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Bloodthirsty Butchers (1969/70)

Dir: Andy Milligan

Something had arrived in Great Britain…No, not the return of the Black Death, the Vikings or the Romans, but the arrival of…Andy Milligan! And he has movies on his mind!

Ye Olde England is the setting for our tale (a very modern 'For Sale' sign glimpsed on the side of a house aside) and it's the oft told tale of the fiendish barber Sweeney Todd, psychotic murderer and thief.
Sweeney (John Miranda, who really hit the big time in 1986 starring as a garbage collector in "Star Trek 4"!) cuts off more than a few locks of hair off his customers…he also chops off their limbs and cut's their throats before robbing the bodies.

He off-loads the corpses at the Ye Olde Pie Shoppe of Mrs Maggie Lovett (Jane Helay) who promptly turns them into tasty pie fillings with the help of her sadistic assistant Tobias (Berwick Kaler, "The Body Beneath").
Maggie lives with her invalid Husband, Ronald (Jonathan Holt) and is unknowingly helped in her cannibal cookery by pretty young shop girl Johanna (Annabella Wood) who has a boyfriend name Jarvis but is being stalked by Tobias; "Look here missy, I'm going to have you whether you like it or not"!

Into this stew of craziness is dropped Anna (Susan Cassidy), a showgirl singer who is having an affair with Sweeney and manipulating street tart Rosie (Linda Driver) who has designs on Tobias.
And all the while, the bodies are piling up…….

 

Claustrophobic and dark, "Bloodthirsty Butchers" is perhaps Milligan's best known film, but it's ultimately not his best, for varying reasons.

As we are in the 'Realm of Milligan' unintentional humour is of course everywhere, but the highlight has to be when Jarvis is being (very closely indeed!) followed, in supposed secret, by Tobias with dubbed on footsteps that sound like horses hooves and scored with completely out of place light-hearted music,
Suddenly Tobias proceeds to bark like a dog (supposedly the voice of Milligan himself) when Jarvis hears something following him. This cunning ruse amazingly works in fooling Jarvis and you're not quite sure if you are imagining the whole crazy episode!

Other, darker, humour comes in the form (as always) of some of the dialogue.
Sweeney is full of the old Irish wisdom, by the way of Milligan of course; "Women can't stand happiness for more than 3 days at a time. It drives them wild. So you have to know when to upset things before they do. They you forgive them, you screw them, you say you love them and you watch out for the next 3 days"!
Rosie is a classic 'Cockney Trollop' who shouts out lines like "You tell 'im to get his arse up here, I ain't waitin' on the likes of 'im" and "Take your bloody hands of me! Who the hell do you think you are? I ain't nobody you know"! Wonderful stuff!
And her pregnancy blackmail plan is yet another classic Milligan portrayal of the scheming woman.

Anna, whose also having an affair with a theatre owner named Abe and is annoyed that she is not getting her promised raise and higher billing from him, supplies much of the more acidic dialogue like;
"Filthy bastard you've done very well out of me"! And it's typical Milligan indeed when Anna spits in Abe's face!
Anna's relationship with our sexually demanding mad barber Sweeney Todd also supplies some great lines;

Anna - "I'm afraid…Afraid we'll go beyond the limit"
Sweeney - "You let me worry about that"!
Anna - "Don't make it too low"
Sweeney - "There is no low when two people become one! Haven't I shown you that"!

More spitting in the face and general abuse comes when Sweeney berates his alcoholic Wife Becky (Ann Arrow); "You been drinkin' so much yer brains are pickled" before ruthlessly beating her.

Away from the dialogue it is that other Milligan strong point, his characters, that supply the entertainment.
And if the main characters (the loud and brassy Anna aside) are nothing really special away from the odd line of fun dialogue, the support characters more than make up for it.
The aforementioned Rosie makes a strong impression, as does Tobias via a wonderfully nasty turn by Kaler, but the highlights are 2 one scene only characters.

The first is a wonderful Milligan figure in the form of Anna's fellow performer 'Corky' who does a drag act (in slapped on white make-up with red lipstick lips and cheeks) and who tries to comfort Anna after a bust up with Abe. Corky IS off off-Broadway burlesque gone mad and no mistake. He's camp, delightfully out of place and just plain weird!
Secondly is Mr Busker (William Barrel, "The Man with Two Heads") an utterly wonderful, leering, twitching, junkie in need of a (Human) meat pie fix! He's a superbly whacked out character and one that is pure Milligan madness!
But generally there are way too many characters here (some introduced very late in the day) all pushing and shoving for screen time so crudely it becomes dizzying and chaotic.

Acting for the most part is actually pretty damn solid where the leads are concerned, especially Helay as the pie baking Maggie. There is certainly an acting professionalism here missing from many Milligan casts.

Set design is perhaps the films biggest 'artistic' fault. The rare external scenes show very modern buildings and the sets are dark and cramped. This does help a few scenes, giving them a Dickensian feel, but it looks overly cheap most of the time and makes for tiring viewing.
A classic example of a cheap Milligan set is Anna's drape enshrouded dressing room that is so dark and close it's literally cloying!
Amazingly cheap highlight though has to be Sweeney's barber shop window lettering which is wobbly, of varying size letters and looks like it's about to fall off!

Sound wise we of course have the limitations of Milligans ancient recording techniques and at one point it sounds like an electric drill suddenly starts up during a conversation involving Anna!
The soundtrack is also a weakness. Some unintentional amusement is had by the wildly varying and often totally inappropriate library music score, but it's near constant use starts to grate especially the totally out of era music hall songs.

Exploitation content wise we have a few topless shots from Susan Cassidy, some pretty violent limb hacking, a crudely slit throat, a pie with a breast hiding under the lid and shakily shot dismemberment's.
But the obvious cuts have watered down much of the films original, obviously twisted, trashy effectiveness.

Despite my hopes that the print I found would be uncut print (does an uncut print even exist?) it is most definitely censored, though seemingly, maybe, not as cut as the DVD release by 'Video Kart' on a double with Milligan's "The Rats are coming! The Werewolves are here"!
There is still some fun gore to be seen, but it does make for rather frustrating viewing at times, which is not the movie's (or Milligan's) fault.
Now, given the fact Milligan movies tend to have harsh and jumpy editing in general, you have to be careful, but here it does indeed seem the cuts (mostly, if not all, done by Andy's infamous distributor William Mishkin) are for excessive bloodletting sadly.

Exactly what happens at the end of the movie is quite frankly anyone's guess!
It's a visual nightmare made up of madly shaking camera work, frantic screaming and fighting, awful editing and almost non-existent lighting!
Now whether this is all (certainly some of it is) down to Milligan or some blunt axe type censorship I can't rightly say…but it's god awful nonetheless and leaves you extremely unsatisfied.

So what has Milligan given us?
Well with the cuts it's hard to say what Milligan actually gave us originally as it no longer exists (certainly the uncut print would be far more enjoyable and satisfying) but where we do get undiluted Andy Milligan we have a film made up of some strong support characters, solid acting for the most part, a few snatches of choice dialogue and some splashes of cheesy gore.
But, although it does have many moments to savour, some of the frequent, long dialogue scenes stop the film dead (rare for an Andy film) and the cuts to much of the violence and general sleazy goings on has definitely hurt it.