“THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN”

THE STORY – This documentary portrait of NY genre filmmaker Andy Milligan, one of the great schlockmeisters of the 1960s & ’70s, also serves as a portrait of the bohemian art scene that flourished in the West Village during the post-beatnik, pre-hippie era.

THE CAST – Gerald Jaccuzo, Hope Stansbury, Jimmy McDonough, Stephen Thrower, Sam Sherman & John Borske

THE TEAM – Josh Johnson & Grayson Tyler Johnson (Directors/Writers)

THE RUNNING TIME – 109 Minutes

“Gutter Trash.” “The Naked Witch.” “The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!” Brilliant film titles, all. With “The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan,” the new doc by Josh & Grayson Tyler Johnson, the man behind the films with these genius titles finally gets his day in the sun. While the doc may be conventional in its storytelling structure, its subject is anything but.

Before becoming a filmmaker, Andy was a promising young actor in the 1950s, one of the mainstays on live dramas from the early days of television. His ambitions, however, were higher than that. He soon found himself gravitating to New York’s West Village to Cafe Cino, which in those days was the center of the bohemian art scene in New York. In between sips of espresso, actors, writers, and directors all gathered together to develop new works and support one another’s ambitions. It was there at the Cino that Andy found his voice as a writer and eventually as a director, creating provocative works that drew in audiences and gave him the confidence to expand his artistic boundaries.

Andy decided to purchase an Auricon camera, which was commonly used by news crews, even though it had its audio track visible on the film itself while producing lousy sound. No matter to Andy. He had a camera and stories to tell, so he was now a filmmaker. He filmed one of his plays titled “Liz” and, upon completion, met with distributors in hopes of getting it seen. The only one who bit was William Mishkin, considered to be the king of exploitation films. Mishkin told Andy that he would buy it on the condition that he adds a number of shots of “tits and ass,” and, anxious to have his work seen, the deal was done. “Liz” suddenly became “The Promiscuous Sex” and played at grindhouses across the country, raking in loads of money and launching Andy on a new career.

Andy began cranking his films out, and Mishkin knew how to sell them, with such titles as “The Degenerates,” “Depraved!” and “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me!” still cashing in at the box office. But Mishkin balked at Andy’s first color film, 1968’s “The Ghastly Ones,” as it played better as a horror film than a sex film, but Mishkin finally agreed to sell it to the screamer crowd. While the reviews were abysmal, grindhouse audiences flocked to it, and Andy was suddenly reborn as a horror director.

Happily in the documentary, the Johnsons include a treasure trove of clips of Andy’s oeuvre, particularly from his horror period, featuring impalings, beheadings, and lots of screaming damsels. Given his background, horror seemed to be a natural progression for Andy. Raised in a broken home in St. Paul, his obese mother emotionally abused him, and that trauma later manifested itself in his films, with women (particularly those who were heavy-set) often the object of the most heinous torture scenes. As longtime Milligan confidante Gerry Jaccuzo observes, in a horror movie, you can kill your mother, and nobody would say anything about it.

The dark view of humanity that quickly becomes apparent in Andy’s films can also be seen in the work of such fellow NYC genre directors as William Lustig and Abel Ferrara. The big difference, though, is that those filmmakers know how to make a movie. Andy, by contrast, was inept. Milligan biographer Jimmy McDonough notes that Andy can often be heard yelling instructions to his actors on the soundtrack. When he would shoot actors on a set that had a mirror in the background, Andy could often be seen in its reflection filming the movie. Most famously, whenever Andy wanted to suggest chaos in a scene, he would simply tilt the camera up to the sky and twirl around (Much the way Andy lived his own life, McDonough notes).

The doc begins to sag a bit at the end of Act 2 as the film’s format of juxtaposing film clips and talking heads begins to reap fewer rewards. But it finds its footing again as Andy, secretly dying of AIDS, begins to reconnect with the people he had once alienated earlier in his career. It’s to their credit that they responded to give their friend a proper ending to what was a most unusual life.

Is the career of an obscure exploitation film director worth an entire documentary feature? Objectively, probably not. But there’s no use in denying that “The Degenerate” is an awful lot of fun as we watch an artist, however inept, living out his dream of getting his message up on the screen, even if it’s in the most schlocky way possible.