Video Nasty #7 - Blood Rites

Question: Can you link Blood Rites director Andy Milligan with Akira Kurasawa within six degrees of separation ?


Everybody should see at least one Andy Milligan atrocity in their life and Blood Rites, Milligan’s film from 1967 is a good place as any to descend into the netherworld of the Staten Island auteur. The story concerns three estranged sisters who are requested to spend a few days at their family home with their husbands in “sexual harmony” (as instructed by their father’s will). However the blissful reunion doesn’t last very long when the lovers get picked off by a homicidal maniac…

In the Trash Cinema sweepstakes, Andy Milligan gives the likes of Ed Wood and Phil Tucker a good run for their money. Almost every aspect of Blood Rites is amateurish. Milligan could occasionally display some talent like the interesting 1965 gay short Vapors, and the stylish and eerie Body Beneath from 1970, but mostly the director churned out ultra-low budget exploitation films for the 42nd St. crowd. Blood Rites looks and sounds particularly impoverished with its cheap dime store gore and the needle-dropping soundtrack. It’s an ugly and depressing film as well with disastrous framing, copious amounts of naked ugly flesh, and Milligan’s handheld camera which swirls around with drunken abandon. Milligan had a penchant for shooting his films as period pieces to stop them dating but the mix of turn-of-century costumes and the very 1960’s décor – check out the op-art style wallpaper – makes the whole film look decidedly weird.

The endlessly talky screenplay was co-authored by Milligan and it’s a fascinating window into the director’s soul – in one scene one of the wives is raped by her husband, for really no good reason except to satisfy Milligan’s misogyny, and in another moment an incestuous union is implied between one of the husbands and his brother. Unlike the trance-like performances of Blood Feast, Blood Rites manages to cobble together a modicum of acting talent. Especially good are the sinister housemaids played by Veronica Redburn and Maggie Rogers. Hal Borske who plays Colin their retarded sidekick deserves praise for his dedication to the film – Milligan has him wearing ridiculous false teeth throughout the show, chow down on a not-so-freshly killed rabbit and even sets him on fire for the lively climax. Blood Rites exits on one of the more rugged back roads of American Cinema, and the way is often littered with bodies, including Milligan himself who succumbed to AIDS in 1991. He was 62.

Something Weird’s DVD of Blood Rites, (under the Ghastly Ones title) is double-billed with another Milligan film Seeds of Sin (which was hijacked by producers and re-edited to include a mass of irrelevant sex footage). The fullframe transfer is decent enough but the print Something Weird had to work with was in a pitiful condition, full of wear and tear and omnipresent scratch lines. It’s unlikely better materials could have been sourced but the DVD goes some way to replicating the Grindhouse experience – this is probably how audiences saw the film back in ’67, at the Anco theatre on 42nd St. The audio on the DVD fares little better – it’s hissy and murky but still good enough that you can still hear Milligan impatiently pass instructions to his long suffering his cast. Extras include some Milligan trailers, a gallery of stills and artwork, and two significant additions – the Seeds of Sin work print (called Seeds), and an excellent and highly amusing running commentary by Hal Borske and Basket Case director and exploitation film archivist Frank Henenlotter.

As for the teaser at the top of this post, Andy Milligan directed Richard Romanus in Blood Rites, who later starred in Mean Streets directed by Martin Scorsese, who played Vincent Van Gogh in Dreams, directed by Akira Kurosawa...

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Notes
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Stephen King was evidently not a fan of Blood Rites. In his 1981 non-fiction book, Dance Macabre, an overview of the Horror genre, he wrote:

In the hands of Tobe Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre satisfies that definition of art which I have offered, and I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. I would not do so for The Ghastly Ones. The difference is more than the difference between a chainsaw and a bucksaw; the difference is something like seventy million light-years. Hooper works in Chainsaw Massacre, in his own queerly apt way, with taste and conscience. The Ghastly Ones is the work of morons with cameras.