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Guru the Mad Monk (1970)

Dir: Andy Milligan

“Guru” opens with rather more professional (though very cheesy) full colour credits than usually seen in a Milligan film. And their gaudy look (backed by swirling orchestral library music) is an apt signpost for the movie they herald.

Medieval Europe…Two hooded men drag a woman into a suitably pantomime looking dungeon, with strategically placed cobwebs and red and white netting, and throw her into a very rickety looking cage.
The woman is named Nadja (Judith Israel) and it turns out one of the men working in the prison is her long lost love Carl (Paul Lieber).

We learn that Nadja was kidnapped one day, on her way to see Carl, by Gypsies and made to be the leader’s lover.
She gave birth to a stillborn baby and was dumped on the side of the road by the Gypsies.
While trying to bury the baby’s corpse she is arrested for killing the baby, sentenced to death and thrown into the dank dungeon where she now awaits her fate! “My only crime is that I didn’t have a chance to live”!

Carl stands by her and we have a great exchange between them;
Carl: “It wasn’t your fault, it was God’s fault”
Nadja: “Shhh…He mustn’t hear you. He has enough blame already”.

Carl goes to the local Priest, Father Guru (Neil Flanagan, who gets above title billing!) and ends up getting a slap for blasphemy!
Guru still decides to help him though via a sleeping powder, which Carl must procure from a woman named Olga (Jaqueline Webb), which will be given to Nadja to make everyone think she has suddenly dropped down dead!
He has a crazy price for his assistance though.
Guru is fed up at having no money for his Church, ‘The Lost Souls Church of Moravia’, and so tells Carl he must steal the bodies of executed criminals (by fiddling the body books!), that are always taken to the Church for burial (it turns out the Church is a criminal dumping ground…“Perhaps that is why we are looked down upon by the rest of Eastern Europe”), so Guru can sell the bodies to medical schools and make some money!
But little does Carl know that the seemingly kind and helpful Guru is a self-serving madman with a sinful heart and murderous ambition.

Are you all still following this? I hope so.

Anyway, a reluctant Carl agrees, but finds out that Olga wants something too for supplying the powder, ”I need blood. Lots of blood. I need it to carry on my… experiments”.
So Carl is asked to leave the bodies of the executed lying around for a bit so Olga can collect the blood from them…”I have a very ingenious way of doing this”.
And indeed she does, as it turns out Olga is a Vampire! “I’m Olga…Some call me Nosferatu”!
Again a reluctant (and very foolish) Carl agrees.
And so the crazy, complex web of utter madness is spun and threatens to trap them all in its sticky silliness….

Milligan! Andy Milligan! God love him.
Where to start? Well let’s go with the costumes. As always Andy supplies them and they are up to his normal high standards. Sarcastic? Me?
These outrageously gaudy costumes are actually a joy. Olga’s get-up is the highlight as she flounces around in a flamboyant ‘fairy tale Princess’ double pointed hat with crimson netting, and a jet black dress that sports a truly hideous multi-coloured flowers print.
Basically none of the costumes make it above the level of a school play but their delightful, over the top appearance means you can’t help but warm to this whole ultra low budget exercise in period recreation.

The sets are cheap and cheerful and certainly clash badly with the outdoor location footage of Guru’s (Manhattan!) church.
One of the most simplistic is Olga’s house which is simply a wooden wall decorated with cheap looking strips of fabric hanging from the ceiling and an awful white cloth with huge red flowers on it draped over the only wall visible. Again we enter the world of the school play as far as set design goes.

Without his infamous, ancient and technically backward 16mm 'Auricon' camera to shoot with (by this time Milligan had moved from the Stone Age all the way to the Bronze Age as far as camera equipment was concerned), with which Milligan used to get so many bizarre and interesting angles and whose lightweight versatility injected a feverish energy to proceedings, “Guru” is sadly very static and unimaginative in the way it is filmed. Hell, it even looks *gulp* ‘normal’ for the most part!
Disgraceful!

Unintentional moments of humour and blatant mistakes are everywhere. Like when Guru craftily puts the powder into Nadja’s wine via a hollow ring on his finger, only he does it right in front of everybody with the extras not even bothering to hide the fact they are watching him do it!
A blind man would notice this less than stealthy move by Guru.
We have modern scissors being banded around, a blink and you miss it light switch and another Guru moment when he is playing the church organ (which is dubbed on the soundtrack) without his fingers not actually touching the keys most of the time!

