Carnage (1984)

You know, Andy Milligan's films are never quite as bad you think that they are going to be.  Which isn't to say that they are, in any cinematic sense, good.  They are bad movies - how could they be anything else with their minuscule budgets and largely non-professional casts?  Then there is the static direction - long scenes filmed as a single shot, without cutaways - and the overly stagey dialogue, not to mention the plodding pace.  The historical productions at least boast some elaborate costumes, courtesy of Milligan himself.  But the fact is that his films never seem to hit the delirious heights of badness as, say, Ed Wood Jr - you know the sort of film, where its lack of production values and general ineptness combine with bizarre scripting and direction to tumble the whole project over the edge into total insanity.  You never quite get the feel with Milligan that you've stumbled into the middle of somebody else's fever dream.  Two things are key to understanding Milligan's films: his background in theatre, (which goes some way to explaining the stagey direction and performances, not to mention the use of the sort of actors you'd usually find in amateur dramatics productions), and his mother issues, (he apparently had a tumultuous and violent relationship with his mother - she supposedly once chased him with a pair of scissors - and was himself violent toward his sister, which probably explains why matriarchal figures often get such a rough ride in his productions).  The amateur psychologist in me would like to believe that his unhappy childhood explains the interest in historical costumes and settings - they were perhaps an escape from harsh reality.  But who really knows?

Anyway, the Milligan film I most recently saw was atypical, coming from his later period of film-making, in the eighties and represents an attempt to make a more mainstream horror film.  Eschewing period settings, Carnage (1984) is clearly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of haunted house movies like The Amityville Horror.  Unfortunately, it is a pretty poor attempt at a cash in, a clearly poverty stricken production filmed on location in someone's house and performed by what appears to be, at best, a semi-professional cast.  Unusually for an Andy Milligan film, it does include special effects.  Sub bargaining basement effects, but effects nonetheless.  There is some pretty basic stop motion to create some blood spots appearing spontaneously in the kitchen, lots of flying knives, axes and other sharp instruments and some truly dreadful gore effects.  The latter culminates with an evisceration, with the disemboweled innards looking like spaghetti.  Perhaps they were.  Spaghetti Bolognese to provide the blood.  It is an effect so poor that the actor involved can't seem to keep a straight face.  The scene in which it occurs is one of a number of such sequences in which something horrible happens to someone (in this case a pair of burglars), which are never referenced again.  As if, perhaps, they had been inserted later to add some gore and increase the running time.  Consequently, the film becomes hugely frustrating.  Toward the end, the couple who have bought the haunted house finally call in a priest, who asks them what form the ghostly manifestations have taken.  They immediately tell him about the various flying objects, while you, as a viewer, are left screaming at the screen' What about that fucking decapitation on the porch - which only happened in the previous scene!'  Likewise, why don't they mention the guest electrocuted in the bath (which had no water in it, which was just as well as he was still wearing his underpants when he climbed into it), or the maid's suicide, or the two burglars (if they've even found the bodies - no mention of it is ever made)?

Not that it would have mattered if they had told the priest, as he is quickly felled by a flying meat cleaver (and never mentioned again), which, despite being seen to hit him in the shoulder, somehow ends up embedded in his head.  Carnage is a story that isn't so much badly told as ineptly told.  To be sure, it does have some interesting features: despite the obvious Amityville influence, the film adds in a pair of husband and wife ghosts, (who died in the house as the result of a suicide pact and are now violently haunting it), who could almost have come from a thirties Hollywood comedy.  Moreover, surprisingly for an Andy Milligan film, Carnage features a sympathetic mother character.  Maybe he'd mellowed since the seventies.  Nevertheless, in spite of its ineptitude, Carnage, like Milligan's other films, never really gets beyond simply being bad - it just lacks that strand of inspired lunacy that would turn it into some kind of bad movie cult classic.  Whilst certainly bizarre and fitfully amusing (for all the wrong reasons), it long outstays its welcome.