By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The man who has been called “The Fassbinder of 42nd Street” now gets his due.
Severin Films and Monocular Films’ THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN will have its world premiere at next month’s Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, screening on Wednesday, June 11, Thursday, June 12 and Saturday, June 14 (get tickets here). Directed by Josh Johnson (REWIND THIS!) and Grayson Tyler Johnson, it includes interviews with Gerald Jaccuzo, Hope Stansbury, Jimmy McDonough, Stephen Thrower, Sam Sherman, John Borske, Robert Berlin, Ken Lane, Bob Likola and Alex DiSanto–plus excerpts from a recently discovered interview with Milligan himself, the only one known to exist. According to the PR, “Milligan’s low-budget productions–on which he served as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, set decorator, and costume designer and included such ‘classics’ as THE GHASTLY ONES, BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS, GURU THE MAD MONK, TORTURE DUNGEON, and THE RATS ARE COMING! THE WEREWOLVES ARE HERE!–were predominately period melodramas fueled by themes of sadism, incest, and misogyny bathed in bottom-of-the-barrel gore effects, filmed on Staten Island (and for a brief period, London) and forever consigned to grindhouse purgatory. Yet via revealing interviews with a gallery of Milligan’s performers, enablers, co-conspirators, and his biographer–along with copious clips from his deranged oeuvre–a portrait emerges of a gutter auteur who battled and antagonized his own demons to become one of the most transgressive outsider artists of the 20th century.”
Accompanying THE DEGENERATE at Tribeca will be the World “Re-Premieres” of two Milligan films that have been lost for over a half-century: 1967’s THE DEGENERATES and 1968’s KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME! Remastered versions of both movies will be shown on a double feature collectively titled THAT’S TRIBECXPLOITATION! THE ANDY MILLIGAN TIME MACHINE on Friday, June 13 (get tickets here).
