Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973): I Hate New Yorkers

Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)
dir: Andy Milligan

In 1973, Andy Milligan would direct his last X-rated sexploitation feature, Fleshpot on 42nd Street. This swan song to the genre is, like any of Milligan's other movies, less about the tawdry and more about the people. And, like any of Milligan's other movies, almost all of these people are assholes, bitches, jerks, dicks, and otherwise people who you should be hating but find yourself to be kind of loving.

Fleshpot on 42nd Street, more than any other Milligan movie, is a sour ode to the New York of old. The New York which was completely populated by trannies, junkies, hookers, pimps, and deviant corrupt businessmen. The New York surrounded by the school of hard knocks, and the people who hustle to get by. This isn't the sanitized, expensive, Manhattan that is currently pushed as the norm full of bright lights and show business. This is the New York where everybody is out for themselves.

At the center is Dusty, a hustler from frame one. We're introduced to her as she's sitting on a chair in a dirty filthy apartment. The guy with whom she's been living is pissed because she doesn't work, pay rent, cook, or clean. The only thing she can do is fuck. And, she counters that she's been paying plenty with her ass.  They fight, fuck, and then he's happy and goes to work. As soon as he's gone, Dusty robs the guy's place and hawks his goods at the pawn shop, where she also fucks and robs the married pawn dealer.

After this savory setup, we meet up with the sour soulless heart of the film, Cherry, a somewhat chubby, older, drag queen with a tongue sharp enough to cut hair. Cherry also hooks to make a living. Upon arriving at Cherry's place, Dusty takes a trick from Cherry. The trick likes it rough, and proceeds to whip her with a belt. After fucking the S&M trick, Dusty and Cherry go to a bar to drink, and have catty shouting matches with a couple of catty broads, the Simmons Sisters. Eventually, Dustyhooks up with a nice guy, who romances the shit out of her. Dusty falls in love. There is no happy ending.

While this movie did originally exist in softcore and hardcore formats (and is currently only available in the softcore with all of the sex scenes cut short), Milligan is far more interested in showing just how hard and shitty people are. As usual. At one point, Dusty is talking about her pimp boyfriend who has been sent up the clink for five years, and laments how he was a really good pimp. Or, when Dusty picks up a trick, Cherry leers on with admiration as she works faster than you could smoke a cigarette.  Later, Cherry shows her prowess by working a guy with the same amount of speed. Cherry follows the guy to his truck, and things go well until he pushes off his wig and almost beats her.

This isn't a happy-go-lucky porno. This isn't Deep Throat where it could ostensibly be about pleasure, or Behind the Green Door where the sex is performed for high class people in exotic situations. The sex in Fleshpot is barely even about anybody's pleasure. The sex in the softcore version makes the sex seem even more like a necessity than something that either party wants. Dusty is doing it for the money. The johns are doing it to get off, and don't care what they stick it in. Fleshpot provides a lusciously unsavory and unerotic portrait of an era now past in New York.

Milligan's neuroses are on full display in Fleshpot too. His hatred for women, and for men who act like women are at the forefront...again. Dusty is a manipulative thieving bitch. Cherry is a catty good-for-nothing drag queen who will stab you in the back for no good reason. The Simmons Sisters...well...all they do is bitch. But, most of the men fare no better. The first john is an easily-duped-by-pussy moron who gets his ass robbed because he dared suggest somebody clean. The other johns are largely violent and almost psychopathic. The only one who seems any good doesn't have things turn out well for him.  This is Milligan shitting on the world in which he lives. In both Butchers and Werewolves, Milligan had escaped to Britain to create period pieces that hid his world, but in Fleshpot it is in full on display.

Even without the hardcore scenes, Fleshpot is a definite watch. The dichotomy between the sex scenes and the drama is jarring at best as it is. Suddenly, the cliche 70s porn flute kicks in, which then changes to dramatic music as the sex goes violent. It's a jagged pill to swallow as it is, and with hardcore sex thrown in, it may even rip your throat out as you try to figure out what Milligan is doing. And, it's fascinating but soul-searing to be inside one man's sour little world for 80 minutes.

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972): Family is Toxic

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)
dir: Andy Milligan

Andy Milligan's origin in directing abusive plays is on full display in this gothic play-posing-as-a-movie where the horror is other people.

With a title like The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, one would be forgiven for thinking this was actually a movie about either rats or werewolves. In actuality, the rats make a fleeting appearance, and the werewolves only exist in the finale. What the movie is actually about is the damages that a family can do to each other regardless of role in the family.

The film is actually about the interpersonal dynamics of the Mooney family, a family of semi-werewolves where the werewolf trait is genetic and varies from character to character. The main thrust of the film is how the dynamics are disrupted when the youngest daughter, Diana, returns to her family's estate with a new husband in tow. She had been away to medical university to study medicine so she could develop a cure for her father's deadly disease.

Diana's older sister, Monica, is a crazy psychotic mean bitch of a woman who incessantly taunts and abuses her brother Malcolm, who is kept chained up due to his status as a permanent half-werewolf with animalistic tendencies. Her mother, Phoebe, is hiding secrets from everybody, and trying to keep relative peace in the family so that the father doesn't die. Then there is Mortimer who is an older brother who is treated like a butler, and also may be having an affair with Phoebe, his mother.

