
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