So by now it should be obvious to you all that this is one shockingly badly made movie.
Real amateur night. And it’s very obvious (sadly) that Milligan could really care less about much of the production.
It is a shame to see just how far he had fallen in five short years from the crude, but at least competent and generally well made, movies like “Vapors” and “Seeds” to the careless, out and out shoddy work seen here.
This is the kind of film-making only a select number of people (as in us complete nutbags) will ever find any entertainment value in. You have been warned oh casual viewer!

To add to the already chaotic plot Guru is given a deformed hunchback (a Milligan semi-regular feature) assistant named Igor (Jack Spencer), who sports the essential comedy mutilated eye.
As per the cliché Igor is much picked upon by Guru, who does the arrogant master routine to perfection, “I can talk to you and talk to you, and you just look up at me with that stupid smile of yours. I can say anything to you, you ignorant bastard and you just smile…What a beautiful smile. That’s all you really have isn’t it? Your smile”.
And when Igor announces he finds Nadja pretty, he is on the receiving end of more acidic put downs, “you idiot! God never intended for you to be loved by anyone. You were made to serve me and only me, you understand”?
Poor Igor!

Moving on to the FX, out of all the Milligan movies so far viewed by your humble reviewer, “Guru” contains THE worst special effects sequence ever. In fact this may be the worst FX scene in the entire history of cinema!
A woman thief has her hands placed on a chopping block and as the shot crudely changes angles the kneeling actress suddenly pulls back and leaves her now dummy hands behind so they are no longer supposedly connected to her (bloodless) wrists!
Basically they come off before the executioners blade even falls! In fact the actor playing the executioner does not really bother to even try and chop them off, indeed he weakly swipes at only one of the two mysteriously amputated limbs! He was obviously expecting Milligan to shout “cut” and redo the scene.
Little did he know Milligan!
Other bad executions/punishments consist of an hysterical eye skewing that consists of two stupidly large white balls, obviously placed on the actors closed eyes, stuck with pointy sticks with a bit of blood around them. And an off camera decapitation (as Milligan’s camera suddenly shoots off to the right resulting in a case of mild airsickness for the unfortunate viewer) that leaves us feeling cheated.

In fact, gore wise it’s pretty low in general with only the occasional bit of blood splashed around, and we have cutaways from many of the murders, though a cheesy crucifixion scene is fun, even if the promised snipping out of the victims tongue is never seen. Unless this is a cut print, but it seems more to do with the cost of actually doing more than a tiny handful of effects.

Acting is generally dubious (especially by Webb who trips over most of her lines with tiresome ease) but actually better than expected, with Flanagan, as he waddles around in his frumpy scarlet robes, giving a solidly sinister performance as the scheming, murderous monk, that never goes off too far into the realms of laughable ham until the 2nd half… when he lets rip big time!
A scene where he argues with HIMSELF, while looking in a mirror, certainly skips with gay abandon into complete hilarity.
Guru: “If I don’t watch over you, you will destroy us both”.
Guru: “You go to Hell”!
Guru: “If I do…I’ll have to take you with me”!

Lieber simply spends most of the film looking worried (“cheer up Carl. Look on the sunny side of life”, advises Guru at one point) but given all the crap being thrown at his character (who after much screen time in the first half almost vanishes from the film) you would honestly expect nothing else.

Spencer is fun as the sorry Igor, with is impression/outburst of a cock crowing being a whacked-out highlight. But he’s a fun character and brings some welcome cheesy charm to his scenes.

And talking of Milligan’s debut “Vapors”, fans will spot it’s lead actor Gerry Jacuzzo in a late support role as a Priest in a silver wig.

But the main strength of the film is that it packs in so much trashy fun. And ultimately, with cinema this generally bad, that is all you can ask for.
We have an almost ceaseless stream of craziness that means after only 20 minutes there has been more wacky sights and sounds than most movies manage in twice the time. Which can’t be bad!
And fans of high low-grade trashy movie making will find a real charm to the proceedings playing out before their bloodshot eyes.
It all ends after a paltry 56 minutes with a haphazardly edited (to say the least) and very badly staged finale that is full of so much screaming and general chaos it beggars belief.

“Guru” is bad. But “Guru” is also FUN.
And if it is a shame that Milligan’s more serious film making ambition had long since been squashed into the dirt (as much as his own fault as others) we at least have a movie from him that puts a little smile on our faces. Even if it is for all the wrong reasons.