What this movie lacks in supernatural tendencies, it makes up in soap opera cruelty. Monica pours hot wax on Malcolm for the hell of it. She burns Diana's clothing. Monica buys rats from an animal dealer, pointlessly tortures them, gets bitten, then tries to return them. When the animal dealer won't return her money, she burns his store down. Meanwhile, Phoebe's reveal is that Diana actually isn't her daughter, but the daughter of Pa's second wife who was poisoned shortly after birth.

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! opens with a shot of a group of people mindlessly torturing what looks like a retarded boy. That boy is Malcolm who is quickly rescued by his family only to be immediately tortured by them. It's better to be tortured by family, because it is inevitable. This sets the tone for the whole movie. The whole movie is about people mindlessly abusing themselves and each other. They're being burned with crucifixes, taunted with food, and throwing fights about everything. The majority of the dialogue is a fast-delivered screaming match about the shittiness families can do to each other.

Milligan's movies are frequently views into the soul of a damaged man. His movies are as cruel and abusive as he could be. He has a very misanthropic viewpoint that everybody is terrible, even if they post as "good people." Milligan, however, holds special abuse for women, believing that they have a special capacity for cruelty, deviance and manipulation.

Andy came from a troubled family, and it comes through loud and clear in this movie. His mother was emotionally abusive and his father was an alcoholic. He blamed his mother for his father's behavior. All of this is easily read in The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, but whether or not this knowledge adds to the movie is completely debatable. To me, the movie stands up on its own as an incisive view into a dysfunctional family. This type of family dynamic, with comedic abuse and ancient secrets, will be exploited for comedic effect in this Christmas' August: Osage County. And, of course, both of these films owe a significant debt to Tennessee Williams' southern gothic family portrait plays. Though, few of the gothic family plays are as cruel as they are when depicted by Andy Milligan.

Is it good? Well...that depends on your tolerance for no budget filmmaking by somebody who worked better without a camera. The acting is on a level of early John Waters, and there is very little humor in the movie to get you through the shouting and the amateurish camera work. But, once you get past the student film aesthetic there is something that is undeniably pulsing about the content in this film. You just have to have a black soul to find it.

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970): The beginning of the reclaiming of Sweeney Todd

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)
dir: Andy Milligan

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is actually an older story than most realize. Sweeney first appeared in a "penny dreadful" serial from 1846-1847 titled The String of Pearls. The famous operetta version by Stephen Sondheim, which revamped the story from being a horror story with a dastardly villain into a revenge story about an anti-hero, wouldn't make its appearance until 1979.

But, in 1970, Andy Milligan created Bloodthirsty Butchers, an exploitation version out of the sordid and cruel little tale of chopping up people and serving them as meals. Of course, Milligan's version is more Milligan than it is the penny dreadful. Milligan's version has enough sex and violence to retain the R-rating, but it ultimately focuses more on the sex and less on the pure and utter violence of the story. What sex, you may ask?

Well, Milligan's sordid London underworld is chock full of sleazy people who are fucking everybody they want. Sweeney Todd is screwing every woman on the block, several of the women are already married and cheating on their husbands, their husbands, in turn, seem to be cheating with other women, and it becomes angry hornet's nest of soapy sexual connections with hardly a moral or narrative center to the drama. Everybody is screaming at each other how one person disappoints the other, or how one girl isn't really putting out like she used to. A stage girl complains about her costumes. Nobody is happy.

With Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Other Films comes to the world of Andy Milligan. Milligan is an underground almost untalented filmmaker who had no idea on how to make a movie, but every idea on how shitty people are. He made movies for $10-12k each, on equipment nobody should have been working on, with actors who had little time to rehearse, making his own costumes, doing everything on the fly, and generally making crude movies that had no real mark on the world.

But, his movies do have a certain something that will appeal to those who can get past the amateur filmmaking, and cheap-as-fuck aesthetic. The screenplays are all originally undeniably Milligan. They have the hallmarks of Sartre's old saying, "Hell is other people." Everybody is out for themselves, and Milligan is too. He doesn't pass judgement on anybody so much as he's putting it out there that everybody is shit, and he's right there with them.

Milligan is a true misanthrope, and Bloodthirsty Butchers puts it on full display. Sweeney Todd is the perfect vehicle for it too. It's a sordid tale where there are no heroes, nor any real villains. The String of Pearls was never the Sondheim version, where Sweeney Todd is back to get revenge and rescue his daughter from a corrupt judge. Sweeney Todd started his life as a murderer with Mrs Lovett as his accomplice. With the only close to humane people being Johanna, who was the girlfriend to a victim of Sweeney's, and her boyfriend, Milligan is free to fill in the blanks with deviant sexuality, cheating, and general assholery.

Which makes Bloodthirsty Butchers even more compelling than what it should be. As it is pre-Sondheim, this is a far different Sweeney than most people now are used to. The story had been quiet in the adaptation realm for years, when Milligan unearthed it to re-adapt it. Bloodthirsty Butchers is also darkly sardonic and cruel, but never a comedy. It's a horror of the soul, as most of Milligan's scuzzy underworld movies are. There are no real heroes in Milligan's works. And, there is no real great ending in his movies. Which is why Bloodthirsty Butchers, bringing you a familiar story told as a period piece is a great introduction to the work of Andy Milligan.